Employers cheat more than 200,000 workers in Ohio each year potentially out of hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings they are owed by failing to pay minimum wage, according to a new analysis by Policy Matters Ohio.
Failure to pay the minimum wage is a form of wage theft, which disproportionately impacts low-income workers who already struggle to make ends meet and who often do not report the illegal activity because they are dependent on their jobs to survive, researchers say.
A couple dozen employers in the Miami Valley region have been cited and fined by federal authorities in recent years for not paying hundreds of workers the minimum wage, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of federal data, and experts believe the true extent of the problem is much greater than that.
“One of the core problems is that dishonest employers calculate that there will be no consequences if they steal from workers and all too often they’re right,” said Michael Shields, a researcher with Policy Matters Ohio.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, says he strongly supports the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act to increase penalties on employers who steal wages and assist workers with recovering stolen earnings and protect them from retaliation.
Wage theft stiffs millions of U.S. workers each year out of tens of billions of dollars their employers owe, says the Economic Policy Institute.
Some research suggests that economic losses from wage theft exceed financial losses from...
CNN is defending its reporting on a statement given by Iranian officials regarding a ceasefire agreement the U.S. and Iran reached just hours before President Trump was set to launch an attack on ...