Beyond the law-in-the-books: Labour enforcement in Senegal

Abstract

Abstract Extant research often assumes that the letter of labour codes is an adequate proxy for effective regulation. This paper empirically shows that such an assumption makes little sense for Senegal. We collect new objective measures of private and public labour enforcement, including workers’ awareness of their rights, access to the judiciary, penalties, and labour inspection resources and activities. We document that Senegal, as well as other countries in Francophone West Africa, is characterised by a combination of protective/stringent in-form labour codes and little enforcement efforts. Furthermore, we show that labour inspections target large and registered firms, while labour violations are more prevalent in small and unregistered firms, implying that the problem is substantially more complex than a lack of public inspection funding. We speculate it is mostly about the lack of effective representation of vulnerable workers in the policymaking process.