May Article of the Month

The May article of the month is our 2021 winner of the Nevile-Plowman prize for best paper of the year. Joy Jeounghee Kim and Skye Allmang ask why the existing labour standards in the United States systemically fail to prevent wage theft and answer that while lax enforcement of the standards makes a contribution, the main cause is that labour standards are increasingly outdated, and this makes the cost of compliance high. The article draws on a strong theoretical framework, uses good contextual studies, and elegantly brings together a story of both the changes in illegal wage theft in the US and the efforts to mitigate it. The choice to take a broad scope of phenomena to explain allows Kim and Allmang to identify a deeper, more structural set of factors as causes for these changes, chief among them the ways in which labour power has declined in recent decades. The paper lays out a clear research agenda for the problem of wage theft, as well as valuable policy prescriptions, and was a worthy winner of the Nevile-Plowman prize against stiff competition.