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wage theft
An Injury to Immigrant Workers Is an Injury to All Workers
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
Feb 08, 2026
In late 2025, federal immigration authorities detained a non-union janitor who’d accused contractors for Minnesota’s Ramsey County of wage theft.
The worker is now in deportation proceedings. But his courage helped win policy changes in Ramsey County, and his fierce advocacy in a similar wage theft case in nearby Hennepin County also paid off: More than 70 subcontracted workers for Hennepin County received nearly $400,000 in back pay in December 2025.
When someone who fights for workers is detained, “it sends a chill,” Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, told me. “When the workers who are stepping up to try and reveal violations are silenced, the standard comes down for the whole industry.”
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
“They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
In Minneapolis, federal agents abducted an educator trying to ensure safe dismissal at a high school. In Southern California, they chased a day laborer at a Home Depot onto a freeway, where he was hit and killed by a vehicle. In Chicago, they detained a childcare worker as children watched.
Agents have even directly harassed striking workers.
On December 16, Juanita Robinson was out on the picket line in Chicago when armed federal agents—including border chief Gregory Bovino—approached and demanded identification. The group “interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line,” according to a press statement from Teamsters Local 705.
“It was scary when they pulled up on us,” said Robinson, who was born in Chicago but calls her immigrant coworkers family. “We’re out there trying to make ends meet, and y’all abusing us,” she said of the agents. “They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
The scholarly research backs Robinson up.
By studying “Secure Communities,” a federal program that resulted in the deportation of nearly half a million people from 2008 to 2014, scholars found that upticks in immigration enforcement are associated with increased minimum wage violations and more dangerous workplaces for all workers.
“If I complain to the Wage and Hour Division that I’m not getting paid minimum wage, it might mean that my wages get restored,” said Matt Johnson, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But it also might affect my coworkers, who were facing similar violations. So when one worker becomes more reluctant to complain,” he told me, it ultimately affects “the rest of the labor market.”
Research also shows that immigration crackdowns actually reduce jobs for US-born workers. Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that’s because immigrants and US-born workers “complement” each other rather than compete directly.
For example, in order for a restaurant “to hire waiters, waitresses, hosts, and hostesses, which are jobs typically taken by US-born people, they also have to be able to hire cooks and dishwashers, jobs more often taken by immigrants,” she explained. When they “can’t find anybody to do the dishwashing, they may have to reduce their hiring overall.”
The effect ripples out. “When many people are all of a sudden removed from a local area because of detention or deportation, or afraid to leave their homes to get haircuts and eat at restaurants,” she explained, that hurts the economy “for everybody, including US-born workers.”
The GOP’s so-called ”Big Beautiful Bill” gave the Trump administration an unprecedented $170 billion over and above existing funding to carry out abuses like these. That enormous sum comes directly at the expense of programs that were cut, like Medicaid and SNAP, and could end up hurting all workers and their communities.
They’re trying to “break the unity that we have to have to be able to actually get raises and health insurance and retirement,” Nummacher told me. “Working people have never been able to win these things without being organized.”
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Trump’s Brand of Law Enforcement: Deportation Yes, Worker Protection No
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Jul 19, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump claims to be all about law enforcement. But what laws he chooses to prioritize, and which get the back seat, or are ignored entirely, speak volumes about the heart and soul of this administration. Recent developments in immigration and labor law enforcement offer some trenchant examples.
I spent the entirety of my almost-40-year civil service career enforcing federal worker protection laws with the U.S. Department of Labor, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), whose purpose is to guarantee that the workers actually receive at least the minimum wage and overtime pay that Congress has mandated.
Enforcing laws like the FLSA for the benefit of workers in the U.S.—across the many millions of workplaces in this country, with very limited investigative and attorney staff—is no easy task. How closely any given federal agency can approach the goal of widespread compliance depends on many factors, most prominent being the level of resourcing Congress has made available, and the effectiveness of the strategies the agency chooses to deploy.
On the immigration front, the president has broadcast far and wide his intention to remove everyone who’s in this country without legal authority (a civil, not criminal violation) as his top enforcement priority. His just-signed budget bill massively increases the funds available for “building the wall” and ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency whose job will be to penetrate every community in the country, find those “without papers,” and arrest and deport them. And then there are prisons like “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades, and the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, designed to terrify as many as possible into self-deporting, and to detain indefinitely those who fail to comply.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now. Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too.
The flood of dollars slated to supercharge the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) enforcement capacity, along with its terror strategy designed to induce self-removal, will no doubt make serious headway toward the president’s goal. But there are so many reasons why this is both a cruel and foolish policy—including, because the U.S. will be left with fewer workers (citizen and noncitizen), fewer people spending money, and a smaller economy overall. But it’s an example, albeit a dark and nefarious one, of how enforcement results can be accomplished if the administration has both the will and the political power to get them done.
