What is Actually Regulating Work? A Study of Restaurants in Indonesia and Australia

Abstract

Much of the discussion of informal work in recent years has been couched in terms of the ‘failure’ of formal labour law to regulate and protect many millions of workers around the world. This is usually seen as a failure of the state, either as a deliberate policy or through institutional weakness, to apply and enforce labour laws and standards in both developed and developing economies. As a result, the imagined picture created is of a circle drawn around the centre of state power within which labour laws are applicable, enforced and effective, and beyond which there is a void of regulation where workers are exploited and denied basic labour and human rights.