Unequal Protections: Subnational Disparities in Labor Standards Enforcement

• In Event: Federalism and Labor Politics

Abstract

Without widespread collective bargaining, the vast majority of today’s workers must rely on employment laws as their sole source of workplace protections. However, the enactment of laws, concentrated at the state and municipal levels, alone is insufficient. Despite legal protections, wage and hour violations in the U.S. remain staggeringly high and disproportionately impact workers in some sectors, and marginalized workers. Without robust enforcement, many workers do not benefit from these subnational laws. Furthermore, enforcement capacity varies enormously between states, suggesting that workers located in states with less enforcement capacity (e.g., most Southern states, where half of all Black workers in the U.S. are located) have less recourse to workplace protections than do similar workers in states with similar laws and more enforcement capacity.

This project examines the relationships between a) historical and political context, especially the legacy of slavery and the post-slavery racialized economy in the South and state enforcement capacity and b) state enforcement capacity and minimum wage violation rates. We construct a novel and flexible database of wage-hour enforcement capacity of all 50 states and the D.C., and pair it with estimated minimum wage violation rates, broken down by key characteristics for all fifty states, based on CPS-MORG data. With exploratory, comparative case studies, the researchers are generating a repertoire of mechanisms through which context, enforcement capacity, and violation rates are related.

We find that (1) enforcement capacity is negatively associated with minimum wage violations; (2) states in which Black workers constitute a larger share of the workforce are more likely to have weaker enforcement capacities; and (3) a higher Black share of the workforce predicts a higher incidence of minimum wage violations. We highlight the role of federalism in creating and maintaining national Black-White racial disparities in violation rates.

Authors

• Daniel Galvin, Northwestern University

• Janice R Fine, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Jenn Round, Workplace Justice Lab@RU

• Hana Shepherd, Rutgers University