According to a new study by Rutgers University’s Workplace Justice Lab@RU in partnership with the Workers Defense Project, Torres is among the 3 million Texas workers that have been paid less than the stagnant $7.25 an hour minimum wage between 2009 and 2022. Some of them have outstanding wages ordered from the TWC that have not been collected from employers.
While nearly $99 million in wages were ordered across more than 57,000 cases from 2010 to 2020, according to the report, 80% of those payments have yet to be received by workers.
Wage theft is persistent across Texas, costing individual workers nearly $4,000 a year on average in minimum wage violations, and over $12 billion as a group over the last 14 years.
“Unfortunately, our findings demonstrate that the Texas Workforce Commission has failed to recover tens of millions of dollars, allowing non-compliant employers to violate workers’ rights with impunity,” said Jenn Round, director of the labor standards enforcement program for the Workplace Justice Lab@RU. “This inaction leaves low-wage workers vulnerable to exploitation and puts compliant employers at a disadvantage.”
Another reason why Texas is the one star state.
It’s Texas, I guarantee they don’t give two shits about getting that out. At some point, this fact must have come across Gimp Abbott’s desk, and he threw it in the trash.
Its crazy how this is theft and nobody that committed it is going to prison.
“Behind” implies they actually intend to help all workers.
They likely do. While they are extremely ineffectual, our state assistance agencies are staffed by very well intentioned people.
The problem is the corruption at the top, in political positions, and the idiots thinking they should pull the ladder up behind them by defunding everything that isn’t a police or roadway agency.
The intentions of the staff are irrelevant. They work for the TWC and they follow orders, and the commission has no intention to help.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Unfortunately, our findings demonstrate that the Texas Workforce Commission has failed to recover tens of millions of dollars, allowing non-compliant employers to violate workers’ rights with impunity,” said Jenn Round, director of the labor standards enforcement program for the Workplace Justice Lab@RU.
The authors of the report analyzed more than 136,000 claims filed from July 2009 to December 2020 in Texas and used Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data to identify minimum wage violations.
Torres doesn’t blame people who haven’t tried to file a claim with the governmental agency tasked with overseeing the state’s workers and employers.
“I feel that it’s unfair, even for a day, that you don’t get paid,” Torres said in Spanish about why he started working with the Worker Defense Fund to recover stolen wages.
Sean Goldhammer, the director of employment legal services at Workers Defense Project, said that the feeling that there’s nothing that can be done when your wages are stolen escalates the larger issue.
Over 10,000 open liens initiated from Payday Law enforcement exist, according to the TWC database, with current delinquency amounts totaling more than $113 million.
The original article contains 1,125 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
