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.

Poll: What To Do With Feminist Finance

As alluded to in my last post, my new job requires some content restrictions. No political commentary, essentially. Which is a real crimp, because that is kind of the main focus around here. Not the only focus, of course, but the primary one. I've also blogged about my own money stuff, and about sexist social expectations around money, and marketing and workplace issues from a feminist perspective. Those remain fair game. But there are lots of other bloggers out there doing a great job covering those issues already. So what I am interested in hearing from any readers who may still exist (and bless your hearts, really, for not deleting this sometimes-flaky blogger from your reader of choice) is whether it would still be interesting and useful to you to follow this blog if the explicitly political topics fell by the wayside for the foreseeable future.

I wish Blogger had a polling widget, but alas, it does not. If you would please drop a comment letting me know what your thoughts on this are, that would be awesome.

Updates From Beyond

I am not dead! I feel like a bit of an asshole for not posting anything in so long, but I've been trying to figure out what to do with this blog. In my new job I am not allowed to do anything political, not even on my own time, and since my long-time credo has been that the financial is the political, that line between what is OK to blog and what is not is at many times very hazy. I hate to abandon this place but I also feel like, given my content restrictions, I don't know how much I'll have to say that's interesting for the next couple of years--no commentary on litigation or legislative matters, no candidate talk. I honestly don't know how to talk about the health care reform situation, for example, without talking about the legislative proposals--there's probably a way to do it, but I don't have the substantive knowledge to do it any justice. And I haven't posted any updates because it always seems like I'm on the cusp of resolving the issue for myself in a satisfactory way, but I think I may have to face the fact that there is no satisfactory solution.

But! I did want to post an update on the status of the Great Spousal Debt Repayment of 2007-2009. To recap, shortly after we decided to get married, I learned that Shiner owed 42 large in credit card bills. There was crying, there was gnashing of teeth, there was a postponement of any marriage decision. He pulled together a plan, he worked it, and yesterday he paid off his last revolving credit card balance. As of, uh, last night, we are now a family that pays all its credit card bills in full every month. Wahoo!

There are a lot of things in this society that are considered too private to celebrate out loud, but that nonetheless deserve a bigass party. Menarche comes to mind, and personal financial successes of all kinds. Very few of our friends or family knew that we were dealing with such large debts, or that we (mostly he) was working so hard to deal with them. That was his choice, but truthfully I was relieved that my family never knew because they would have judged him harshly and it would color their opinions of him for years after the money was all repaid. Unfair, but that's that's how they are, and he doesn't deserve that kind of judgment. The second job was explained by telling people that the day job was boring, the employee discount was killer, and the extra money was nice. The going out less was explained by the second job--sorry, no time. The big smiles after small victories were explained by, I don't know, being in love or some shit. So now that we're here, that we've succeeded--that he has succeeded--our celebration is private, too. It's just between the two of us, a couple of people in our daily circle, and you--my inner sanctum. Clink!