Bringing the law to the factory
The recent factory collapse in Bangladesh has renewed attention to the global issue of workplace standards. In many countries, similar problems have arisen from a lack of enforcement for existing laws pertaining to safety, wages and overtime, or an absence of labor contracts for workers.These problems occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of funding for regulators; difficulties acquiring solid information about potential problems in the first place; and corruption in the enforcement process.“We have a huge problem with enforcement,” says Matthew Amengual, an assistant professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has studied the issue in multiple countries.Now, after extensive on-the-ground research in Argentina, Amengual has a distinctive new paper on the subject that will be published in Industrial and Labor Relations Review. In the paper, titled “Pathways to Enforcement,” Amengual details his findings, including the observation that effective regulators can overcome the...