Wage Theft: A Crime Without Punishment?

http://www.thenation.com/article/168137/wage-theft-crime-without-punishment



In the first episode of the HBO comedy Girls, young Brooklyn hipster and would-be writer Hannah, outraged when her visiting parents cut off her allowance, steals the tips they’ve left for the hotel housekeepers. It’s a funny scene—partly because it tells us something about the ruthlessness beneath Hannah’s blurry indecisiveness, but also because it’s just so outrageous. What kind of crummy, selfish person would take rent and food money from hard-working women? In comedy: an overindulged Oberlin grad. In real life: the housekeepers’ supervisor.


Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology at the CUNY grad center and academic director of the Murphy Institute, likes to tell the story of a hotel housekeeper and her tip-stealing boss because it brings together so many features of the phenomenon of wage theft, the subject of her research. “She was an undocumented Mexican immigrant with four kids, very humble, and she worked in a brand-name Los Angeles hotel,” Milkman told me by phone. “She worked more than forty hours a week, but was paid only for forty hours—minimum wage. The law says supervisors and managers can’t get any part of your tip, but she said her supervisor would go into hotel rooms and take the tips before the housekeepers came in to clean. She complained about not getting paid for all her hours and was fired.” Female, undocumented, low-wage, not paid for all her hours, fired when she complains—it’s an all-too-typical story.

Low-wage workers in the United States face many harsh and demeaning circumstances—not being entitled to paid sick days, for instance. But there’s something particularly shocking about wage theft, an element of insult added to injury: not only does your boss pay you as little as he can get away with; he keeps a nice chunk of it for himself, just because he can. How much? According to “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” a 2009 paper written by Milkman, Annette Bernhardt et al., fully 26 percent of the low-wage workers they studied in three cities—New York, Chicago and Los Angeles—had been paid less than the legally required minimum wage in the previous week; 60 percent of these were underpaid by more than $1 an hour. All in all, 68 percent of the sample had had at least one pay-related violation in the previous workweek. That turned out to be an average of $51 a week, or $2,634 a year. If a politician proposed increasing taxes by this amount, he’d be hanged from the nearest lamppost.

And that’s not all: work performed outside regular shifts was typically unpaid; workers were denied meal breaks to which they were legally entitled; and illegal deductions were taken from their pay (for work-related tools, transportation, etc.). Forty-three percent of the workers who complained (or tried to form a union) met illegal retaliation—they were fired, suspended, or threatened with pay cuts or the immigration authorities.