Who Defines "Social Responsibility"? Worker Preferences in the Moroccan Garment Industry | WIP Seminar with Greg Distelhorst

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(Joint with Matthew Amengual and Alessandro Guasti) For over 30 years, foreign corporations have enforced “social responsibility” standards on the developing world firms they do business with.  Yet these labor standards are defined with no input from the people whose jobs they affect: the workers in those firms.  One challenge to creating worker-guided responsibility standards is understanding worker preferences over the wide range of nonmonetary (dis)amenities associated with every job.  This study illustrates how to elicit the direction and strength of worker preferences for an array of a nonmonetary features of the workplace.  We surveyed 2,500 garment factory workers in Morocco, asking them to decide between randomly varied job profiles.  From their decisions, we estimate the strength of their preferences for workplace features including work hours, work intensity, supervisor relations, safety, cleanliness, job stability, and fringe benefits.  We compute both the causal effects of these features on job preference and workers’ implied willingness-to-pay for these job amenities.  Through this and similar studies, we believe social responsibility standards can achieve closer alignment with the preferences of the workers whose lives they affect.

Please Note: Boxed lunches will be served for those who RSVP. Please email jenna.myers@utoronto.ca if you are not on the list-serv, have any questions, or would like to present your own early-stage research in the future.