Enforcing wages an issue
Some workers being cheated out of pay
New York — As a campaign to raise the minimum wage as high as $15 has achieved victories in such places as Seattle, Los Angeles and New York, it has bumped up against a harsh reality: Plenty of scofflaw businesses don’t pay the legal minimum now and probably won’t pay the new, higher wages either.
Some economists, activists and regulators predict that without stronger enforcement, the number of workers getting cheated out of a legal wage is bound to increase in places where wages rise.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that in 2014, roughly 1.7 million U.S. workers — two-thirds of whom were women — were illegally paid less than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
Other studies put the number higher.
The figures represent workers like Celina Alvarez, who came to the U.S. from Michoacán, Mexico, four years ago and took a series of poorly paying jobs as a cook after settling in New York City.
At the first two restaurants, Alvarez worked 12 hours per day, six days a week for a flat weekly wage of $350 — about $4.86 per hour. There were no tips and no overtime pay. Some weeks, Alvarez said, she and other women in the restaurant didn’t get paid at all. Managers didn’t care if they quit. They’d just hire someone else.
“We were dispensable to them,” she said.
The U.S. Labor Department investigates those types of violations, and during the last federal fiscal year, it recovered $270 million in back wages for 270,000 workers. But the agency’s roughly 1,000 investigators, who police 7.3 million businesses employing 135 million workers, don’t enforce state and local wage laws, for the most part. That means that cities and states that increase minimum wages above the federal rate of $7.25 are on their own.
Some municipalities that have raised wages have talked about following the example of San Francisco, which created its own labor standards enforcement division.
The head of that unit, Donna Levitt, said the number of complaints about wage violations did not go up when the minimum wage stepped up to $12.25 in May. But she said that doesn’t necessarily reflect what is really happening.
“There are a lot of reasons that people are fearful of coming forward and asserting their rights, even if they know the minimum wage has increased,” Levitt said.
Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards says that in the three months after the city’s minimum wage law took effect in April, it opened 25 investigations into complaints that companies weren’t complying.