Measuring Multidimensional Labour Law Violation with an Application to South Africa

The rights of workers contained in labour law are multidimensional, yet analysts tend to concentrate on compliance one dimension at a time. How should we conceptualise and measure compliance with labour law in its totality? This paper draws on the multidimensional poverty literature to propose a measure of multidimensional labour law violation, which allows a quantification of the contribution of compliance along different dimensions. This index is applied to South Africa to illustrate its workings and the insights it can provide on the nature and granular structure of labour law compliance and worker vulnerability.