The rights of workers in this country are routinely violated, according to a Sept. 2 report entitled “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers.” Workers who are immigrants, women and people of color are particularly vulnerable.
The study, funded by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations, used a 2008 survey of 4,387 workers in Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles. All of the workers surveyed were employed in low-wage industries. The workers included documented and undocumented immigrant workers as well as U.S.-born workers.
The study found that the federal minimum wage requirement in this country is not effective—over one-quarter of workers worked overtime hours and were not paid fairly for that overtime. The vast majority of the workers in the survey were denied the right to eat a meal during work.
Capitalism functions based on the consistent theft of wages from workers. These violations amount to routine, illegal wage theft above and beyond the normal rate of exploitation. The study found that wage theft due to violations of pay requirements and other rights amounts to 15 percent of the earnings of a typical worker.
According to the study, almost half of the workers who complained about these violations or attempted to unionize were threatened with pay cuts and immigration authority notification, or were suspended or fired.
The capitalists more often violate the rights of women workers, immigrant workers and workers from oppressed communities, profiting off a system that uses racism, sexism and bigotry to maintain increased vulnerability and oppression of sections of the working class.
According to the study, women and foreign-born workers reported more violations of their right to a minimum wage. Latino workers born outside the United States experienced the most violations of their right to a minimum wage, and African-American workers experienced three times as many minimum-wage violations as whites.
One of the authors, Professor Nik Theodore, said, “The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented workers. What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”
The study’s findings are not surprising. They document some of the worst routine violations of workers’ rights that occur in U.S. capitalist society.
All workers are exploited in the system of capitalism. Workers are never paid the full value their labor has produced, because the capitalist owners and bosses take for themselves the unpaid portion of that value represented by profit . Workers who attempt to form unions face retaliation precisely because unions can be powerful tools in the hands of workers.
These strategies of fighting back, particularly the efforts to form unions, must continue, and we must stand in solidarity with all workers who face such violations of their dignity and human rights. We must fight back against the racism and sexism that make women and people of color more vulnerable to these violations. We must fight back to undo the capitalist system and form a socialist system over which the workers have full control.
