Lawless Employers, Wage Theft and the Growing Inequality Gap
May 4, 2012 10:31 am
The Next New Deal blog has a piece up recapping Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren’s appearance at a recent panel on inequality, hosted by the Century Foundation.
Warren makes many good points in his presentation, but one in particular hit us where we live. From the recap:
…Dorian notes the recent Wal Mart bribery scandal and says that when you think of “the lawlessness of Wal Mart when it comes to unionization, I think that’s a great example to think about the other ways in which employers have pretty flagrantly violated the law in the last 20 years or so. So when you think about minimum wage, when you think about health and safety, we’re in a new environment, and activists who work on this call this ‘wage theft.’” He highlights some shocking statistics from a 2009 study that shows how badly low-income workers have been ripped off by their employers and points out that there is a “basic principle of the social contract that when you work at a job you have an agreement with the employer for how much you’re going to make… There is a pretty systematic violation of that contract, and that explains at least part of the wage stagnation that we’ve seen in the low-wage service sector specifically.” While updating and modernizing labor laws is important, “monitoring and enforcement of existing wage and hour laws are really important.”
Click here (or watch the video below) to learn more, including how racism has shaped policy, and how we can be living in both a democracy and an oligarchy simultaneously.