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Large numbers of workers in the U.S. are cheated out of the minimum wage or overtime they’re entitled to under the FLSA—an unlawful practice known colloquially as “wage theft”—to the tune of billions of dollars per year. A primary reason for this high rate of noncompliance by employers inclined to evade the law is the paltry level of funding the department’s enforcement divisions receive, relative to the millions of businesses they’re responsible to oversee. Given the size of their mission to protect workers, the Labor Department’s (DOL) ranks are tiny, have shrunk significantly due to the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal budget, and are slated to be cut 35% in the FY 2026 budget.
While staffing today is exceptionally bare-bones, the DOL has always needed to deploy its limited resources for maximum impact. Fifteen years ago, I was part of a team that developed a wage law compliance-enhancing strategy that wouldn’t depend on hiring more enforcement personnel. It was founded on FLSA’s mandate that when an employer commits wage theft, it will owe the worker both the amount of the underpayment and an equal amount in “liquidated damages,” with very limited exceptions.
The law’s requiring payment of double back wages makes sound enforcement sense. It compensates workers for costs they incurred on account of being underpaid, and it also incentivizes unscrupulous employers to comply. If an employer who shorted his workers is only required to pay back what he owed in the first place, he’s really getting an interest-free loan that the worker never agreed to. That’s hardly a recipe for encouraging compliance.
And yet, for too long, that’s how the vast majority of DOL investigations finding wage underpayments were resolved. So, 15 years ago DOL assembled a team to address this serious enforcement deficiency, and we conceived a new strategy. Employers who engaged in wage theft were given a choice: be sued for double back pay, or settle for that amount without having to go to court. If the employer believed they shouldn’t have to pay double, or shouldn’t have to pay at all, no gun was pointed to their head. They could go to court and challenge DOL’s claims. But if, recognizing they’d likely lose in court and that settlement was a better option, they’d need to pay the workers the double back wages the law says they owe.
The Labor Department began implementing this policy in 2010, and over the past decade and a half, workers in scores of cases have received millions of dollars in back wages and liquidated damages, DOL’s litigation resources have been spared, and U.S. district courts are less clogged than they would have been if these resolutions in lieu of litigation hadn’t happened. Since 2010, this enforcement strategy has been challenged only once, and the court found it to be reasonable. It also exemplifies sound enforcement strategy designed to spur compliance, and government efficiency, to boot.
And yet, on June 27, the acting administrator of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division saw fit to prohibit DOL staff from entering into any wage theft settlements in which workers receive double back pay, if the case hasn’t been filed in court. The clear impact will be that most workers who are victims of wage theft will once again become unwilling interest-free lenders to their employers, and corner-cutting employers will have no incentive to comply with the law. Regrettably, this isn’t the first such slap against workers, and undoubtedly won’t be the last.
To recap: On immigration enforcement, the Trump administration, and a compliant Republican-majority Congress, are pulling out all the stops to remove unauthorized immigrants—whether law-abiding, taxpaying, contributing members of our communities or not—as part of a dreadfully misguided but comprehensive DHS enforcement policy designed to intimidate and coerce.
The Trump Labor Department, meanwhile, just went out of its way to end a successful, court-approved enforcement strategy designed to make whole workers victimized by wage theft, and to deter unscrupulous employers from engaging in these types of violations.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now.
Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too. Suffice it to say: not exactly at the front of the line.
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Over $1.5 Billion in Workers' Stolen Wages Recovered From 2021-23
"Workers who can least afford to bear the cost of lost earnings—particularly low-wage workers—are disproportionately vulnerable to wage violations," according to Economic Policy Institute researchers.
Dec 23, 2024
A report published Friday by the progressive-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute found that federal, state, and local efforts were able to recover more than $1.5 billion in stolen wages between 2021 and 2023.
Wage theft, which includes things like paying workers less than the legal minimum wage or denying workers their legal meal breaks, "is pervasive across all industries and income levels," according to the report's authors, "but workers who can least afford to bear the cost of lost earnings—particularly low-wage workers—are disproportionately vulnerable to wage violations."
Wage theft is extremely costly to workers. Prior research cited by the EPI report estimates that workers lose $15 billion annually from minimum wage violations alone. For comparison, FBI data shows that robberies accounted for $598 million in losses in 2018, and $482 million the year after, so less than $2 billion over a two-year period, according to the report.
Action at multiple levels of government can help recover what's lost. At the federal level, the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division reports that it recovered $659.8 million between 2021 and 2023, which comes out to wage recovery for 510,534 workers, and an average of $1,292 in recovered wages per worker.
As an example of this kind of enforcement effort, the authors recounted that the Department of Labor (DOL) went after four Los Angeles sewing contractors, which yielded $1.1 million in back wages and damages for over 160 garment workers.
Meanwhile, at the state level, 34 departments of labor and attorneys general recovered a total of $203.3 million over those three years. The other 16 states either did not respond, did not have the requested data, or could not provide the requested data.
