“It looks like we do have the votes that we need to pass this, and there has been a lot of interest from council members across the aisle,” Laura Perez-Boston, who directs the Fe Y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center, told Salon Monday. Still, Perez-Boston said the group was “worried about” the impact of recent testimony against the bill by business groups. “So you know, we’re just trying to make sure that council members are really listening to their constituents,” she said, “and seeing the value of how putting this type of a protection in place would really protect responsible businesses, working families, and just the general economy.” She noted it was also possible that a member would use a “tag” to delay the vote for a week.
As I’ve reported, wage theft scrutiny and activism is on the rise, spurred in part by the growth of non-union low-wage workers’ groups using media, legal, political and workplace pressure to try to improve jobs. Chicago last year passed one of the country’s strongest municipal ordinances to address the issue, threatening convicted wage theft violators with the loss of their business licenses. In interviews with advocates, academics and the progressive National Employment Law Project in 2008, 68 percent of low-wage workers in the country’s three largest cities reported wage theft in the prior week. The term can refer to legal violations like requiring workers to work off the clock, or not paying overtime. University of Oregon labor economist Gordon Lafer wrote in a report last month for the progressive Economic Policy Institute that the statistics suggest “the amount of money stolen out of employees’ paychecks every year is far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience stores robberies in the country
Chicago passed a similar ordinance earlier this year:
“Now the bosses are going to know that the workers have rights, too,” said Maria Garcia, a member of the labor group Arise Chicago, which spearheaded the campaign to pass the law. Interviewed in Spanish, Garcia said she’d experienced wage theft at both of the past two restaurants where she’d worked.
“Wage theft” encompasses a range of offenses. Garcia said that in her case, it had included unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage. The term was popularized by labor activists seeking to stir moral outrage at the all-too common issue: “Wage theft” suggests that refusing to pay wages that workers have earned is a form of robbery, rather than a mere accounting dispute. Recent years have seen increasing traction for campaigns to strengthen wage theft penalties and remedies. Those efforts have also inspired a counter-attack: Last year, Florida Republicans and big businesses pushed a bill that would have overridden local wage theft measures. “We believe the existing court system is the best place for these claims,” a spokesperson for the Florida Retail Federation told the Huffington Post.
But in Florida, business groups have gone to the state legislature to try to override these local ordinances.
Labor’s wage theft efforts elsewhere have provoked pushback from big business. As Lafer noted in his EPI paper, Republicans in the Florida Legislature repeatedly tried to override local wage theft ordinances like a landmark law passed by Miami-Dade County, which created a streamlined process for wage theft claims and offered wronged workers double damages. The message of such preemption efforts, Lafer argued to Salon, is “we don’t want you to have any viable mechanism by which to get back wages that were stolen from you.”
