Low-Wage Workers in Three US Cities Subject To Rampant Wage Theft

And new study conducted jointly by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment has found widespread and serious violations of the working conditions and wages of low-wage workers in Chicago, LA, and New York. How low is low-wage? The median wage for those surveyed was $8.02 per hour. The study focused on front-line workers frequently excluded from standard surveys, like undocumented workers, workers paid in cash, and home-based workers. Among its findings:

Wage Violations 26% of those surveyed were paid less than the minimum wage over the previous week, and 60% of those were underpaid by more than a dollar an hour. 30% of tipped-job workers were not paid the tipped-job minimum wage, and 12% of tipped job employees had some portion of their tips stolen by their supervisors during that time. 44% of all respondents reported at least one wage violation during the past 12 months.

Overtime Violations Over a quarter of the respondents worked more than 40 hours during the previous week, but 76% of them weren't paid the overtime they were entitled to. That's on average 11 overtime hours per worker that were either underpaid or not paid at all.

Illegal deductions 41% of workers who had deductions taken from their paycheck saw deductions that were illegal, like deductions for transportation, use of tools, or materials.

Employer Retaliation A quarter of those surveyed had reported a complaint to their employer or had tried to unionize--both are legal activities. But 43% of them experienced at least one form of retaliation from their employer, like threatening to call immigration or threatening to cut hours or wages. 20% of those surveyed made no complaints even though they had grounds to do so because they feared retaliation.

Childcare Workers Because many childcare workers would legally be classified as independent contractors and thus exempt from many labor laws including minimum wage, they were excluded from the above calculations. But if you look at this overwhelmingly female workforce separately, 89% were making less than their state's minimum wage.

Net Impact 68% of those surveyed experienced at least one pay-related violation over the past week, and they lost an average of $51--15% of their earned pay. Extrapolated over a year, that's a ripoff of $2,634 out of $17,616 in earned wages. The study authors estimate that the workers in those three cities lose out on a total of $56.4 million every week because of these wage violations.

Also prevalent were meal break violations (nonexistent or shortened meal breaks), "off the clock" violations (work required before the employee had clocked in or after she'd clocked out), failures to provide pay stubs that would provide some documentation of whether workers were being paid fairly, and a workers compensation system that is in the authors' words simply not working for low-wage workers.

As you might imagine, some low-wage workers seemed more likely to be subject to these violations than others. In the first place, the low-wage workforce is comprised largely of women, people of color, and immigrants. So it shouldn't be surprising that within that universe, women, foreign-born workers, people of color and--double (or triple) whammy!--undocumented women were among the hardest hit of all. White folks were the least likely to experience wage violations, African Americans were three times more likely than whites, and foreign-born Latinos were the most likely of all racial and ethnic groups to get screwed on their pay. But one of the strongest predictors of whether workers would be treated fairly or not was the industry they worked in. Several of the worst offenders were those with predominately female and brown workforces like textile work and domestic labor.

And this research was concluded in August 2008, well before the economic meltdown, so I am going to make an educated guess that these conditions remain unchanged or have worsened since then.

Can we stop talking about the he-cession yet? Yes, it is interesting and, from a public policy perspective, possibly useful, to know that certain industries, and the men who work in them, are losing jobs at faster rates than women and predominately female industries. But that is not a very complete picture of job-related hurt. To trumpet the problems of newly jobless middle and working class men while ignoring the regular theft of wages from people--particularly women and people of color--who are already living near the bottom of the economic ladder is a very biased picture indeed.