A victory for labor in Chicago: a wage theft law with teeth

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_01/a_victory_for_labor_in_chicago042508.php

January 19, 2013 4:16 PM

Victories for working people in this country are rare enough that whenever one comes along, it’s doubly worth celebrating. This is certainly the case with a law that just passed in Chicago, which makes it much harder for your boss to steal from you.

As Salon’s Josh Eidelson reports, wage theft is shockingly common in this country, and it “encompasses a range of offenses” which include “unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage.” Eidelson cites these statistics from a recent study:

Two-thirds (68 percent) of the workers reported experiencing some form of wage theft in the past week. Researchers calculated that out of an already-low average $339 in weekly income, low-wage workers each lose an average of $51 weekly in wages they earned but never received. That adds up to over $56 million per week among workers in the country’s three largest cities.

These kinds of abuses long been illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But for decades, Grover Norquist’s plan to shrink the government down to the size where he can drown it in the bathtub has been proceeding along smashingly, and unfortunately, no one is around to enforce the law anymore:

A 2012 report from the Progressive States Network noted that the ratio of federal Department of Labor enforcement agents to U.S. workers has fallen from one for every 11,000 in 1941, to one for every 141,000 today. When state labor agents are factored in, the authors found “less than 15 percent of the total enforcement coverage workers enjoyed decades ago.”

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