Class action settlements are another important avenue for wage recovery. According to the authors, the value of the top ten wage and hour class action settlements tallied $641.3 million in 2021—putting it on par with the DOL wage recovery for the full 2021-2023 period. The report, which includes class action settlement research done by the firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, does not include class action data for 2022 and 2023.
"This class action data illustrates that workers are more effective in recovering stolen wages on a collective versus individual basis. However, many workers are barred from joining class action cases, because they are subject to forced arbitration agreements," the authors wrote.
When it comes to policy solutions, the authors noted that there have been a number of positive enforcement changes at the state level. For example, "many states have strengthened penalties for wage theft violations, enforcing them as criminal statutes" while some have "established laws allowing victims of wage theft to obtain a lien on employer property to ensure payment of back pay."
At the federal level, the authors advocated for increased funding for DOL’s Wage and Hour Division in order to boost enforcement efforts. The division has not seen a significant funding increase in over a decade, they wrote. The authors also argue in favor of a number of pieces of legislation, including the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act and the Protecting Right to Organize (PRO) Act—which would strengthen the right of private sector workers to unionize and collectively bargain.
While many in the labor movement expect U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to advance an anti-worker agenda, his pick to head the Department of Labor was met with cautious optimism by some corners of the labor world. Trump tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.) for the role. She co-sponsored the PRO Act in 2023—though at least one critic called this move "mostly symbolic."
In response to the news that Trump had picked Chavez-DeRemer, EPI's Celine McNicholas wrote in November that if workers truly have an ally in her, she "will advance policies that improve workers' lives."
According to McNicholas, those include funding the Department of Labor and protecting workers' overtime pay—as well as refusing to reinstitute the Payroll Audit Independent Determination program that was instituted during the first Trump administration, which mandated that if "if an employer proactively notified DOL of the failure to pay minimum wage or overtime or for taking illegal deductions from workers' paychecks, then DOL waived all penalties and liquidated damages," according to McNicholas.
The program "essentially permits employers who have stolen workers' wages to confess and get out of jail free," she wrote.
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5 Ways Trump's Labor Secretary Pick Can Prove She's Really Pro-Worker
If workers truly have an ally in Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), she will advance policies that improve workers’ lives.
Nov 27, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump recently announced his nomination of Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as secretary of labor.
She is one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and one of only eight Republicans to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Both bills would help reform our nation’s badly broken system of labor law. While Rep. Chavez-DeRemer’s support for these needed reforms is encouraging, if confirmed, she will be secretary of labor for a president who steadfastly pursued an ambitious anti-worker agenda during his first term in office.
Chavez-DeRemer has stated that “working-class Americans finally have a lifeline” with President-elect Trump in the White House. If workers truly have an ally in Chavez-DeRemer, she will advance policies that improve workers’ lives. Here are a few policies that will reveal whether the second Trump administration will actually aid working-class Americans or be a continuation of his first administration’s agenda attacking workers’ rights.
If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.
Win funding for the Department of Labor (DOL) that enables the agency to serve the U.S. workforce: DOL and other worker protection agencies have been chronically underfunded. As the workforce has grown, the budgets of these agencies have shrunk, leaving workers without effective enforcement of basic minimum wage and overtime and health and safety protections. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for and secure at least a $14 billion budget to ensure that U.S. workers have health and safety inspectors and wage and hour investigators on the job to enforce their rights.
Protect workers’ overtime: Overtime pay ensures that most workers who put in more than 40 hours a week get paid 1.5 times their regular pay for the extra hours they work. Most hourly workers are guaranteed the right to overtime pay, while salaried workers’ eligibility is based on their pay and the nature of their duties. DOL recently issued a rule to raise the pay threshold for salaried workers to be eligible for overtime, which stands to benefit 4.3 million workers. Despite this benefit to U.S. workers, corporate interest groups and conservative states challenged the rule in court. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for workers’ right to overtime and continue to defend this rule in litigation. She should not allow the Trump administration to, once again, institute a low-salary threshold for overtime eligibility that leaves millions of workers without these protections and forced to work long hours for no additional pay.
Refuse to reinstitute the Payroll Audit Independent Determination program: This program was instituted during Trump’s first administration and essentially permits employers who have stolen workers’ wages to confess and get out of jail free. If an employer proactively notified DOL of the failure to pay minimum wage or overtime or for taking illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks, then DOL waived all penalties and liquidated damages. Wage theft is rampant, costing U.S. workers as much as $50 billion each year. Any program that makes it easier and less costly for employers to steal workers’ wages is a program that hurts U.S. workers and their wages. Chavez-DeRemer should make it harder for employers to steal workers’ wages, not easier.
