Dr Hana Shepherd, Rutgers University
Manchester Industrial Relations Society are pleased to be hosting this online talk on the forthcoming book by Dr Hana Shepherd and Prof Janice Fine of Rutgers University.
Abstract
In the U.S., federal labor and employment laws have not kept pace with 21st century employment strategies and practices. Amidst federal inaction on worker protection, workers and community organizations forged a new path toward employment protections at the state and city levels. There has been a marked increase in the passage of municipal ordinances raising the minimum wage or providing paid sick leave protections. Some of the cities who passed these laws also established agencies or offices to enforce them. Given the importance of enforcement to the success of these laws, how agencies enforce laws determines the extent to which they can effectively improve the lives of working people in these cities.
In our book, we compare enforcement among the four oldest, most resourced local labor enforcement offices: San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City. There are many reasons to expect that the enforcement of these laws would be similar in these four cities, but their approach to labor standards enforcement-specific practices and procedures; how they use their legal authority; whether they think creatively about their job varies between them. We ask: what key conditions and processes in each city gave rise to these orientations to and practices of enforcement?
Our explanation considers how previous political struggles between workers and business led to a critical juncture: the founding of the enforcement office. The founding of the office which involved locating the office in a specific parent agency, appointing a first leader, and establishing the initial approach to enforcement-set the initial organizational conditions. Those initial conditions give rise to durable resources for interpreting and navigating multiple administrative orders in the city bureaucracy that worked against robust implementation and enforcement of pro-worker policies. The cities where the organizational founding conditions provided resources to successfully navigate competing administrative orders were those that conducted the most robust implementation. We use these cases and our explanation to discuss the implications comparative regulation and economic justice.
About the presenter
Dr Hana Shepherd [sociology.rutgers.edu] is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University in the US. Her research lies at the intersection of organizational sociology, the sociology of work and the regulation of work, social networks, social and cognitive psychology and sociology of culture. Her current work focuses on realizing employment protections for low-wage workers and employee power in low-wage workplaces. Her forthcoming book with Janice Fine examines what happens after cities pass minimum wage and paid sick leave laws and then set about trying to enforce those laws.
