Report: Wage Theft, Labor Law Violations Widespread Across Country
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As we celebrate America’s workers this weekend, a new study shows how hard it is for low-wage workers to make a decent living because their employers engage in wage theft and break laws on pay.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with 4,387 workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, a group of respected academics estimates that 68 percent of the workers surveyed are routinely denied proper overtime pay and often are paid less than minimum wage. The average low-wage worker lost more than $2,600 in annual income due to the violations, 15 percent of their yearly earnings.
The study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” was released earlier this week. The three city surveys were conducted throughout 2008 in eight languages by researchers at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the University of California-Los Angeles, University of Illinois-Chicago, Cornell University and Rutgers University.
Those surveyed are employed in various low-wage industries, including retail, restaurants and grocery stores, carwashes, building services and industrial laundries, home health care, child care, construction, warehousing, transportation and garment manufacturing.
Minimum Wage Increases Today—10 Million See More Pay
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Today, nearly 10 million workers in 31 states get a raise when the federal minimum wage increases by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the raise will act as a significant economic stimulus “at a moment when it is critically needed—one that will lift all boats so Americans and businesses can stay afloat and ride out this economic storm.”
The raise will put an extra $2,000 a year into the paychecks of a full-time minimum wage worker. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), that increase will generate $5.5 billion in consumer spending over the next year—providing a boost to the economy without any increase in government spending. This is money that will be spent, Sweeney says, on basic necessities such as groceries, electricity, rent and transportation.
This is not money that will be saved for a rainy day or spent on lavish vacations overseas. Now, that’s not a bad return on a 70-cent-an hour investment. Indeed, a 2008 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago confirmed that minimum wage increases boost consumer spending substantially more than tax cuts do.
Bankers Are Creating a Slot Machine with Our Money
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The nation’s financial markets were a disaster waiting to happen, and the recent crash has given progressives the perfect opportunity to create a more fair and prosperous economy, says a leading author.
Les Leopold, author of The Looting of America, says the nation’s economic disaster was caused by a financial crash that has been brewing for 30 years. It began when policymakers created a trifecta of deregulated financial markets, tax codes that favored the rich and new trade rules.
[These policies] were supposed to lift all boats; instead, we got a gigantic bubble which burst.
Leopold, executive director of two nonprofit educational organizations—the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute—spoke last night at the National Labor College (NLC) in Silver Spring, Md.
Frances Perkins: The Woman Behind the New Deal
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On March 25, the AFL-CIO will host author Kirstin Downey who will discuss her new book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. The event, at 12:30 p.m., includes a light lunch. Copies of the book will be available for signing. If you’re in the area and can stop by, please RSVP to 202-637-5297. As the review below points out, Perkins’ role in the New Deal has too long been underplayed.
When Frances Perkins stepped into her office as labor secretary, the first-ever woman in a presidential Cabinet, her welcoming committee consisted of this:
A huge cockroach.
It’s a fair guess few had a rougher welcome to a high Washington position than Perkins did in 1933. In a splendid new biography of Perkins, The Woman behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, Kirsten Downey writes:
Some male Labor Department staffers threatened to resign rather than report to a woman.
Inequality Could Keep Economy from Full Recovery
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The federal stimulus package is a good way to jump-start our economy, but it is not enough to solve the deep crisis of inequality that has been building in this country for decades. A recent article says the government needs to act quickly to start addressing the growing income gap.
In an article in The Nation online, Christine Owens and Annette Bernhardt, executive director and policy co-director, respectively, of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), say working families were struggling to survive even before the current recession. Although U.S. workers are more productive than ever, they are faced with stagnant wages, disappearing benefits and little job security. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that eight of the top 10 occupations projected to generate the most jobs by 2016 are low-wage jobs in the service sector.
2008 in Review: Remember January, With a Jobless Rate of 5 Percent?
It was a classic “Good News-Bad News Year” for working families in 2008. First, the good news. Working families mobilized to Turn Around America and gave a pink slip to McBush, electing Barack Obama and ending eight years of the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.
Now, the bad news. Millions of workers got their own pink slips as the Bush economy tumbled even faster toward disaster. In between, the Employee Free Choice Act gained momentum, health care reform jumped to the forefront in the public debate and workers continued to fight anti-worker employers and weak labor laws to form unions and bargain for a better life.
Here’s the first of a six-part AFL-CIO Now blog series on the year that was.
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January-February
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In what became a month-by-month flood of bad economic news, the first unemployment report of the year showed the jobless rate jumping to 5 percent—at the time, the highest level in two years. But the worst was to come. A month later, news came that for the first time in four years, the economy lost jobs—17,000 of them. That first wave of job loss was a tsunami by year’s end.
With the economy’s downhill ride gaining speed, the AFL-CIO proposed a five-point economic-recovery plan to turn it around. President Bush and congressional Republicans blocked the sweeping stimulus package, even denying aid to the growing number of jobless.
In a rare bit of good economic news—the result of a 2006 and 2007 mobilization by the AFL-CIO and other groups to raise state minimum wages—low-wage worker in 14 states got a pay raise Jan 1.
Why Working Families and Our Unions Support Biden
As media pundits have noted, Sen. Barack Obama’s selection of Delaware Sen. Joe Biden adds many years of foreign policy experience to the ticket.
Less well-known is Biden’s long support for working families and their unions. America’s union movement, Biden has said, is
the only thing that keeps the barbarians at the gate.
But he doesn’t stop there.
There is a middle class in this country for one reason and only one reason: the union movement.
Arnie’s Next Pay Cut Plan: Kill Overtime
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has come up with a cruel way to solve the Golden State’s budget impasse—take away the eight-hour day and cut overtime pay for private-sector workers. Those changes to basic workplace protections are part of his so-called compromise budget released this week.
His move followed the executive order he issued July 31, cutting the pay of some 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour and laying off thousands of state workers. The pay cut is now in the courts and workers will receive their full August pay.
