Specific data on how much money bosses steal from employees in Washington is thin on the ground, but a 2017 study from the Economic Policy Institute looked at minimum wage theft alone in the top 10 most populous states in the country and found that companies steal an average of “$3,300 per year for year-round workers” in those states, amounting to a loss of “nearly a quarter of their earned wages.”
The Stranger
January 29, 2021
Specifically, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase the federal minimum wage over a four-year period from $7.25 to $15. It would also index future increases in the federal minimum wage to median wage growth in addition to phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities. According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers.
Sen. Mark Warner
January 29, 2021
In 2017 the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at 2.4 million US workers. Based on their analysis, they reported wage theft as an $8 billion a year industry. Factor in the rest of the population the theft comes in closer to $15 billion, stolen by employers every year ($64/paycheque). It’s a lucrative and easy line of income for the bosses. Even though it’s against the law — it’s the type of law you can break without any consequences. It’s rarely prosecuted and if it does go to court, which happens, the thief gets to keep some of their stolen loot.
Medium
January 29, 2021
Read the Economic Policy Institute’s fact sheet on why we need $15 here.
SEIU
January 29, 2021
As Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute explained to me, two factors at work in 2020 created this weird disparity. One is what she calls the “pandemic composition effect,” which means that the industries that lost the most jobs last year thanks to the pandemic were industries that tended to have low unionization rates — bars, restaurants, hospitality, etcetera. The second factor was that unionized workers were less likely to lose their jobs than non-union workers in the same industry. Each of those two factors was responsible for about half of the increase in union density. So even as hundreds of thousands of union jobs were lost, union members were less impacted than the economy as a whole, which produced the mathematical trick of an appearance of progress. (It is worth noting, too, that assuming that jobs come back to the same hard-hit industries when the pandemic is over, that will serve to dilute and reduce last year’s union density gains.)
In These Times
January 29, 2021
Specific data on how much money bosses steal from employees in Washington is thin on the ground, but a 2017 study from the Economic Policy Institute looked at minimum wage theft alone in the top 10 most populous states in the country and found that companies steal an average of “$3,300 per year for year-round workers” in those states, amounting to a loss of “nearly a quarter of their earned wages.”
The Stranger
January 29, 2021
Specifically, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase the federal minimum wage over a four-year period from $7.25 to $15. It would also index future increases in the federal minimum wage to median wage growth in addition to phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities. According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers.
Sen. Mark Warner
January 29, 2021
In 2017 the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at 2.4 million US workers. Based on their analysis, they reported wage theft as an $8 billion a year industry. Factor in the rest of the population the theft comes in closer to $15 billion, stolen by employers every year ($64/paycheque). It’s a lucrative and easy line of income for the bosses. Even though it’s against the law — it’s the type of law you can break without any consequences. It’s rarely prosecuted and if it does go to court, which happens, the thief gets to keep some of their stolen loot.
Medium
January 29, 2021
Read the Economic Policy Institute’s fact sheet on why we need $15 here.
SEIU
January 29, 2021