Low-Wage Workers Stiffed, Women Worst, National Study Finds
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That’s why they call them sweatshops — 43 percent of apparel and textile manufacturing workers surveyed in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago said they’d been cheated of the minimum wage they were expecting. The survey, released this week by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, was funded by four foundations, Ford, Russell Sage, (which gave $327,924) Joyce and Haynes.
Women, no surprise, were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the worst affected — not surprisingly — illegal immigrants, who made up 39 percent of those surveyed, (31 percent were legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans.) The typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of an average weekly wage of $339 — about a 15 percent loss in pay. African-Americans were three times more likely than whites to suffer a wage violation.
“We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate,” said professor Ruth Milkman, one of the study’s authors. Why? Maybe because she hasn’t ever, or likely for a long time, worked at the very bottom of the labor ladder. Anyone who’s worked a low-wage job knows you take it because you’re desperate and out of choices. When you’re desperate you’ll put up with whatever your employer wants just to keep that paycheck coming, whatever they chip out of it.
In 1999 and 2000, author Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. She wrote about it,in “Nickeled and Dimed” offering a rare look inside a world most of us try to flee as soon as possible and pray we never see again.
Best of the bunch surveyed were residential construction — dinging workers only 13 percent — and home health care, at 12 percent. Tied for second-worst employers, with personal and repair services? Private households, aka nannies, maids and other domestic workers. Ripping off workers is sick, but cheating someone you’ve chosen to bring into your home or care for your kids? Nice example to set.
Among many others, The New York Times ran a story about the study and an editorial calling for tougher laws and penalties.
Has this ever happened to you?
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Here’s a revolutionary thought for all those outraged
editorialists: How about enforcing the laws that exist? How about going after businesses that abuse workers? What do we need, another fire with locked exits?
“How about enforcing the laws that exist? How about going after businesses that abuse workers? What do we need, another fire with locked exits?”
Yes, we must enforce the laws, but after decades of deregulation and anti-worker policies (promoted by both Republicans and “New Democrats”), the enforcers no longer have the resources.
DOL Wages & Hours investigators:
1957 = 1 per 46,000 workers
1972 = similar
1990 = 1 per 130,000 workers
2008 = 1 per 173,000 workers
So investigators have four times as much potential work as they had 50 years ago.
But that potential is much more likely to be real, because — again, due to conservative laissez faire policies — more workers today are in low-wage, non-unionized jobs (e.g., Wal-Mart), where employer abuses are more likely:
rate of unionization for non-agricultural workers:
1957 = appx 30%
1975 = 26.4%
1985 = 18.9%
2008 = 12.4% (7.6% of private industry workers)
A perfect example of what Thomas Frank calls “win-win sabotage” by the corporate elite and their political puppets.
We must recognize that:
more:
In response to another comment. See in context »http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010903/ross
http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=2579
I agree. In a crap economy, how hard is anyone going to push, even if they should?
Interesting that this study was released during the same week as the announcement that women now form the majority of the workforce. I also wonder how many working women, paid off the books as household employees, are not counted in the tally.
Do you know what these women earn? The stats I’ve seen show that most women, still, earn $20-40K, and therefore often up with low SS payments, no savings and a poverty-stricken old age.