TY - JOUR

T1 - Persistently non-compliant employment practice in the informal economy

T2 - permissive visibility in a multiple regulator setting

AU - Clark, Ian

AU - Collins, Alan

AU - Hunter, James

AU - Pickford, Richard

AU - Barratt, Jack

AU - Fearnall-Williams, Huw

PY - 2023/4/1

Y1 - 2023/4/1

N2 - The growing significance of non-compliant employment practice in the British economy has motivated scrutiny of the effectiveness of current regulation. In some markets, charges of labour exploitation, underpayment of the national minimum wage and associated ‘wage theft’ from workers are rife where business operations are characterised by academics, regulators and stakeholders as exuding ‘permissive visibility’. The current landscape of enforcement and regulation of informal business and employment practices features complex structural and operational issues for regulators subject to tight resource constraints. These enable permissiveness and offer scope for strategic regulatory tolerance of some violation types, possibly to raise compliance rates for other types of violations. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence and qualitative data sources in one market sector (hand car washes), this study investigates some key hypotheses focussing on compliance and responses by businesses and regulators to the extant regulatory regime. These inform a pragmatic institutional analysis considering the merits of some movement towards a single enforcement body instead of the existing arrangements featuring multiple regulatory institutions.

AB - The growing significance of non-compliant employment practice in the British economy has motivated scrutiny of the effectiveness of current regulation. In some markets, charges of labour exploitation, underpayment of the national minimum wage and associated ‘wage theft’ from workers are rife where business operations are characterised by academics, regulators and stakeholders as exuding ‘permissive visibility’. The current landscape of enforcement and regulation of informal business and employment practices features complex structural and operational issues for regulators subject to tight resource constraints. These enable permissiveness and offer scope for strategic regulatory tolerance of some violation types, possibly to raise compliance rates for other types of violations. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence and qualitative data sources in one market sector (hand car washes), this study investigates some key hypotheses focussing on compliance and responses by businesses and regulators to the extant regulatory regime. These inform a pragmatic institutional analysis considering the merits of some movement towards a single enforcement body instead of the existing arrangements featuring multiple regulatory institutions.

U2 - 10.1093/cje/bead007

DO - 10.1093/cje/bead007

M3 - Journal article

VL - 47

SP - 611

EP - 632

JO - Cambridge Journal of Economics

JF - Cambridge Journal of Economics

SN - 0309-166X

IS - 3

ER -