Many migrant workers in California on H-2A temporary agricultural visas are forced to contend with unsafe working conditions, wage theft and other labor law violations.
Lawbreakers who happen to be bosses are, in cases of misclassifying employees as “contractors,” treated with an enviable amount of understanding by the IRS.
A new Congressional bill would reduce a broad range of agriculture workers to the status of “guest workers.” California’s dairy owners are ecstatic. Co-published by International Business Times.
During a six-week investigation of President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, Capital & Main has found a widespread pattern of alleged employee abuse at CKE Restaurants, of which Puzder has been CEO since 2000.
“I want this message to be loud and clear: Until Pacific 9 reclassifies its workers, until they return our wages, until they obey the law, we will not stop the fight.” […]
Truck drivers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will begin a strike at 6 a.m. today against local subsidiaries of XPO Logistics, a Connecticut-headquartered freight transportation company. The drivers are taking the action because they say that XPO misclassifies them as independent contractors rather than as employees – a practice that allows […]
Why are the port truck drivers on strike? It is well known that the U.S. economy relies in part on jobs generated or networked around the imports of manufactured commodities. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach form a nexus of the global supply chain, where multinational corporations focus on every opportunity to keep […]
Los Angeles may be a capital for entertainment, tourism and culture, but for many local workers L.A. is synonymous with working off the clock, unpaid overtime and other labor-law violations. L.A. workers lose an estimated $26.2 million every week to bosses who fail to pay employees what they earn. However, we can learn something from […]
In March, seven class action lawsuits filed in California, Michigan and New York suggested that for the country’s 30 million-strong low-wage workforce, getting one’s paycheck ripped off by some of the largest and wealthiest employers in America is too often business as usual. Contending that the McDonald’s restaurant chain had been “systematically stealing” from its […]
California has roughly a dozen labor codes governing wage-theft on the books, with more proposed each year in the state legislature. Are these laws proving effective? Fausto Hernandez is one worker who doesn’t think they are. The 55-year-old native of Oaxaca, Mexico, has labored in the carwash business for a decade. “For several years I […]
Wage theft is a serious yet seldom-reported crime that victimizes millions of Americans – particularly low-income and immigrant workers. Today, as part of an ongoing examination of workplace issues, Capital & Main debuts a new series focusing on wage theft, beginning with a primer on the problem by Bobbi Murray, followed by Joe Rihn’s profile […]
For Victor Vitela life revolves around work. A reserved man with dark hair and a powerful frame, Victor makes his living driving an 18-wheeler loaded with cargo back and forth from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to the Inland Empire. His tone is matter of fact when he talks about his job […]
Readers of Capital & Main are all too familiar with wage theft and job misclassification – twin plagues that afflict American workers, especially truck drivers at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Employers use wage theft to shortchange employees out of their wages and benefits by shaving hours off time cards; job misclassification, on […]
California wage earners received encouraging news Wednesday when Assembly Bill 2416 (Wage Theft Recovery Act) cleared a major hurdle by passing 44 to 27 on an Assembly floor vote — three votes more than needed to move to the Senate. The measure, introduced in February by Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), is modeled after a successful […]
The gaudy evidence of income inequality is all around us: stratospheric CEO “wages,” private plane shuttles to Coachella, gated enclaves and all the rest. But few things say “class war” more eloquently than wage theft, the practice by unscrupulous businesses of short-changing their employees by undercounting work hours or shaving off time for breaks that […]
Last week, we reported on the legal struggle at port trucking company Seacon Logix, whose drivers filed claims with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) seeking reimbursement for a number of wage-and- hour violations, including illegal paycheck deductions made by the company. After the DLSE ruled in favor of the drivers in early […]
Every year millions of Americans are victims of what some call wage theft — a practice in which a company fails to compensate workers for their time, short-changes them on their benefits or intentionally misclassifies employees in order to save money. And even though all that is illegal, Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker […]