Exploring the Complaints and Compliance Gap under U.S. Workplace Policies

Abstract

Limitations in investigation resources and the often politicized environment surrounding regulatory decisions have led government agencies to rely on worker complaints to enforce workplace policies. Focusing on two critical U.S. workplace statutes, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, we examine the relationship between worker complaints and underlying compliance with standards. Although we find a high degree of variability across industries in terms of the complaint rate, underlying compliance conditions explain a relatively small percentage of overall complaint activity, which suggests that a number of other factors mediate the relation between deleterious workplace conditions and the likelihood that a worker will complain. Our findings therefore raise questions about how well regulatory agencies apply investigation resources given their reliance on complaints, a problem that intensifies as resources allocated to workplace protection decrease over time.