LA Examiner: Los Angeles area workers need to know their employment rights

When you’re looking for a job in Los Angeles, it’s easy to be exploited or taken advantage of if you don’t know your rights. 

In fact, a recent article in the Los Angeles Times “Harsher penalties suggested for employers who shortchange workers in California” suggests that there are thousands of workers in the state of California that are working for less than the state mandated $8.00 per hour. The problem is that many of them feel stuck because employers know that in this economy there are others willing to take their place. 

Employer actions amount to theft

According to the Los Angeles Times article, “A UCLA study, released this year as part of a national project, found that wage theft costs Los Angeles County workers $26 million a week. The survey found that workers who experienced some type of wage theft lost an average of about $40 from typical weekly earnings of $318.”

This same survey showed that approximately three-fourths of 160,000 people who worked over 40 hours a week received no overtime pay. Plus nearly 30% of the county's low-earning workers were paid less than the minimum wage. 

However, besides taking from their employees by illegally underpaying workers, these employers are robbing the state as well by not paying their full share of payroll taxes which fund unemployment insurance and disability programs. 

California is doing what it can to stop this illegal behavior, but it doesn’t have enough inspectors. In fact, last year the state cited 216 employers for violating minimum wage and overtime pay laws. That’s a decline of about 50 from the previous year, likey due to an insufficient number of…

http://www.examiner.com/job-search-in-los-angeles/los-angeles-area-workers-need-to-know-their-employment-rights

 

 

Workers.org: Mott's workers defend jobs, union as strike ends

The Mott’s applesauce and apple juice workers held their picket line for 114 days. Dr Pepper Snapple bosses blinked on Sept. 13. That Monday, in the midst of the local apple harvest, DPS offered Local 220 of the Department Store union, which is a division of the Food and Commercial Workers union (RWDSU-UFCW), very different contract terms than the workers had rejected on May 23. Gone were demands for $1.50 an hour pay cut, with additional 50-cent cuts the next two years, for a total of $2.50 an hour. Gone were the demands for a pension freeze and a big jump in employee costs of medical care. Gone were DPS’s dreams of being able to run the plant with low-paid scab labor, jettison the skilled workers and kill the union. Instead DPS offered a wage freeze, with a $1,000 signing bonus, reduced pension contribution and a 401(k) plan for new hires, and 20 percent employee costs for medical care. Local 220 RWDSU-UFCW voted 185 to 62 to ratify the three-year contact on Sept. 13.

Though it wasn’t a clear-cut victory, the workers were able to stop a highly profitable company’s draconian attack. A very dangerous precedent would have been set for all workers in this recession if the strike had failed. But the workers are returning to work with …

http://www.workers.org/2010/us/picket_line_0923/

 

 

MiamiNewTimes: DeVito South Beach tip scandal

On a cool weeknight in February, DeVito restaurant on South Beach is humming. Beneath giant chandeliers of glowing glass, waitress Angela Suarez skips from the kitchen counter to a dozen different white-marble tables, carrying heaps of porcini gnocchi and pecorino cheese pasta.

Though the perky server is smiling brightly, inside she's boiling with rage. She recalls working about 60 hours the prior week, but the paycheck she picked up earlier showed only 38. So after midnight, when business has died down, she sneaks upstairs to a computer near the manager's office and logs in. Sure enough, the record confirms she's been stiffed, she claims. And part of her tips have been siphoned to a sommelier.

"They basically mistreat everybody around there," she says. "They're bad people."

Last month, Suarez, who is using a pseudonym because she fears retribution from a new employer, sued DeVito for cheating her out of tips and wages. In just the past …

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/content/printVersion/2453664/

 

SFGate: Survey finds 'wage theft' at Chinatown eateries

Chinatown restaurants routinely pay workers less than the minimum wage, according to a study by local activists that brings the national trend of so-called wage theft home to San Francisco.

The 30-page report being released today by the Chinese Progressive Association culminates a two-year survey of about 400 workers - more than half of whom said they were being paid less than the San Francisco minimum wage, currently $9.79 per hour.

"We believe this is the largest study of its kind in the country," said Meredith Minkler, a UC Berkeley public health expert who helped train workers from Chinatown to survey their peers to penetrate the language barrier. …

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/17/BU5E1FF0Q5.DTL#ixzz12M8rXqYu

 

ShortOrderBlog:China Grill, Prime One Twelve Latest to Be Sued by Ex-Employees for Tip Skimming

When we head to most South Beach restaurants, we customers expect to get fleeced: $200 steaks, $50 sushi rolls, $15 mineral water. But the employees?

According to two lawsuits filed earlier this summer, fancy South Beach restaurants China Grill and Prime One Twelve are stiffing their own servers out of thousands in wages and tips.

The lawsuits are just the tip of the iceberg, however, when it comes to Miami restaurants accused of stealing from their servers, as New Times will explain in an investigative article out later today.

Lawyers for the restaurants could not be reached for comment, but both establishments have denied the accusations in court.

Two former waiters are suing China Grill for more than $15,000 of damages each, according to court documents filed in U.S. federal court in June. The lawsuit alleges the Washington Ave. restaurant underpaid its waiters, forced them to share tips with employees that shouldn't have received them, and skimmed those tips with various fees….

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/shortorder/2010/09/china_grill_prime_112_latest_t.php

 

NCCC: Farmworker Advocacy Network to launch new campaign

On Thanksgiving 1960, Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” report on the state of America’s migrant workers shocked a nation.  Murrow exposed the dangerous conditions and lack of dignity that characterized farm work.  Describing a scene of workers being recruited to work the fields, Murrow narrates: “This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, ‘We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.’”

…

The very same workers who put food on our tables have paid for it with sweat, blood, and sometimes their lives.  Farmworkers do some of the most dangerous work in the country, but they don’t have the same protections as workers in other industries.  Their labor is the backbone of North Carolina’s largest industry, and every day we eat fruits and vegetables that have been handpicked.  Yet most farmworkers don’t get overtime, workers’ compensation or other benefits, and nearly half cannot afford enough food for their own families.   Many are not even entitled to the minimum wage….

http://www.nccouncilofchurches.org/2010/09/farmworker-advocacy-network-to-launch-new-campaign/

 

AKTimes: Fayetteville mayor decries wage theft

Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan has made the city the first to express opposition to wage theft, according to a release from the Northwest Arkansas Workers' Justice Center.

The proclamation against the practice is non-binding, but Jordan is quoted as saying he would establish a Mayor’s Task Force on Wage Theft, assign a police officer to investigate wage crimes and create a hotline to report wage theft.

Wage theft is intentional underpayment or nonpayment for labor. It is often employed against people in a position not to fight back — particularly immigrant workers without papers. In addition to hurting workers and families, it disadvantages competitors and steals government revenue.

NEWS RELEASE

The mayor of Fayetteville, Arkansas has issued an historic proclamation condemning wage theft, making theirs the first city-wide public pronouncement in the nation against the illegal practice that annually takes billions of dollars out of the pockets of millions of workers across the country, particularly in the low-wage economy.

Lioneld Jordan, mayor of Fayetteville, unveiled the proclamation on Thursday, September 9, at a public forum on wage theft organized by the Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center, an affiliate of the national network Interfaith Worker …

http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2010/09/14/fayetteville-mayor-decries-wage-theft