Ruth Palacios and Arturo Xelo, a married couple from Mexico, work at their fruit stand in the Corona neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York on Tuesday, April 13, 2021. They worked seven days a week for months disinfecting COVID-19 patient rooms at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, but weren't paid overtime Palacios says.
Major U.S. corporations are some of the worst offenders. They include Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle-K stores, which agency records show have collectively taken more than $22 million from their employees since 2005.Their victims toil on the lower rungs of the workforce.
“Some companies are doing a cost-benefit analysis and realize it’s cheaper to violate the law, even if you get caught,” said Jenn Round, a labor standards enforcement fellow at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University. Through much of the Jim Crow era, the federal government ignored racial disparities in pay. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that Congress first tried to establish a national minimum wage and overtime pay for workers. To get Southern Democrats to vote for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, Northern Democrats agreed to exclude agricultural laborers, nannies and housekeepers from the law’s protections. In the South, most of those workers were Black.
With help from an attorney at Adelante Alabama Worker Center, Callejas sued the owner of the hotel, AUM Pelham LLC. The company denied that Callejas was hired at $10 an hour or that she worked overtime, but it agreed to a settlement. Company owner Rakesh Patel did not respond to requests for comment.
“The little guys have to speak up because people — the bosses — are taking advantage of their workers,” Palacios said in a video call from her home in Queens. Circle-K Stores denied the underpayment allegations in court filings, though it ended up settling the case for $2,500 in October. But data from the Labor Department shows that the company repeatedly takes wages from its employees, with few repercussions.
“The company re-classified the identified positions, and throughout this process, Halliburton has worked earnestly and cooperatively with the U.S. Department of Labor to equitably resolve this situation,” wrote Susie McMichael, a public relations representative for Halliburton. A Labor Department official said the agency orders companies to pay damages when appropriate, determined on a case-by-case basis. Fines are usually assessed when a company repeatedly, or willfully, breaks the law. The department tries to resolve cases administratively to avoid taking employers to court.
Leppink, now commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry, said she pushed investigators to demand cash damages for workers in every possible federal case. For example, if an employer took $1,000 from an employee, the agency could demand that amount in back wages and an extra $1,000 in damages.
Lawyers who represent workers in wage theft cases say they often discourage clients from filing a complaint with the Labor Department because they rarely get paid damages or see quick results. The typical case took 108 days to investigate, according to the agency’s data.At a 2015 hearing in Philadelphia, a law professor from Temple University told the City Council that employers stole wages from tens of thousands of Philadelphia workers every week.
publicintegrity And that surprises you?
1/8 Solar & Wind are 0 emissions? Each 1 MW of solar farm power requires between 35 to 45 tons of steel, + you need to dig for cadmium, gallium, germanium, etc Make silicon Silicon metal is made from the reaction of silica (SiO2) -
publicintegrity Time for the new and improved DOJ to end this form of slavery.
BreeNewsome publicintegrity Imagine if we treated wage theft like the crime it is. We could RICO the whole C-Suite.
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