I was recently at a briefing on Capitol Hill put on by
Interfaith Worker Justice, an organization that has been tackling this issue at
a federal and local level. Some of the statistics about wage theft are
shocking. According to the written testimony of IWJ Executive Director, Kim
Bobo:
* Two million workers aren’t paid the minimum wage.1
* Three million are mis-classified as independent
contractors instead of employees.2
* Millions more are illegally denied overtime pay.3
Millions of workers are having wages stolen each and every
year.”
This impacts not only the workers who are having their wages
stolen but also their families, their communities and all of us. Because the
same employers that are not paying wages are also not paying payroll taxes,
thus short changing the Social Security and Medicare System that we all rely on
to support us as we age. In addition, business that pay full wages and benefits
(especially those that have a collective bargaining contract with their employees)
are put at a major competitive disadvantage. They are forced to compete with
those companies that can routinely underbid them because they are unfairly
denying their workers their paychecks.
And women are often impacted more than men, as women workers
(especially working women of color) are concentrated in the low paying jobs
that are rife with wage theft. Immigrant workers are also vulnerable and
exploited in these schemes. In 2007, Nathan
Newman covered wage theft on the blog, TPM Café. He cited a study by the
Brennan Center for Justice in NY which highlighted the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) study of the nursing
industry which found in 2000 that 60% of nursing homes routinely violated
overtime, minimum wage, or child labor laws, and a 2004 DOL study of the garment
industry which found that 54% of contractors in Los Angeles violated the
minimum wage law .” Both of those industries are dominated by women workers, all
of whom are repeatedly having their wages stolen from them everyday, by
corporation big and small.
But if the Department of Labor is doing these studies and
knows what is going on, why aren’t they doing anything?
One of the jobs of the Department of Labor (DOL) is insuring
that workers are protected and this is a major area where they are incredibly
negligent. The Department of Labor’s lack of expansive enforcement of wage and
hourly laws has been going on for decades. But we are reaching a point where
this type of behavior is becoming commonplace within American business culture
and we need our government to take a stand.
IWJ has some suggestions on how we change this, they
include:
- A Community policing model for wage enforcement;
- Dramatically increasing DOL wage and hour division staff;
- Pushing the DOL staff to do more proactive work instead of waiting for complaints; and
- Meaningfully punishing offenders.
These are common sense solutions to a problem that has been
ignored for too long. It is time that our government takes this problem on and
ensures that workers receive the full benefit of their daily work. You can
check out the Interfaith Worker Justice website for more information at http://www.iwj.org
and you may want to check in with your elected officials to see what they are
doing to help workers keep from having their pockets picked by greedy
corporations.
It makes you wonder, if 2 million businesses had their
profits stolen, do you think the government would be standing by?
For Ms. Bobo’s full testimony, click here:
http://www.iwj.org/documents/Wagethefttestimony.pdf