Los Angeles is ground zero for wage theft
On June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed into law a bill that will raise the minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 by 2020. L.A. joins the ranks of other cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Oakland, California, which have approved similar increases. That’s good news: According to a recent report released by the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center, more than 4.7 million men and women in California are low-wage workers — defined as someone who makes less than two-thirds of the state’s median hourly wage for full-time workers, which in 2014 was $13.63.
But the largest city in the country to guarantee a $15 per hour minimum wage is also ground zero for the corporate crime of wage theft, which can range from forcing hourly employees to work off the clock or manipulating time cards to denying legally mandated breaks or retaliating against workers for filing complaints. Each week $26.2 million is stolen from L.A.’s low-wage workers (PDF), according to an August 2014 report released by the health nonprofit Human Impact Partners, the UCLA Labor Center and the Los Angeles branch of the Restaurant Opportunities Center. That’s more than for any other city in the country.
The workers affected by wage theft are largely women and people of color. Research by the Restaurant Opportunities Center United has shown that the growing restaurant industry has a discriminatory system that limits black workers (PDF) to the lowest-paid jobs in the industry. For instance, in fine dining restaurants, they are more likely to be bussers than maître d’s. Additionally, among workers in positions that depend on tips, black women are particularly vulnerable (PDF) to low wages, with black female servers getting only 60 percent of what male servers make.
Women and people of color are overrepresented in low-wage occupations such as home care. More than half of home health aides and personal care aides work less than full time and are forced to rely on some form of public assistance. Black and Hispanic women working as nannies, housecleaners and elder caregivers in the private market are paid just as poorly, rarely receive overtime and are frequently required to take on tasks well beyond the scope of the work they were hired to perform.
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