Over the past few years, studies by the Department of Labor and academics have found that wage theft — underpayment of workers by means such as making them work off the clock or failing to pay overtime — is rampant in America. All too often, it goes unreported and unprosecuted.
In some instances, however, wage theft is discovered and earnings are returned. From the beginning of 2014 through July of this year, $29.5 million in back pay was awarded to workers under Texas' Payday Law, according to an open records request filed by the Service Employees International Union and shared with the Houston Chronicle.
The real total is likely much higher, advocates say, since workers — especially undocumented ones — either don't recognize they've been shorted, don't know how to file a claim, or are hesitant to get the government involved in fixing the problem for fear of retaliation.
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"There's a lot of fear about what happens if they do make a complaint," says SEIU Texas director Elsa Caballero. "Are they going to lose their job? A crappy job is better than no job."
Over that same January 2014 - July 2017 time frame, 42,788 complaints were filed, and 41,191 were resolved, records show. In addition, about 800 employers were assessed a total of $1.17 million in "bad faith" penalties for knowingly underpaying their workers. Each individual penalty cannot exceed $1,000 or the total amount of unpaid wages, whichever is less.
Normally, the employers at fault are not disclosed to the public; that's why an open records request was required to obtain a list. For the past three legislative sessions, State Rep. Mary González, an El Paso democrat, has filed a bill that would have created a public database of offending employers, but each time it's been shot down.
"There's this giant loophole that allows companies to become offenders over and over again," she says.
An analysis of Census data by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute earlier this year found that the average victim of wage theft in Texas loses more than those in all other states.
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In 2013, worker advocates in Houston succeeded in creating a local layer of protections against wage theft. However, only a handful of complaints have since been filed under the city's ordinance, and the city does not proactively search for violations in the way that the federal Department of Labor sometimes does.
The SEIU has been helping employees of city contractors, mainly janitors and security guards, file complaints under that ordinance as part of a campaign to organize a union for those workers. A number of their stories are told in a report the group released last week arguing that a union contract provides stronger protections than current laws.
