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Who’s violating fair labor standards in your neighborhood? And which companies in your area are outsourcing jobs? You can find out at Job Tracker, an online database maintained by Working America.
Reporting violators of fair labor standards is a new addition to Job Tracker. Working America has just added 40,000 new records from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour inspections database. The new records track corporate violators of the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA], which governs minimum wage, overtime pay and child-labor laws. Job Tracker enables you to see companies by zip code, with the number of violations, the number of children employed illegally, back wages paid, fines assessed and information about companies considered repeat or willful violators.
The new records build on Job Tracker’s first-of-its kind consolidation of data about mass layoffs and anticipated plant closings, OSHA violations, labor law violations, and listings of companies that have sent jobs overseas. Job Tracker is a joint project of Working America and the AFL-CIO and contains data on over 400,000 companies. Working America, a fast-growing organization for working people in the U.S., has 3 million members.
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]]>The post Wage theft: Covert crime against workers, in St. Louis, too appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Many businesses are increasing their bottom line by not paying their workers all of their legally earned wages. They are stealing wages from lower paid workers and there is little enforcement of existing employment laws. Wage theft is rampant in many industries, and it’s having a profound impact on millions of workers in America, and causing significant economic hardship.
America’s workplace laws are failing to protect our country’s workers. In industries ranging from construction and food manufacturing to restaurants, janitorial services and home health care, workers are enduring minimum wage and overtime violations, hazardous working conditions, discrimination, and retaliation for speaking up or trying to organize. They have little recourse because of their need for work, especially during the recession.
A 2008 UCLA survey of 4,387 workers found that many employment and labor laws are regularly and systematically violated, impacting a significant part of the low-wage labor force in the nation’s largest cities. Based on survey results, estimates are that in a given week, front-line workers in low-wage industries in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City collectively lose more than $56.4 million per week as a result of employment and labor law violations.
The following is a summary of key violations from the UCLA survey titled “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities:”
Minimum wage violations:
Overtime violations:
“Off-the-clock” violations:
Meal break violations:
Pay stub violations and illegal deductions:
Tipped job violations:
What can we do to stop wage theft?
According to the survey, when workers are victims of wage theft, their families experience more poverty and economic insecurity. Also, their local communities suffer from social instability and lower tax revenue. When unscrupulous employers violate the law, responsible employers are forced into unfair competition, setting off a race to the bottom that threatens to bring down standards throughout the labor market. And when significant numbers of workers are underpaid, tax revenues are lost.
The survey report suggests three principles that should drive the development of a new policy agenda to protect the rights of workers.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Obama administration is investigating pay practices throughout the health care industry, and as a result, hospitals around the country have paid millions of dollars in back wages to settle claims by the government and their employees. And many more hospitals are fighting class-action lawsuits that raise the same issues.
In St. Louis, the Labor Department has recovered more than $1.7 million in back wages for 4,000 employees of hospitals and clinics operated by SSM Health Care, a Roman Catholic system.
In Boston, the Partners HealthCare System agreed to pay 700 employees more than $2.7 million in overtime back wages to resolve a lawsuit by the department alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
And under the proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit in California, Kaiser Permanente would pay $7.25 million to hundreds of registered nurse coordinators, case managers and other medical workers. The employees said they had been denied overtime pay because they were improperly classified as exempt. Kaiser denied wrongdoing but has agreed to the settlement.
photo: Progress Illinois
video: Interfaith Worker Justice
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