Workers won back $2 billion in 2015 and 2016, but that’s just the tip of the wage theft iceberg – By Laura Clawson (dailykos.com) / Dec 27 2017
Wage theft rarely gets treated like a crime. Bosses make employees work off the clock before or after work, they don’t pay overtime, they misclassify people as independent contractors while treating them as employees … these things may sound small, but they add up to big bucks. How big? In 2015 and 2016, federal and state governments and the courts got back $2 billion—with a B—in stolen wages, a recent Economic Policy Institute paper shows, and we know that most workers never get back what they’re owed.
- In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $246.8 million for 240,340 workers, and in 2016 the number was $266.6 million for 283,677 workers.
- In 2015, state departments of labor and attorneys general recovered $170 million, and $147.5 million in 2016. That’s $317.5 million over two years, but here’s the thing: that’s only 39 states.
- Class actions also got back a lot of money for workers: “The top 10 wage and hour class action settlements in 2015 totaled $463.6 million; in 2016, they totaled $695.5 million, for a total of $1.2 billion over both years (Seyfarth Shaw LLP 2017).”
That’s a huge amount of money that workers ultimately got back—but those were the lucky ones. Few workers complain and many who do don’t get adequate help. This costs workers a huge amount of money, money that many of those most likely to experience wage theft really cannot afford to lose:
Cooper and Kroeger (2017) find that workers suffering minimum wage violations are cheated out of $64 a week—$3,300 annually for year-round workers. These workers lose almost one-quarter of their earnings, receiving on average only $10,500 in annual wages instead of the $13,800 they should have received. Furthermore, Cooper and Kroeger find that while minimum wage violations affect workers broadly across demographic categories, disproportionate shares of wage theft victims are people of color, women, immigrants, young people, workers from modest-income households, nonunionized workers, and workers who have do not have a bachelor’s degree.
And $3,300 a year is real money, especially if you’re making less than $20,000 to begin with. If one of those workers stole $3,300 from their boss, it would be considered a crime worth some prison time. But when the boss steals a half hour’s pay at a time every day and every week, he probably gets away with it, and if he doesn’t, he usually just has to pay what he stole. Routine wage theft will only stop if employers know they’ll face real consequences if caught. EPI suggests that wage thieves should have to pay triple damages, while workers should get protection from retaliation and full information about how they should be paid so they know if they aren’t getting what they’ve earned. The government, meanwhile, needs to commit to stronger enforcement. But these days we’re talking about Donald Trump’s Department of Labor, so it will be extremely interesting—in an infuriating, depressing sort of way—to find out how much back pay it recovers in 2017.
