Violations of workers’ rights and protections—such as failing to comply with minimum wage and providing access to paid sick leave—are pervasive. The systemic violation of labor standards ultimately undermines fundamental worker rights and undercuts the competitive position of employers who comply with the law. However, the state and federal agencies charged with enforcing these laws are too often woefully underfunded and understaffed.

For this project, researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School Shift Project and Brandeis University Heller School for Social Policy and Management will pilot new data tools that could help state labor enforcement agencies more strategically deploy scarce investigative and compliance enforcement resources. The team plans to merge data from the Shift Project capturing workers’ experiences of labor standards violations with administrative data to identify the places, firms, and establishments where workers are at a higher risk of experiencing violations such as wage theft and inadequate breaktime. Researchers will then develop a proof-of-concept tool for a target low-wage industry. The proof-of-concept will be designed to inform future experimental field-testing efforts with state labor enforcement agencies.