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El Patrón Es El Ladrón! - The Boss Is The Thief! | The Rebel Press

Like many struggling workers, Mr. José Ucelo Gonzalez looks for work every day at the Home Depot by Brookhurst Ave. and the interstate 5 fwy in Anaheim. On March 9th, 2012, Mr. Ucelo accepted a job offer by Michael Tebb; owner of M.T Asphalt, an Anaheim based company. The agreement was $10 an hour. After a hard 10-hour day work, Mr. Ucelo tried to collect his salary, but instead he got verbally abused and challenged to a fistfight by his employer. Mr. Ucelo remained calm and tried to deescalate the situation, but the harassment continued. Tebb accused his employee of robbery and threatened to call the police if he insisted on asking for his pay. The contractor got in his truck and left. Mr. Ucelo called 911 to ask for assistance but before he could give his location to the operator,

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Wage Theft: A Crime You Can Get Away With

By Tim Judson,  Workers' Rights Policy Specialist at Progressive States Network | Source: HuffingtonPost.com | Posted: 06/07/2012 5:19 pm

Co-authored with Cristina Francisco-McGuire

This week, we authored a report grading states on how well they protect a fundamental workplace right: getting paid what you are legally owed. This right is so basic and common-sense that most people are still unaware of how commonly it is violated.

Wage theft, or the illegal underpayment of workers, has become so widespread, it affects millions of workers across the country and is nearly ubiquitous in certain industries: retail, restaurants, hospitality, day-labor, warehousing, child care, and construction. That's a lot of people -- already not getting paid enough -- whose bosses illegally make their paychecks even lighter.

The last time a detailed, multi-state survey was done, the findings were shocking. Researchers in three of our nation's largest cities interviewed thousands of workers who earned at or near the minimum wage, and found a wide array of workplace violations. Here are just the basic facts:

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Robbed on the job: Advice on fighting wage theft | Marketplace.org

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 Justice and author of "Wage Theft in America," says it's surprisingly common in the U.S. "Minimum wage and overtime violations are two of the most common ways that wage theft occurs. Another way is payroll fraud, when employers intentionally call people independent contractors when they are really employees. Now if your boss -- not you -- declares you an independent contractor, you probably aren't one. Then there is also tip stealing. About 10 percent of tipped workers actually don't get their tips; their employers just don't give it to them," says Bobo. "This is really a crime wave in the nation. And it's a crime wave that we don't recognize."

Leer más: Robbed on the job: Advice on fighting wage theft | Marketplace.org

Connecticut Day Laborers Often Cheated Out of Weekly Pay

At the break of dawn in communities around the nation, men in work clothes gather to find construction and landscaping work and similar hands-on employment at customary locations. Sometimes these day laborers work much longer hours, and for much less, than they had been promised. Most have little chance of recovering hard-earned wages. One survey found that only one in 130 cases result in a filed claim. The laws are there. Society agrees a worker deserves to be paid, but there are vast gaps in legal enforcement. That’s where New Haven’s Community Labor Rights Clinic comes in. It’s modeled after a five-year old project in Stamford, the Day Laborer Project, operated by Connecticut Legal Services. The New Haven clinic was launched last month by New Haven Legal Assistance Association attorney James Bhandary-Alexander, a former National Labor Relations Board lawyer. Two nights a month, the clinic aims to serve this underserved client population.

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