With profits falling, the capitalist class is increasingly turning to a fail-proof method of squeezing surplus value from workers—simply not paying them.
The most common targets are immigrant workers, particularly those with limited English skills. Some immigrants may be unfamiliar with their rights or too vulnerable to fight their employers.
Chinese immigrant Zhen Zhong Zhang worked 70-hour weeks for $500 in pay. After learning his rights and confronting his employer, Zhen was ultimately paid $11,000 in back wages. Kim Bobo of Interfaith Worker Justice calls the sudden increase in claims—as high as 30 percent in 2008 over 2007 in some states— “a crisis in wage theft.”
The U.S. Department of Labor exercises its allegiance to capitalist interests with deliberate inaction: When the Government Accounting Office created 10 test claims for Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, nine were mishandled and five not recorded at all. In two cases, the DOL credited employers with having paid back wages when they had not.
