NYT: The Cheap Cost of Cheating the Lowest Paid

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27sun4.html

By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: June 25, 2010

Her baby will soon be due, so Modesta Toribio has to grudgingly admit she may not soon make her current career goal — New York’s supposedly mandatory $7.25 minimum wage — that she has been routinely denied for the past five years. She inched her salary up to $6.60 an hour from the starting $5 at a cut-rate Brooklyn clothing store mainly by pestering her bosses. Ms. Toribio has a brassy knack for that, but she has learned it takes a lot to best scheming employers.

Academic studies estimate that unscrupulous employers in New York City keep an extra billion dollars a year by defying New York State’s weak labor law and cheating timorous and ill-informed immigrant workers.

Ms. Toribio was both when she arrived from the Dominican Republic 10 years ago. But she evolved into a word-of-mouth investigator and organizer for the Make the Road New York community group. The organization has successfully worked with committed state inspectors to wring wage-theft judgments against scores of employers — $28,000 for a gouged fruit-stand peddler, $70,000 for 99-cent store workers, $400,000 from moguls squeezing the payroll at a sneaker chain.

FULL story at link.

[tridim]

1. Wish I could hire a Ms. Toribio in Denver

My former boss got away with stealing $34,000 from me.

[Mimosa]

2. See why employers want unrestricted immigration yet? n/t

[dkf]

3. Unrestricted illegal immigration do you mean?

[Mimosa]

5. Yes. Who else is as vulnerable? Thanks. N/T

[undergroundpanther]

4. not just immigrants

get fucked over this way..BTW.Required quotas of commissions& obscene paperwork and required labors to get enough money to live are royally fucking over my roommate.Company pay&labor practices are looking more and more like sneaky scams to fuck over the poor and unemployed everywhere regardless of citizen status.