Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century by Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank

Economist Michael J. Piore and sociologist Andrew Schrank suggest that regulatory oversight has largely failed to maintain basic labor standards in the United States. Uncompensated overtime, brazen wage theft, dangerous conditions, and harassment in its many forms are all on the rise. Institutions created during the Fordist economy of the twentieth century to stem such abuses—such as the Wages and Hours Division of the Department of Labor, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—represented a public sector division of labor rendered ineffective in the post-Fordist era. Piore and Schrank traveled to France, Spain, and several Latin American countries to interview regulators and learn if their systems might provide a model for the United States. They conclude that a generalist system of labor inspection, one they term the Franco-Latin model, provides a more flexible regulatory environment that is better suited to address new relations of production...