Multinational enforcement of labor law: Experimental evidence on strengthening occupational safety and health (OSH) committees

Laura Boudreau

No 17579, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Work-related mortality is responsible for 5-7% of all global annual deaths (ILO, 2019). Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) committees are considered the key worker voice institution through which to improve workplace safety and health (ILO, 1981). I present evidence of these committees’ causal effects on workers and on factories. To do so, I collaborated with 29 multinational apparel buyers that committed to enforce a local mandate for OSH committees on their suppliers in Bangladesh. With the buyers, I implemented a nearly year-long field experiment with 84 supplier factories, randomly enforcing the mandate on half. The buyers’ intervention increased compliance with the OSH committee law. Exploiting the experimental variation in OSH committees’ strength, I find that stronger OSH committees improved objective measures of safety. These improvements did not come at a cost to workers in terms of wages or employment or to factories in terms of labor productivity. The effects on compliance, safety, and voice were largest for factories with better managerial practices. Factories with worse practices did not improve, and workers in these factories reported lower job satisfaction; this finding suggests complementarity between external enforcement and internal managerial capacity in determining the efficacy of regulation.

Keywords: Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F61 J53 J81 L14 O12 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17579 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17579

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17579

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().