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9 - Measuring Labor Market Efficiency: Indicators that Fuel an Ideological War and Undermine Social Concern and Trust in the South African Regulatory Process

from Part II - INDICATORS IN LOCAL CONTEXTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2015

By
Debbie Collier  and
Paul Benjamin
Edited by
Sally Engle Merry ,
Kevin E. Davis  and
Benedict Kingsbury
Debbie Collier
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
Paul Benjamin
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
Sally Engle Merry
Affiliation:
New York University
Kevin E. Davis
Affiliation:
New York University
Benedict Kingsbury
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

[L]aws created to protect workers often hurt them. … More flexible labor regulations boost job creation.

World Bank (2007, 19)

The effects of labour law may be more indeterminate than previously thought. … … [T]here is evidence to suggest that the economic effects of labour laws are not just highly varied and complex … but also that they may be efficiency- enhancing in certain contexts …

Deakin and Sarkar (2008, 481)

INTRODUCTION

The laws that regulate the labor market – that intangible domain where transactions for labor take place – have not escaped the gaze of indicators. Since the turn of the century a multitude of labor market indicators have been produced within a strained ecology of international organizations concerned with the performance of labor markets. In some cases these organizations are concerned only with one dimension (the “efficiency”) of labor market regulation, notwithstanding the complex multidimensional character of labor law, its origins in social policy, its indeterminate economic effect (Deakin and Sarkar 2008), and indeed notwithstanding its original purpose of injecting equity into an otherwise unequal relationship.

Plotted on a continuum, the international organizations involved in the transnational shaping of the legal norms and institutions that regulate the labor market are poles apart in their mandates and worldviews. These organizations range from a powerful private international organization, funded almost entirely by private enterprise, with an agenda that pushes for labor markets governed primarily by private ordering and market principles to a public international law organization that promotes a coordinated regulatory framework enabling equitable participation in the labor market. This divergence of views among international organizations undermines the development and coherence of legal norms and standards for worker security and creates a fractious transnational legal order that has implications for the domestic debate on labor market regulation.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Quiet Power of Indicators
Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law
 , pp. 284 - 316
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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