Who to inspect? Using employee complaint data to inform workplace inspections in Ontario

In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, employment standards enforcement includes reactively investigating employee complaints and, to a lesser extent, proactively inspecting workplaces. Analyses of administrative data from Ontario’s Ministry of Labour (MOL) show that the use of complaint data to inform workplace inspections is quite limited. Yet strict adherence to the MOLs procedures for workplace inspections is not conducive to the investigation of some of the empirically most common complaints. Accordingly, we argue for more strategic enforcement by making greater use of complaint data to guide workplace inspections triggered by complaints, and for the increased use of penalties in these inspections.