Strategic Enforcement Lab

The Problem

Each year, employers fail to pay U.S. workers billions of dollars that they earned. Research suggests that minimum wage workers alone are underpaid by more than $15 billion a year and such workers often are denied rights to paid sick leave, advance notice of work schedules, and other protections provided for by law. Wage theft and other violations affect all types of employees across all industries, harming workers and their families, and undercutting honest businesses.

State and local labor agencies are often small teams who are responsible for managing many more complaints than they have resources to investigate. Workers who are most exposed to wage theft are often reluctant to complain, even if they know their rights.  Further, while agencies would like to be more strategic in their approach by moving away from relying solely on individual complaints, they do not have access to the tools or data to help them prioritize their enforcement activities. 

The Solution

The Strategic Enforcement Lab (SE Lab) will tackle these issues by collaborating with labor departments in New Jersey, Maine, and New York City to advance data-driven strategies that strengthen enforcement and make the most efficient use of agency resources.

In one line of work, the SE Lab will develop and test data-driven models to help these agencies practice “strategic enforcement” by better targeting their activities, predicting where serious labor violations are most likely to occur and where enforcement is most likely to spur broader compliance. The SE Lab’s goal is to develop tools that any interested state or city could deploy to protect workers, boost family economic security, level the playing field for honest businesses, and make government more efficient. The SE Lab will be working with each jurisdiction on specific strategic enforcement initiatives:

• New Jersey: Working with the New Jersey Department of Labor, the SE Lab will co-design and test machine learning models to further target the state’s strategic enforcement activities.  
• New York City: The NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has identified a key issue related to their paid / sick leave enforcement: firms that do not pay their employees sick leave as required often claim that their workers simply do not get sick, or don’t have any accrued paid time off. The SE Lab will be developing and deploying a tool that addresses this challenge and provides new ways of measuring compliance for paid/sick leave. 
• Maine: In collaboration with the Maine Department of Labor, the SE Lab will be building analytic models to improve complaint triage, helping the agency target and prioritize complaint investigations in two to three industries most likely to have violations based on data.

The Research

Over the next two years, the SE Lab seeks to: 

1. Measure the frequency of labor law violations using surveys and administrative data to fill in blind spots created by the typical approach of relying solely on administrative data. The SE Lab will leverage data from The Shift Project, which links unique worker survey data with information from a wide variety of public and private sources with a particular focus on low-wage workers. 
2. Build models to predict where violations are most likely occurring, so agencies can target their investigations and interventions strategically. 
   Identify which enforcement activities best deter other businesses from violating employment laws.

To make their models as accurate as possible, the researchers will leverage two novel data sources: broad-based worker surveys, and administrative data that in the past has seldom been used for studying work conditions.

The researchers will be conducting quasi-experimental field tests with the labor agencies to measure the impact of these tools on the number and severity of violations identified compared to current practices. 
 

The Impact

The tools developed by this lab can support employment and labor law enforcement activities anywhere in the country, and the SE Lab is eager to assist agencies in additional jurisdictions. As more labor departments adopt advanced enforcement tools like these, more workers will be paid the money they earned.