The New York Times reported last week on a study that shows low-wage workers are cheated out of pay and workers' compensation at staggering rates. According to the study, "68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week."
Wage-law violations disproportionately impact people who experience discrimination based on other categories in addition to class:
The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis responded to the study:
"There is no excuse for the disregard of federal labor standards -- especially those designed to protect the neediest among us." Ms. Solis said she was in the process of hiring 250 more wage-and-hour investigators. "Today's report clearly shows we still have a major task before us," she said.
Secretary Solis is a longtime supporter of labor. Hopefully having an advocate in a position of power will prove beneficial here and she will be able to use this study as a reason to combat unfair employment practices.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Low-wage workers cheated out of pay.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/15846
For a brief and horrible time after university, I worked at Wal-Mart. It was standard practice there to remove any hours over the scheduled shift that an employee might work. For example, if I worked 15 minutes longer than my shift, the local payroll/HR person would deduct that time from my pay before sending the hours to Head Office for payroll generation.
A few times, I got them to reverse their 'corrections' because I had been validly kept late. Often though, if you couldn't prove that you'd been kept at work for a good reason, you just lost the time.
I was too young and too uncommitted to that workplace to kick up too much of a fuss but there were workers there (mostly women) who routinely had time shaved from their cheques.
Further proof that when something is too cheap, someone paying for it.
So, the study proves that market clearing price of labor prevails more often than not, despite government attempts at price fixing?
Yes. Bow down to market forces, which are the true arbiter of good and evil.
/sarcasm
I don't recall mentioning anything about good or evil, only the (probably unintentional) insight produced by the study.
You can debate endlessly whether drugs are good or bad, but that doesn't have any bearing on the fact that prohibition has utterly failed to keep them from getting to market.