Promote policies to protect workers’ health and safety: DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for ensuring U.S. workers are safe on the job. Still, 344 workers die each day from hazardous working conditions. Under the prior Trump administration, OSHA scaled back safety inspections. Chavez-DeRemer should ensure that OSHA does not repeat this under her watch and instead expands inspections to ensure that all workers have a safe workplace. Further, she should fight to protect safety standards like the recently proposed standard protecting workers from extreme heat. Workers’ health and safety must be a priority for any secretary of labor and administration claiming to be pro-worker.
Hold employers accountable for exploiting workers: Some employers use workers’ immigration status as leverage to exploit workers, threatening them with deportation if they report violations of labor and employment laws. For workers in labor disputes, the current administration granted deferred action, which is a determination to defer removal (deportation) of an individual from the U.S. In order to qualify for deferred action, a worker’s employer must be the subject of an open investigation at a labor agency, like DOL, and the labor agency conducting the investigation must submit a letter supporting deferred action to the Department of Homeland Security which oversees the program. Deferred action helps hold lawbreaking employers accountable, and Chavez-DeRemer should continue to support this for workers whose employers are being investigated for violating the law. If she is confirmed, she should fight to ensure the Trump administration provides deferred action for workers whose rights have been violated and should work to issue letters in support of deferred action for eligible workers.
These are just a few actions Chavez-DeRemer could take to demonstrate her commitment to workers. If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.
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House Dems Unveil Sweeping Bill to Protect Worker Rights and Safety
"This bill will help level the playing field and, once again, restore the balance of power between workers and their employers," said Rep. Bobby Scott.
Jul 26, 2024
A group of Democratic U.S. House members on Friday unveiled legislation "aimed at bolstering protections for America's workers and ensuring accountability for employers who flout labor and employment laws."
The Labor Enforcement to Securely (LET'S) Protect Workers Act was introduced by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.)—the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—and House Labor Caucus Co-Chairs Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), and Steven Horsford (D-Nev.).
The bill's sponsors said their legislation is based on the premise that "employment laws are a promise to our nation's workers" meant to "secure the most basic rights of work."
"That promise is broken," they contended. "Recent shocking revelations about massive increases in the number of children illegally overworked and trafficked into dangerous jobs—just over 85 years since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was enacted to eliminate that very problem—is the latest example of the ways that this promise to America's workers is broken."
Across the U.S., Republican state lawmakers have been advancing legislation to remove restrictions on child labor, despite several high-profile workplace deaths of minors. At the federal level, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) last year introduced a bill that would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work in the logging industry.
The LET'S Protect Workers Act sponsors highlighted rampant wage theft and overtime violations, workplace injuries, and union-busting by employers who "know that even if a resource-starved Department of Labor catches a violation, the penalties are a mere slap on the wrist."
"People should be able to come home at the end of the day—alive, well, in one piece, and with all the wages they worked hard to earn," the lawmakers asserted. "Children should be in schools, not dangerous workplaces, and workers should be able to organize a union without interference or the threat of retaliation from their employers."
According to House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats, if passed, the LET'S Protect Workers Act would:
- Increase civil monetary penalties for violations of child labor, minimum wage and overtime, worker health and safety, and farmworker protection standards;
- Improve mine safety and reliable funding of black lung benefits through new and increased civil monetary penalties and the option to shut down scofflaw operators;
- Set new penalties for retaliation against workers who exercise their family and medical leave rights;
- Strengthen enforcement of mental health parity requirements for employer-sponsored health plans;
- Close a loophole that allows employers to escape penalties for failing to keep records of workplace injuries if [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] does not detect the violation within six months; and
- Create new penalties for violations of the National Labor Relations Act, consistent with the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.
"Every American should be fairly compensated and be able to return home safely at the end of the day," Scott said in a statement Friday. "Unfortunately, shortcomings in our labor laws enable unethical employers to exploit workers, endanger children, and suppress the right to organize—with little accountability."
"That's why I'm proud to introduce the LET'S Protect Workers Act, which will hold bad actors accountable and strengthen penalties for labor law violations," he added. "This bill will help level the playing field and, once again, restore the balance of power between workers and their employers."
In a joint statement, Dingell, Horsford, Norcross, and Pocan said that "the lack of meaningful enforcement makes it all too easy for bad faith actors to get away with illegally violating workers' rights—from firing workers for organizing a union, to allowing children to work overnight shifts, or jeopardizing workers' safety by ignoring workplace regulations."
"We're proud to join Ranking Member Scott in introducing this bill to crack down on unscrupulous employers and to ensure that workers receive the protections they deserve," the lawmakers added.
Earlier this month, nearly 50 labor organizations led by the AFL-CIO and representing a wide range of U.S. workers urged congressional Democrats to resist Republican efforts to roll back rules enacted by the Biden administration to protect worker rights amid relentless attacks by abusive employers.
Specifically, the labor groups warned that Republicans are trying to use the Congressional Review Act—which was enacted to strengthen oversight of federal rulemaking—to overturn pro-worker rules enacted by the Department of Labor and other government bodies.
