Last week I wrote a diary on a new report about widespread wage theft among low-income workers, ""Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers"". I said that I was working on an article for Random Lengths News. It was published on Thursday, and I'm republishing here below.
Robbed On The Job
Wage Theft Is Rampant-Estimated at Roughly $2.9 Billion Annually
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Property crime is a serious concern in America today. In 2007, the total dollar value of all property officially reported stolen in California-population about 38 million-was just over $2.8 billion, almost half of which was motor vehicle theft. The rest came to $1.47 billion. Of that $2.8 billion close to one-third of it was recovered-$912 million.
But a new report indicates that these statistics are woefully incomplete. "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers" finds that wage theft is rampant among the bottom 15 percent of the workforce, and so widespread that workers in just three cities-Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)-had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008, a rate more than double that of reported theft in California. As for recovering any of it, workers were more likely to get fired for asking than ever seeing a dime of what had been stolen from them.
"The reason we did this study, we were running to into this in our qualitative work," said Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at UCLA who was one of eleven co-authors of the report. "My collaborators had all encountered this," she said, "But nobody really knew how common it was. We thought, wow, we could really figure this out."
A couple of weeks ago, a team of researchers released a report, "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers", which found an astounding level of labor law violations among low-wage workers (rrepresenting the bottom 15%), costing workers thousands of dollars a year. It was based on a survey of thousands of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, but the pattern of labor law violations is certainly much more widespread, though it's impossible to tell how severe it may be elsewhere. Naturally the wage theft involved impacts entire communities--including the business located there--a much broader impact than just the individual workers who are directly affected.
Topline findings-listed at the Center on Politicy Initiatives website where the report is available-include the following:
Workplace violations are severe and widespread in the low-wage labor market. In our sample, 26% of low-wage workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the week prior to the survey, and 76% of those who worked more than 40 hours were not paid the legally required overtime rate.
Job and employer characteristics are key to understanding workplace violations. For example, the industry and occupation of a worker's job was one of the strongest predictors of violations.
All workers - regardless of legal status, race, gender and nativity - are at risk of workplace violations, though some groups are more vulnerable than others.
More than two-thirds of our sample experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week. Assuming a full-time, full-year work schedule, we estimate that workers lose an average of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of total earnings of $17,616.
I interviewed one of the co-authors. Ruith Milkman, for a story based on the report that I'm writing for Random Lengths New. I plan to republish the story after it runs, but I didn't want to wait to share some of the information in the report, and some of what thoughts it stirred.
First and foremost, it served to reinforce what I learned as a child from my grandparents and great aunts and uncles, about the sort of world that had existed before modern labor laws were put into place as part of the New Deal. To a shocking degree, this report reveals, that lawless world has returned all around us, without being noticed. The shock of that realization is a call to do something about it-not just something immediate, but something deep and sustained.
"The danger with this is, this is a new enough phenomena that people are horrified when they hear about it," Milkman told me. "But the real danger is that it becomes a part of the economic landscape," she said. "Now the question is what are we going to do about it?"
There is a real danger that it could become something that we simply accept, she warned And here Milkman drew an analogy to the emergence of mass homelessness in the early Reagan era. "When it first started, there was a lot of distress and intense discussion and debate about it, and now we take it for granted. It's like we live in India."
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