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Texas bill would create public database of wage thieves (TX)

Written by Ryan Johnston
MAY 3, 2019 | STATESCOOP

Under a new bill making its way through the Texas legislature, the state would create a publicly searchable database of companies and employers that commit wage theft – a serious problem in a state that only sees 50 percent of offenders pay back stolen wages.

The bill, introduced last November by Democratic state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, would require the state’s workforce commission to maintain the database of offenders. Wage theft can take different forms, such as employers skimping on overtime for hourly workers or paying below minimum wage, which has been $7.25 per hour in Texas since 2009.

The database that would be created under Gonzalez’s bill would publish the names of each manager, owner and business that purposely withheld wages from employees and never paid them back. Though the bill doesn’t punish offenders monetarily, it would give workers, activists and politicians the ability to identify consistent violators. Right now, that information is only available through a public records request, something potential employees are unlikely to make of their future employer, particularly if they’re undocumented.

But the bill would give offending employers time to pay owed wages before they are added to the database. Companies that are ordered by the state’s labor commission to pay back wages have 30 days to do so; if they don’t comply, the state has 180 days to notify them they’re going to be added to the database, during which they can dispute the offense. Once an employer is added to the database, though, the identifying information would be searchable for three years or until they’re convicted of having committed wage theft.

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Violation Tracker Expansion Adds 34,000 Wage Theft Cases

Violation Tracker Expansion Adds 34,000 Wage Theft Cases; More Than 40 Agencies Now Combined in One Search Engine

 

Good Jobs First
4/18/2017

Washington, DC, April 18, 2017-Good Jobs First today announced a large new addition to Violation Tracker, the country’s first public database of corporate crime and misconduct: more than 34,000 cases brought by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor since the beginning of 2010 for violations of overtime, minimum wage and other provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The largest violators captured by the new data are oilfield services company Halliburton, which in 2015 agreed to an $18 million settlement of alleged overtime violations, and CoreCivic (the new name of private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America), which in 2014 agreed to an $8 million settlement.

Violation Tracker, a public service of Good Jobs First’s Corporate Research Project, is available at http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker.

“The DOL Wage and Hour dataset is the first phase of our work plan to provide comprehensive coverage of wage theft cases,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on Violation Tracker. “We are also collecting information on private collective-action Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits.”

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