Meanwhile, Republicans including former President Donald Trump—the 2024 GOP nominee—have been trying to woo U.S. workers with proposals including a tax exemption for tipped employees panned as a "
hollow promise" by experts and by inviting Teamsters president Sean O'Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention last week.
In response to Republicans' dubious courting of U.S. labor, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas)—who is a co-sponsor of the LET'S Protect Workers Act—recently called for holding what would be a largely symbolic vote on the PRO Act. The bill was revived last year by Scott and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and, if passed, would expand labor protections including the right to organize and collectively bargain.
"If Republicans wanna talk like they're pro-worker, then let's have a vote on the PRO Act next week," Casar
said on social media last week. "Let's see which politicians are for unions and which ones are all talk. Dems are ready to vote, how about you guys?"
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No, Immigrants Aren’t Taking US Jobs
It is clear the labor market is both absorbing immigrants and generating strong job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, including those in demographic groups potentially most impacted by immigration.
Feb 23, 2024
The immigrant share of the labor force reached a record high of 18.6% in 2023, according to our analysis of Current Population Survey, or CPS, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Anti-immigration advocates have been out in full force, using this as a talking point for deeply misguided commentary and analysis that roughly translates to “immigrants are taking all our jobs.”
The reality is that the economy does not have a fixed number of jobs, and what we see today is a growing economy that is adding jobs for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers. Here are six key facts that show immigrants are not hurting the employment outcomes of U.S.-born workers.
- The unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers averaged 3.6% in 2023, the lowest rate on record. Obviously, immigration is not causing high unemployment among U.S.-born workers.
- The share of prime-age U.S.-born individuals with a job is at its highest rate in more than two decades. In 2023, the prime-age (ages 25–54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4%, up from 80.7% in 2019 and now at its highest rate since 2001.
- The prime-age labor force participation rate (LFPR) for U.S.-born individuals is also at its highest rate in more than two decades. In 2023, the LFPR for prime-age U.S.-born individuals was 83.9%, up from 83.3% in 2019 and now at its highest rate since 2002. Further, the increase in the U.S.-born prime-age LFPR over the last year was the second highest on record—below only the increase that occurred the year before last.
- The prime-age LFPR of U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree grew at a record pace in each of the last two years and is above its pre-Covid trend. We focus here on prime-age men without a bachelor’s degree because though the immigrant population is comprised of men and women of all education levels, immigrants are somewhat disproportionately concentrated among men without a college degree (in 2023, the immigrant share of the overall labor force was 18.6%, but it was 20.0% of men without a college degree). That means that if recent immigration were affecting labor market outcomes of U.S.-born workers, it would be more easily detected among workers in this group. However, the LFPR of these workers is also beating expectations. It is clear the labor market is both absorbing immigrants and generating strong job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, including those in demographic groups potentially most impacted by immigration.
- Though the immigrant share of the labor force reached a record high in 2023, immigrant labor force growth is not occurring at an unprecedented rate. From 2019 to 2023, the immigrant labor force grew 2.3% annually on average, according to our analysis of CPS data. That is strong growth, but it’s roughly one-third the rate the economy experienced between 1996 and 2000 (which, just like 2022 and 2023, was a period of very low unemployment—and strong employment growth—for U.S.-born workers). Immigrant inflows into the labor force over the last year alone were also not unprecedentedly high—for example, the pace was slower than in 2022 and slower than three of the years from 1996–2000.
- Immigrants are an integral part of our labor market, filling gaps caused by demographic changes in the United States and contributing to strong economic growth. The immigrants that make up 18.6% of the U.S. labor force are playing key roles in numerous industries and are employed in a mix of lower, middle, and higher-wage jobs. And as the Congressional Budget Office recently reported, immigration is contributing to strong economic growth—with future immigration forecasted to boost real gross domestic product by 2% over the next 10 years—as well as increasing government revenue. Immigrants are also complementing U.S.-born workers by contributing to overall population and workforce growth. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that if the U.S. were to have lower-than-expected immigration levels, the population would begin to decline in 20 years, and if there were suddenly zero immigration, the population would begin to decline next year, deeply harming economic growth.
As these six facts show, the idea that immigrants are making things worse for U.S.-born workers is wrong. The reality is that the labor market is absorbing immigrants at a rapid pace, while simultaneously maintaining record-low unemployment for U.S.-born workers.
Claiming that immigrants are making things worse for U.S.-born workers is often used as an intentional distraction from dynamics that are actually hurting working people—such as weak labor standards and enforcement, anti-worker deregulation, weak labor law that fails to protect workers’ rights to unions and collective bargaining in the face of coordinated and well-funded attacks, and other dynamics that result in too much power in the hands of corporations and employers.
