Study shows Southern construction workers getting screwed on wages, benefits, safety

[Camille]

Study shows Southern construction workers getting screwed on wages, benefits, safety

dkos diary...


A new report whose authors label it a “call to action” shows that construction workers in the South get little or no employment benefits and comparatively low pay. The 68-page report—Build a Better South: Construction Working Conditions in the Southern U.S.—was put together by the Workers Defense Project, Partnership for Working Families, and the College of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois. The authors surveyed workers in six Southern states. Among other things, they found:

• 40 percent of Houston, Texas, construction workers had no health insurance, paid vacations, or sick leave
• 30 percent said they got no on-the-job breaks and that their employer did not provide drinking water.
• 5 percent of the 1,435 workers interviewed said workers' compensation covered the cost of their work injuries.
• 24 percent of surveyed Nashville construction workers have suffered an on-the-job injury, four times higher than the national average compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But fewer than one in five got workers compensation as a result.
• Many employers do not provide basic safety equipment such as hard hats, safety glasses, or gloves.
• 57 percent of workers said they earned less than $15 an hour.
• 11 percent have experienced wage theft. The authors calculated the six-state losses to such thieving employers at $29.8 million annually.
• 32% were misclassified as independent contractors, which means they were denied rights to a minimum wage and overtime payments. It also means they had to personally cover what should have been their employer’s share of payroll taxes.

Excuse me for thinking that the criminal aspects of this situation will not draw the attention of the Department of Justice under J.B. Sessions III. He will instead be busy seeing that the federal government does its part while “encouraging” state governments to do their part in ensuring that the War on Drugs™ continues to ruin as many lives as possible for no reason other than pure ignorance and malignity.

In a foreword, David Michaels, now a professor at George Washington University and previously the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for the Obama administration, wrote:


Our cities, in the South and Southwest, and across the country, are thriving. Young people are flocking to live in revitalized urban areas, and our cities are the motor powering the creation of so many of the nation’s new jobs.


However, when you visit a corporate headquarters in Houston, a townhouse development in Nashville, or a condominium in Miami, it is easy to forget that it was construction workers who built these buildings with their hands, their sweat, and their blood.


Working or living in these new buildings, or gazing at their beautiful facades, you can no longer sense the presence of those construction workers and the challenges they faced, toiling long, hard hours to support their families. The evidence of pervasive wage theft, and of widespread employment misclassification, disappears once the buildings are finished and the crews go home. There is no more blood on the rebar where workers fell, and no signs of the back injuries that came from lifting too heavy loads or the gasping for air that comes from breathing silica dust day after day. [...]


With Build a Better South, Workers Defense Project, Partnership for Working Families, and the University of Illinois define a challenge facing our country: how can we ensure that the workers who build our vibrant cities earn living wages and without sacrificing their health?


The report includes seven recommendations:

• Guarantee safe working conditions.
• Ensure honest pay for honest work.
• Create good jobs with career pathways.
• Improve enforcement of existing policies.
• Invest in training.
• Prioritize safety.
• Subcontract for quality.

Sensible ideas. But even with the explanations that accompany them in the report, they sound far too much like standard boilerplate. And there are no included proposals for how to make these actually come to pass.

One key element needed to do so is rebuilding the labor movement. But that is a daunting task in the 70th year since the Taft-Hartley Act got union-busting officially underway. Union membership in the private sector has fallen every year since then as 28 states have adopted “right to work” laws that make organizing difficult. Only public sector unions have seen gains, and those unions are under severe attack.

Meanwhile, one modest but important piece of pro-union legislation pushed in 2009—the “Employee Free Choice Act”—never even got a public airing as a consequence of the Obama administration’s dealing first with other priorities like the Great Recession and health care, followed by the 2010 slaughter of congressional Democrats at the polls.

If progress in this realm is going to be made, worker advocates should be prepared with an entire platter of pro-union legislation for when the next time Democrats gain power.


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...kers-getting-screwed-on-wages-benefits-safety

 

[Camille]

dkos diary...


Here’s a kind of theft almost no one goes to prison for. When an employer doesn’t pay workers the money they’ve earned, it has the same effect as if they got paid and then walked out on the street and had their pockets picked. But somehow wage theft—not paying workers the minimum wage for the hours they’ve worked, stealing tips, not paying overtime, and other ways of not paying workers what they’ve earned—doesn’t get treated as the crime it truly is. It has a huge impact, though, as a new study from the Economic Policy Institute shows. The EPI looked at just one form of wage theft: paying below minimum wage. Just that one type of violation steals billions of dollars out of workers’ paychecks:

• In the 10 most populous states in the country, each year 2.4 million workers covered by state or federal minimum wage laws report being paid less than the applicable minimum wage in their state—approximately 17 percent of the eligible low-wage workforce.
• The total underpayment of wages to these workers amounts to over $8 billion annually. If the findings for these states are representative for the rest of the country, they suggest that the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year.
• Workers suffering minimum wage violations are underpaid an average of $64 per week, nearly one-quarter of their weekly earnings. This means that a victim who works year-round is losing, on average, $3,300 per year and receiving only $10,500 in annual wages. [...]
• In the 10 most populous states, workers are most likely to be paid less than the minimum wage in Florida (7.3 percent), Ohio (5.5 percent), and New York (5.0 percent). However, the severity of underpayment is the worst in Pennsylvania and Texas, where the average victim of a minimum wage violation is cheated out of over 30 percent of earned pay.

Young workers, women, immigrants, and people of color are disproportionately affected because they’re overrepresented in low-wage jobs to begin with. This wage theft is keeping people in poverty—the poverty rate among workers paid less than the minimum wage in this study was 21 percent, and would have dropped to 15 percent if they’d been paid minimum wage. If their bosses had followed the law, in other words.

The wage thieves rarely face penalties for stealing, and when they do:

Employers found to have illegally underpaid an employee are usually required only to pay back a portion of the stolen wages—not even the full amount owed, much less a penalty for violating the law.

The law basically gives employers permission to steal from workers, in other words. And it sure won’t be getting better under Donald Trump.


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...s-paychecks-but-it-s-not-treated-like-a-crime