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.
Southern California port truck drivers striking XPO Logistics have quite the following these days.
As Capital & Main reported recently, drivers with one of the larger trucking companies serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach went on strike just before dawn October 26th. These drivers are on the front lines of a critical fight impacting the future of work in the United States: “misclassification,” a condition in which companies wrongly treat their workers as “independent contractors” rather than as employees.
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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