While there’s no question that the immigration system desperately needs updating so that workers are adequately protected, it’s important to remember that it is employers that underpay and exploit workers based on their immigration status—committing workplace violations against those who lack status at a vastly higher rate than U.S.-born workers. And it is employers that regularly and even systematically steal wages from workers who only have a temporary, precarious status provided by a work visa. The resulting two-tiered system of rights in the workplace prevents immigrants from asserting and enforcing their rights. Reform efforts in Congress and the executive branch should thus focus on providing status and work authorization to those who lack it and compelling employers to follow the law, rather than more funding for, and draconian measures on, border enforcement, deportations, and detaining immigrants.
If those who mischaracterize immigration as bad for the economy and for U.S.-born workers really care about improving wages and working conditions for U.S.-born workers, they should focus on pushing for labor law reform and strong labor standards and helping ensure that all workers—regardless of immigration status—have equal and enforceable rights in the workplace.
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How to Restore Trust in the US? Tax the Rich
The only major institution in American life that Americans trust less than Big Business just happens to be Congress, which has consistently refused to seriously tax the wealthy and the corporations they run.
Jan 16, 2024
We Americans don’t trust as much as we once did. So point out all the pollsters who’ve been tracking trust in the United States since the middle of the 20th century.
Back in the late 1950s, notes the Pew Research Center, “about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” The 1960s and 1970s, amid the Vietnam war and then Watergate, would see that level of trust trend steadily downward, only to recover a bit with Richard Nixon’s exit.
But that trust comeback would prove modest at best, never nearing the levels of the late 1950s. The last two decades have now seen those modest trust levels totally evaporate. And the distrust Americans feel, Gallup polling adds, extends to almost every major institution of modern American life.
Back in 1958—the high point of trust in American life—these rich faced a 91% tax on their annual income over $400,000, a sum equal to about $4.2 million today.
In 2022, Gallup reported this past July, only 15% of Americans professed a “great deal” of trust in the nation’s key institutions—and just 11% extended those institutions a “fair amount” of trust.
What’s driving America’s stunning descent into distrust over the past four decades? Taking a closer look at the institutions Americans distrust the most can provide some clues. Our second most-distrusted national institution turns out to be “Big Business.” Only 14% of the American people trust Corporate America a “great deal.”
Do Americans have cause to distrust Big Business? Sure do. No other institution in American life over recent decades has benefited so royally from America’s growing inequality, with CEO pay stats coming to best symbolize those royal benefits. CEO compensation levels, the Economic Policy Institute has detailed, have “skyrocketed” some 1,460% since 1978.
Back in that year, CEOs at major American corporations realized some 30 times more compensation than the nation’s private-sector workers. By 2022, that gap was running nearly 400 times.
Other stats, released earlier this month, vividly dramatize just how much cause Americans have to distrust Corporate America. U.S. companies, journalists at Popular Information report, currently owe over 200,000 American workers some $163.3 million in back pay. These millions represent wages that have gone unclaimed from companies found guilty of committing wage theft by, for instance, ignoring minimum wage or overtime pay regulations.
The federal Department of Labor has the authority to impose extra penalties on companies that repeatedly violate federal wage standards. But American corporations, the Peterson Institute for International Economics has shown, have precious little incentive not to commit wage theft. Over the decade that ended in 2016, Peterson analysts note, U.S. Department officials, identified nearly 3,000 of these repeat offenders. Only 10 of them ended up with federal criminal convictions.
Deep pockets in the United States enjoy all sorts of other special treatment, maybe none more lucrative than how the federal tax code treats “unrealized capital gains,” the wealth our richest accumulate when the value of their stocks and other assets start soaring.
Researchers at Americans for Tax Fairness revealed earlier this month that our richest personally worth at least $100 million spent 2022 holding “at least” $8.5 trillion of “unrealized capital gains.” These gains, the AFR analysts went on to show, help these rich lead luxuriously “extravagant” lives. Yet these same gains “receive an ongoing exemption from taxation in life and a permanent exemption in death.”
Lawmakers in Congress have done next to nothing to fix this capital gains tax outrage. And they haven’t taken any steps to make sure the federal Department of Labor has enough staff to effectively identify and prosecute companies that willfully and repeatedly commit wage theft.
These failures, in turn, can help explain why the only major institution in American life that Americans trust less than Big Business just happens to be Congress. Over recent decades, lawmakers in Congress have consistently refused to seriously tax the rich and the corporations they run.
Back in 1958—the high point of trust in American life—these rich faced a 91% tax on their annual income over $400,000, a sum equal to about $4.2 million today. The equivalent top rate today: 37%. Taking all loopholes into account, our richest 400 today pay federal taxes at just an overall 8.2% rate.
In healthy societies, people trust one another. How can we start building trust in today’s United States? What might make a good place to start rebuilding that trust? We could start by taxing—again—our most fabulously wealthy.
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The Labor Movement Is Reawakening; Policy Must Rise to Meet It
This is the moment for policymakers to demonstrate leadership and act in the best interest of the workers who keep our economy and our society functioning.
