Unregulated Work and New Business Strategies in American Cities

Abstract

In America’s urban labor markets, an entire set of jobs can be observed in which workers routinely endure violations of labor and employment laws. These include both jobs that are legally covered by employment and labor laws, but in which the laws are routinely violated, and jobs that are not legally covered by employment and labor laws, although there is effectively an employment relationship. In this paper, we report initial findings from an ongoing study analyzing the growth in jobs and work practices that are effectively beyond the reach of regulation—what we call “unregulated work”— in New York City and Chicago. We find that (1) unregulated work exists in a wide variety of industries; (2) unregulated work is the result of the interaction of supply-side and demand-side factors within a regulatory and institutional framework; and (3) workplace violations are fast becoming a fixture of the U.S. labor market.