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posted by martyb on Monday May 25 2015, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the pay-up dept.

We love to talk about crime in America and usually the rhetoric is focused on the acts we can see: bank heists, stolen bicycles and cars, alleyway robberies. But Zachary Crockett writes at Pricenomics that wage theft is one of the more widespread crimes in our country today - the non-payment of overtime hours, the failure to give workers a final check upon leaving a job, paying a worker less than minimum wage, or, most flagrantly, just flat out not paying a worker at all.

Most commonly, wage theft comes in the form of overtime violations. In a 2008 study, the Center for Urban Economic Development surveyed 4,387 workers in low-wage industries and found that some 76% of full-time workers were not paid the legally required overtime rate by their employers (pdf) and the average worker with a violation had put in 11 hours of overtime—hours that were either underpaid or not paid at all. Nearly a quarter of the workers in the sample came in early and/or stayed late after their shift during the previous work week. Of these workers, 70 percent did not receive any pay at all for the work they performed outside of their regular shift. In total, unfairly withheld wages in these three cities topped $3 billion. Generalizing this for the rest of the U.S.’s low-wage workforce (some 30 million people), researchers estimate that wage theft could be costing Americans upwards of $50 billion per year.

Last year, the Economic Policy Institute made what is, to date, the most ambitious attempt to quantify the extent of reported wage theft in the U.S.and determined that “the total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million.” Obviously, the nearly $1 billion collected is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government. Commissioner Su of California says wage theft has harmed not just low-wage workers. “My agency has found more wages being stolen from workers in California than any time in history,” says Su. “This has spread to multiple industries across many sectors. It’s affected not just minimum-wage workers, but also middle-class workers.”

 
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  • (Score: 1) by acp_sn on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:44AM

    by acp_sn (5254) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:44AM (#187871)

    And you are entirely at fault for staying at a job that did this to you.

    They say you have to be there at a certain time, you get paid for that time. If they say "you have to be here for unpaid time" you have two choices. 1 is tell them to go fuck themselves, 2 is agree then show up when you start getting paid.

    The very first time they fail to pay you for the hours worked you find a lawyer. Again if you put up with it then you are the one who is letting someone else shit on you.

    If they are real assholes and it looks like you are about to get fired go to your doctor and say you hurt your back doing something at work and file a workers comp claim. Since its almost impossible to prove you didn't hurt your back if they fire you then it looks like retaliation.