Sep 04, 2023
We are in an unprecedented moment in history for the modern American labor movement, with widespread labor strikes that stretch from coast to coast. From machinists to movie stars, worker-led actions are reverberating across sectors and sending a powerful message: Workers demand more.
Right now, more than 170,000 media professionals and writers are on strike demanding fair compensation from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and there are 146,000 workers represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) ready to strike on September 15 if the Big Three American automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis) fail to improve working conditions and compensation. A strike by the UAW would increase the number of American workers on strike to the highest level since 1983. The scale of these strikes represents a significant shift in labor relations and a unique opportunity to shape an economic future that values and respects the dignity of work and the rights of workers.
For the first time in decades, the public is overwhelmingly on the side of workers. According to Gallup surveys, public support for labor unions is at its highest level in nearly 60 years. This surge in approval signals a significant societal shift and an awakening to the reality of working conditions in a 21st-century economy that often prioritizes profit over people.
Today’s labor movement, emboldened by a call for solidarity, represents a watershed moment for the advocacy and protection of workers’ rights.
Historically, labor unions have been instrumental in securing essential rights and protections for workers, from a five-day workweek to safer working conditions.
Today’s labor movement, emboldened by a call for solidarity, represents a watershed moment for the advocacy and protection of workers’ rights.
Yet, while public sentiment may be evolving, policy and legislation have been slower to catch up. A fair and thriving society needs laws protecting labor that keep pace with the changing workplace landscape. The recent wave of technological innovations, the Covid-19 pandemic, and rising global temperatures are all reshaping how we work, and policymakers must rise to the occasion. In an era marked by increasing employer power over workers and the growing prevalence of precarious work, policies that strengthen the right to strike and to collective bargaining are more critical than ever.
After years of corporate attacks, current labor policies do not respect and promote the collective power of workers. Rather, they enable harmful practices like union-busting, wage theft, and even corporate exploitation of children. Enacting laws that promote labor protections is not just a matter of economic justice—it is a question of human dignity. The right to fair compensation for work, to safe conditions, and to collective bargaining are cornerstones of a just society.
This is the moment for policymakers to demonstrate leadership and act in the best interest of the workers who keep our economy and our society functioning. It is a pivotal opportunity to strengthen labor laws, protect the right to strike and bargain collectively, and, ultimately, pave the way for a more equitable and fair society. The labor reforms available are wide-ranging: Policymakers can end at-will employment, support sectoral bargaining, center workers in workforce development, and raise the decision-making power of workers and unions.
The resurgence of the labor movement is not a temporary disruption to be weathered; it’s a clarion call for change to be embraced. Let’s ensure that this watershed moment in labor history leads to lasting change for the millions of workers who deserve nothing less.
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Progressive Senators Demand Answers From Kroger on 'Widespread Wage Theft'
"Even as your company was failing to address concerns about systemic wage theft, you have been pushing through a $24.6 billion merger with Albertsons Companies, Inc. that further threatens workers' wages and jobs."
Feb 16, 2023
A trio of progressive U.S. senators on Wednesday pressed the CEO of Kroger to answer longtime worker allegations of rampant wage theft, accusations that continue as the supermarket giant pursues a contentious megamerger with erstwhile competitor Albertsons.
"We are writing today regarding alarming new reports of Kroger's involvement in the mistreatment of workers and consumers through widespread and unresolved wage theft," Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a letter to Kroger Company chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen. "These reports indicate that 'systemic and widespread errors' by Kroger resulted in thousands of your employees experiencing delays and missing wages in their paychecks in late 2022."
Warren explained on Twitter that "Kroger stiffed its own workers while pushing a merger deal with Albertsons that could harm both consumers and workers," and that the senators "are calling them out for lining their pockets at the expense of their employees."
Kroger workers say a big part of the problem is MyTime, a new payroll system rolled out last year that McMullen claimed would "simplify day-to-day work" but instead has resulted in problems including missing pay and incomplete checks.
"I'm tired of having to beg for pay that's due to me," one Kroger employee told Popular Information last month.
In January, hundreds of Kroger employees, most of them members of the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 Union, filed a class-action lawsuit alleging widespread wage theft.
The senators' letter states that "given your company's record of anti-worker policies, and your ongoing attempt to push through a merger that would harm both consumers and workers, we are writing to request a full explanation of how your workers will be compensated for any lost or delayed wages, and how you will prevent future wage theft."
The lawmakers asked McMullen to answer questions including:
- How many missing or incorrect paychecks were reported to the company in 2022, and how many of these reports were related to the MyTime system?
- What was the total amount of wages owed to workers that Kroger failed to pay in 2022?
- How much back pay has Kroger issued to date for missing or incorrect paychecks in 2022?
- Is Kroger continuing to use the MyTime payroll system, despite significant accuracy issues, and if so, what steps has the company put in place to prevent further wage theft?
