A growing group of laborers is trailing hurricanes and wildfires the way farmworkers follow crops, contracting for big disaster-recovery firms, and facing exploitation, injury, and death.
Prosecutors can and should take immediate steps to redirect efforts toward wage theft. This would give momentum to movements calling to redirect resources that now go to funding the police.
"Looking at these corporate supply chains, we've been able to achieve more by getting union agreements through supply chain actions than we've ever been able to achieve in legislative campaigns," says Justin Flores, FLOC's vice president.
Classic Air is among a handful of companies that have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years transporting immigrants around the country and the world for ICE. These flights have been scenes of abuse and medical neglect.
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.
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