Advocates of worker rights in Philadelphia pushed for more funding to enforce some of the most progressive worker laws in the country - resulting in a 400% increase in recovered wages.
To tackle the problem of wage theft, which almost always places on workers the burden and risk of coming forward to report violations, we have to address the problem of retaliation.
Residential senior care homes profit handsomely by paying their workers poverty wages. The profit margins can be huge and, for violators of labor laws, hinge on the widespread exploitation of thousands of caretakers, many of them poor
Cenikor, a nationally renowned drug rehabilitation program, has forced patients struggling with addiction to work for free for more than 300 for-profit companies, including some of the nation’s largest, most likely in violation of federal labor law.
An eye-opening new report has documented billions of dollars of corporate theft from workers. The government is turning a blind eye.
Los Angeles is the wage theft capital of the United States. Workers here lose $26 million to wage theft every week according to the UCLA Labor Center. The crime has major impacts on local economies. It decreases taxable income, lowers wage standards, and in California alone is estimated to cost the state $7 billion in lost payroll taxes.
“The Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration and its approach to enforcement have made immigrant communities obviously fearful in a new way,” says Laura Huizar, a staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project. “This is going to prevent a lot people from filing wage complaints that they otherwise would have.”
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.
For now, it will be up to states and cities to protect workers.
We acknowledge that many workers do not get what they have earned. Interlaced with vulnerability and structural racism, the rampant rate of wage theft is one of the lesser known labor violations that far too many low-wage workers endure.
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