David Weil

The Future of the Apparel and Textile Industries: Prospects and Choices for Public and Private Actors

The expectation that Chinese apparel and textile exports will swamp the US and EU retail markets now that international quotas on those products have been eliminated has fueled much of the discussion of the future of these industries. Although imports from China have surged since the elimination of quotas on 1 January 2005, this conventional wisdom masks important choices that remain for public and private policies over time. In particular, two factors will continue to have major effects on the location of apparel and textile production going forward. First, public-policy choices will continue to influence sourcing location; in particular, as they relate to tariffs and regional trade polices as well as to policies affecting the linkages between countries. Second, the lean-retailing model that now prevails requires apparel suppliers to replenish basic and fashion basic products on a weekly basis. As that retailing model became dominant in the 1990s, so too did the advantage of sourcing these apparel items closer to the US market so that products could be manufactured and delivered more rapidly from a smaller finished-goods inventory. Even though costs remain a driving factor, we show that proximity advantages for certain classes of products will continue in a postquota world as retailers raise the bar ever higher on the responsiveness and flexibility required of their suppliers.

Public Enforcement/Private Monitoring: Evaluating a New Approach To Regulating the Minimum Wage

This paper examines compliance with federal minimum wage laws in the U.S. apparel industry and analyzes the impact of new methods of intervention designed to improve regulatory performance. Drawing on data from a randomized survey of apparel contractors, the author evaluates the impact of agreements between manufacturers and the government used to monitor contractor behavior as a means of improving compliance outcomes. Several non-regulatory variables predicted by theory to be important influences—the level of work skills, for example, and product market factors related to the elasticity of labor demand—are indeed found to be correlated with compliance. Nonetheless, stringent forms of contractor monitoring are associated with substantial reductions in violations of minimum wage standards. The results suggest that well-designed public/private monitoring efforts can lead to significant improvements in compliance with labor standards.

If OSHA Is So Bad, Why is Compliance So Good?

Since its inception more than twenty years ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been the subject of an intense public debate on its effectiveness. This article analyzes the determinants of establishment-level compliance with specific safety and health standards as a means of assessing the agencys effectiveness. The empirical results suggest that OSHA has had large impacts on business compliance behavior, despite its low regulatory profile. These results indicate that government regulatory agencies can substantially change private-sector behavior, even given limited regulatory resources.

Retailing and supply chains in the information age

Abstract This article describes how information technologies have reconfigured retailing and in turn the operation of a core US manufacturing industry, apparel. “Lean retailers” exchange point-of-sales information with their suppliers and require them to replenish orders quickly based on actual sales. This shifts part of the risk arising from changing consumer tastes from retailers and onto suppliers. In response to this shift in risk, we argue that manufacturers must reshape planning methods, cost models, inventory practices, production operations, and sourcing strategies. We then show that suppliers that adopt comprehensive changes to their manufacturing processes perform better along a number of dimensions compared to firms that have not.

Building safety: The role of construction unions in the enforcement of OSHA

Because unionized workers are more likely to exercise their rights under OSHA, it is hypothesized that OSHA is more stringently enforced at unionized construction workplaces than at comparable nonunion workplaces. A comparison of OSHA enforcement in union and nonunion construction sites demonstrates that union sites face higher probabilities of inspection and receive greater scrutiny during inspections than do comparable nonunion sites. Further, union employers are required to correct violations of safety and health standards more quickly and bear higher overall penalty costs than their nonunion counterparts. As a result, the construction industry operates under a “two-tiered” safety and health regulatory system.

The Information-Integrated Channel: A Study of the U.S. Apparel Industry in Transition

THE POPULAR PROGNOSIS for the U.S. apparel industry is bleak. Citing increased import penetration in many product segments and the concurrent erosion of domestic employment, many analysts regard apparel manufacturing in the United States as a dying industry. I The Department of Labor concurs, projecting a significant reduction in employment in the domestic apparel industry during the next decade. Under its most optimistic scenario, the department predicts employment will drop from a 1990 level of 839,000 to 649,000 in 2005; under its most

Regulating Labour Standards via Supply Chains: Combining Public/Private Interventions to Improve Workplace Compliance

Concern over global labour standards has led to a profusion of non-governmental forms of regulation. Systematic evaluation of these systems has been very limited to date. This article empirically explores an innovative system to regulate labour standards in the US garment industry combining public enforcement power and private monitoring, thereby drawing on different elements of global labour standards systems. We examine the impact of this system over time and in two distinct markets on employer compliance with minimum wage laws and find that these initiatives are associated with substantial reductions in minimum wage violations. The system therefore offers a useful model for international labour standards regulatory systems.

ARE MANDATED HEALTH AND SAFETY COMMITTEES SUBSTITUTES FOR OR SUPPLEMENTS TO LABOR UNIONS

A subject of recurring debate in both academia and the business world is whether workplace committees and other forms of employee participation are substitutes for or supplements to labor unions. One well-established effect of unionization is increased enforcement of government labor policies such as OSHA; this study investigates the enforcement effects of mandated safety and health committees. A comparison of OSHA inspection records for the two years preceding and following the implementation of committee mandates in Oregon in 1991 shows that mandated committees significantly increased the differences between union and nonunion workplaces in OSHA enforcement, with enforcement strengthening considerably in union workplaces but edging upward only slightly in nonunion workplaces. The committees thus appear to have acted more as supplements to than substitutes for labor unions.

Rethinking the Regulation of Vulnerable Work in the USA: A Sector-based Approach

This article discusses one of the major challenges of US workplace policy: protecting roughly 35m workers who are vulnerable to a variety of major risks in the workplace. After laying out the dimensions of this problem, I show that the vulnerable workforce is concentrated in a subset of sectors with distinctive industry characteristics. Examining how employer organizations relate to one another in these sectors provides insight into some of the causes as well as possible solutions for redressing workforce vulnerability in the US as well as other countries facing similar problems.

Assessing OSHA Performance: New Evidence from the Construction Industry

The determinants of OSHA performance can be examined by breaking the regulatory process into three elements relating to enforcement, compliance behavior, and the adequacy of standards in addressing safety outcomes. This paper develops and applies this framework to the U.S. construction industry during the period 1987 to 1993. Enforcement activity among the firms in the sample was substantial, with firms facing a high probability of annual inspection. But, despite this significant enforcement effort, inspections have a modest effect on firm compliance with OSHA standards. Finally, the health and safety standards cited most frequently diverge from the major sources of fatalities and injuries on construction projects. These results suggest that historic enforcement policies toward construction make less sense as OSHA moves into its fourth decade of operation. More generally, the paper illustrates the problem of focusing enforcement resources on large, highhprofile companies even though they often are not the major source of regulatory problems in an established area of public policy intervention.