Labor & Employment Law

Today: National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft

By James Parks

At a time when Congress is considering whether to give the nation?s wealthiest people a holiday gift by extending their Bush-era tax breaks, workers, religious leaders, public officials and others will come together in more than 35 cities across the country to fight for those who have been cheated and left behind.

A week before Thanksgiving, we’re taking part in a National Day of Action Against Wage Theft to highlight this ongoing crisis and ways that workers and communities are organizing to stop it.

Wage theft is a national epidemic that robs millions of workers of billions of dollars they?ve worked for but never see, says Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), the coordinator of the National Day of Action. Speaking at a telephone press conference yesterday, Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, put it this way:

A week before Thanksgiving, faith communities collect turkeys to give to poor families. Millions of poor families could buy their own turkeys if their wages had been paid as required by law. This Thanksgiving, as a nation we are struggling with how to boost the economy. What better way to stimulate the economy, put more money back into neighborhood businesses, than to assure that workers are paid all their wages?

As part of the National Day, Bobo said, workers in Houston will drive a  Justice Bus, stopping by workplaces where employers allegedly engage in wage theft. The mayor of Grand Rapids, Mich., will announce a new task force against wage theft. Workers seeking unpaid wages will file lawsuits in New York City and Austin, Texas. Dozens of groups will visit employers in other cities who allegedly have stolen wages and demand they pay workers what they have promised.

Rebecca Fuentes, the director of the Workers’ Center of Central New York in Syracuse, described state fair workers who were so badly abused by their employer that they were impoverished to the point of malnutrition. They had to go to the emergency room with burn blisters on their bodies from working without protection around hot machinery. For more on their story, click here. Fuentes told reporters:  

A carnival is a place for entertainment and celebration, but for these workers, it was a place of worry and despair, with their poverty and malnutrition uncomfortably coexisting with the abundance and happiness a carnival ought to represent. We are taking action.

One focus of the National Day of Action will be the need to strengthen the enforcement of wage and hour laws, support community wage theft prevention programs and prevent the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. State laws to stop wage theft have already passed in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Mexico, and a first-ever county ordinance was passed in Miami-Dade County earlier this year.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on November 18, 2010 (boomark / email).