USA: Working without Laws

Last week, the National Employment Law Project released Working Without Laws, a landmark study exposing systematic and routine violations of employment and labor laws in core sectors of the economy in New York City. In industries ranging from construction, food manufacturing and industrial laundries to restaurants, janitorial services and home health care, workers are enduring minimum wage, overtime and off-the-clock violations at alarming rates, and face retaliation for speaking up or trying to organize. The sheer scale of these practices signals that workplace violations are becoming an accepted business strategy to control labor costs in low-wage industries.

The upshot is that every week, more than 300,000 low-wage workers in the five boroughs are subject to some sort of wage theft from employers. These violations add up to a loss of $18.4 million in wages every week, vital earnings that are robbed from working families, local communities and the city's economy. The report concludes with a comprehensive inventory of city and state policies that will be needed to restore the promise of workplace protections in New York.

Click here to download the report