Report on Pennsylvania Wage Theft

A report on wage theft in Pennsylvania was released this past week.  Prepared by the Social Justice Lawyering Clinic at the Stephen and Sandra Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Beasley School of Law.  In response to the report, Community Legal Services is calling on the City of Philadelphia and the State of Pennsylvania to take action to protect workers.

Entitled Short Changed:  How Wage Theft Harmed Pennsylvania's Workers and Economy, the report is available at:  http://www2.law.temple.edu/csj/files/wagetheft-report.pdf.  Wage theft is defined as:  

Wage theft, the illegal non-payment or under payment of wages, is a pervasive problem hurting hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers across the state each week.

Researchers based their report on a 2009 study of low wage workers in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers.  The report offers statistics on the occupations most affected by wage theft, the ways that wages are stolen (for example, unpaid overtime, or refusing to pay workers who are required to travel as part of their job for travel time), and regional statistics for wage theft in Pennsylvania.  

Those who are not sympathetic to the cause of workers might consider the tax revenue lost when employees are not paid all they are owed.

You can read more at Life Under $10.10, http://lifeunder1010.com/