Where should labor unions be? Labor unions should be where the workers are, and where the money is.
When we stereotype or lazily assume low-wage workers to be “low skill,” it reinforces an often unspoken and pernicious view that they lack intelligence and ambition, maybe even the potential to master “higher-order” skilled work.
While the Fight for $15 campaign has forced dozens of states and cities across the U.S. to increase their minimum wage in recent years, activists have finally begun to turn their attention to tipped workers.
About 39,000 Minnesota workers suffer from wage theft each year, resulting in $11.9 million in wages owed, and that's only what goes reported. The union-backed Wage Theft Initiative proposes policy changes to give the state Department of Labor and Industry more enforcement tools and an increased budget.
Since 2005, a dispersed group of sub-minimum wage workers has been performing online tasks for pennies through an Amazon-controlled marketplace called Mechanical Turk. These workers tag photos, transcribe audio, take surveys, and do whatever current computer technology cannot. Their work-product is littered across the Internet, and through academic publications, but they have largely remained invisible.
A recent UCLA Labor Center report, Get to Work or Go To Jail: Workplace Rights Under Threat, goes further by exploring the ways in which the criminal justice system can also lock workers on probation, parole, facing court-ordered debt, or child support debt into bad jobs. Because these workers face the threat of incarceration for unemployment, the report finds that they cannot afford to refuse a job, quit a job, or to challenge their employers.
A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than $12.16 per hour—the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—earn so little on the job that they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
The combination of fed-up workers, motivated organizers, and political opportunity created a perfect storm for New York City's carwasheros and fast-food workers in the fight for $15.
During the 2014 fiscal year, the Connecticut state labor department received 2,776 complaints over unpaid wages and returned $6.5 million in wages to workers, according to the state labor department.
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