Today’s post was shared by Gelman on Workplace Injuries and comes from www.nytimes.com
This blog has recently included an extensive focus on fraud in workers’ compensation.
Wage theft is another form of fraud, and an expensive one, at that. This editorial from The New York Times talks about wage theft against all workers, regardless of the work they do and the amounts they get paid.
“In 2012, the Department of Labor helped 308,000 workers recover $280 million in back pay for wage-theft violations — nearly double the amount stolen that year in robberies on the street, at banks, gas stations and convenience stores,” according to the article.
It doesn’t take very long, and wage theft from one, two or three employees becomes real money that affect workers, their loved ones, and society in the form of money not in those workers’ pockets.
I find it helpful that the newspaper calls out the New York attorney general for advocating for workers through recovering almost “$1 million in stolen wages for 1,450 fast-food employees,” according to the article. In case you wondered why local and statewide elections are important, here’s one reason from the article.
“The Labor Department has only about 1,100 wage-and-hour investigators to monitor seven million employers and several states have ended or curtailed wage enforcement efforts.”
So who’s going to advocate for workers and go after employers who are fleecing both their workers and society?
That’s one of the many reasons that laws are in place and the judicial system is set up to interpret those laws. But one of the first steps in holding fraudsters accountable is having someone willing and in a position to enforce those laws and stand up to business, regardless of how much those businesses pay their workers.
| As corporate America devises new methods to reduce wages it also assaults the injured workers’ benefit safety net, including workers’ compensation insurance. That results in rate benefits going down and premium bases becoming inadequate to pay ongoing claims. Today’s post is shared from nytimes.com and is authored by its Editorial Board.
When labor advocates and law enforcement officials talk about wage theft, they are usually referring to situations in which low-wage service-sector employees are forced to work off the clock, paid subminimum wages, cheated out of overtime pay or denied their tips. It is a huge and underpoliced problem. It is also, it turns out, not confined to low-wage workers. In the days ahead, a settlement is expected in the antitrust lawsuit pitting 64,613 software engineers against Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The engineers say they lost up to $3 billion in wages from 2005-9, when the companies colluded in a scheme not to solicit one another’s employees. The collusion, according to the engineers, kept their pay lower than it would have been had the companies actually competed for talent. The suit, brought after the Justice Department investigated the anti-recruiting scheme in 2010, has many riveting aspects, including emails and other documents that tarnish the reputation of Silicon Valley as competitive and of technology executives as a new breed of “don’t-be-evil” bosses, to cite Google’s informal motto.
The… |
[Click here to see the rest of this post]
