Measuring Labor Rights

This project aims to improve upon existing measures of labor standards, most of which evaluate a government’s respect for worker rights through observed violations of labor standards. I discuss this method and some shortcomings associated with it in an article that I published in Political Research Quarterly. The essential idea is to instead measure labor standards through evidence of the ability of workers to proactively exercise their rights.

The work involves gathering and standardizing cross-national data on union density, collective bargaining, worker protests and strikes. These data will then be used to develop a composite index of labor standards with statistical measurement models.