- Have any company executives had pay, bonuses, or other compensation withheld or clawed back as a result of the systemic problems affecting workers' pay in 2022?
- Will you commit to fully redressing all workers affected by missing or late pay prior to taking any additional steps to move forward with the Albertsons merger?
Warren, Sanders, and Wyden are among the many progressive and labor voices urging the federal government to reject Kroger's proposed merger with Albertsons. Together, the two supermarkets and their subsidiaries employ more than 710,000 workers at around 5,000 stores in 48 states and Washington, D.C. and rake in $208 billion in annual revenue, second only to Walmart.
In a bid to fend off antitrust challenges to the proposed merger, Kroger and Albertsons announced earlier this week that they would sell off as many as 300 stores, mostly in areas where the two chains overlap, GlobeSt reported.
"Even as your company was failing to address concerns about systemic wage theft, you have been pushing through a $24.6 billion merger with Albertsons Companies, Inc. that further threatens workers' wages and jobs and hurts consumers by reducing competition among grocers," the lawmakers' letter asserts. "This merger would exacerbate corporate consolidation in the grocery sector, and likely result in the shuttering of some stores across the country and the firing of workers from both Kroger and Albertsons."
A Kroger spokesperson told Common Dreams via email that "while the majority of issues have been resolved, we understand these issues have caused undue difficulty for the impacted associates," and that "we are taking multiple steps to pay our associates as quickly as possible, including overnighting checks to impacted associates."
According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, more than $3 billion in stolen wages were recovered for U.S. workers between 2017 and 2020—a fraction of the $50 billion EPI says is stolen by employers each year. By contrast, the FBI said the total value of all 267,988 reported U.S. robberies in 2019 was around $482 million.
The lawmakers' letter came as Communications Workers of America and the National Employment Law Project published a study in which 9 in 10 surveyed workers at independent authorized retailers of telecom titans AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in 43 states said they've experienced wage theft.
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Here Are All the Reasons Walmart's Business Is Not Sustainable
You probably paid a cheap price for those groceries at Walmart this week, but you almost certainly didn't pay a fair price.
Jun 06, 2015
You probably paid a cheap price for those groceries at Walmart this week, but you almost certainly didn't pay a fair price.
Walmart is a case study of how the "free market" can distort the value of a basic human need: Every price tag in Walmart's food inventory--which accounts for a quarter of the nation's grocery bill--is the product of agricultural subsidies, financialized commodities exchanges, and hyperinflated marketing. So to uncover the true cost of cheap groceries, the advocacy group Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) followed the supply chain and uncovered violations at every link in the retailer's "ethical sourcing" system.
Facing public pressure, Walmart has developed guidelines for ethical and sustainable sourcing, pledging that all outlets and suppliers "must fully comply with all applicable national and/or local laws and regulations...related to labor, immigration, health and safety, and the environment." Specifically, the company mandates that suppliers follow legal protections for "health and safety of workers" and implement "measures for reducing air and water pollutants, energy and water usage, and waste." The company recently launched a flashy "sustainability product expo" and rolled out new animal-welfare guidelines for livestock.
The human-welfare department appears to be lagging. While Walmart has come under fire for mistreating its store associates, the supply-chain workers are exploited in even more complex ways, with even less recourse against the company, as Walmart does not directly employ them.
The FCWA charges that Walmart is complicit in the systematic degradation of migrant workers at home and abroad. At the far end of the supply chain, Walmart's giant market in farm-raised shrimp ties into exploitative fishing boats in the Pacific region's infamous labor-trafficking system. Walmart profits indirectly from brutally enslaved and abused migrant labors, used to catch feed fish for the burgeoning aquaculture industry.
Walmart's "savings" from cheap labor gets passed through its US supply chain, too: The federal government recently cracked down on a Walmart egg supplier for "discriminatory practices" in intrusive screening of immigrant workers. One major lettuce supplier, Taylor Farms, has been hit by a wage-theft class-action lawsuit along with scandals over alleged union-busting and abuse of migrant workers in California.
In 2012, Walmart had to cut ties to scandalized seafood processor CJ's after workers complained of being forced to peel crawfish around the clock, and to suffer 80-hour workweeks, wage theft, and threats from the employer who had sponsored their guest-worker visas.
One such "blacklisted" worker, Martha Uvalle, told reporter Josh Eidelson that her boss had warned workers who challenged him, "I'll send you back to Mexico.... You'll never come back.'"
The combination of intimidation and market control runs throughout Walmart's much-hyped "Heritage Agriculture" program for farmers in the United States as well as "emerging markets" of China and India. In 2010, Walmart announced a five-year plan to "sell $1 billion worth of local food sourced from 1 million small and medium farmers," with potential growth in farmers' incomes by 10 to 15 percent. But five years on, participating growers have reportedly not seen the promised bounty and complain of unfair contracting. Similarly, the report notes, Walmart dominates in a corporatized milk market that decimates small dairy farmers, leading to severe industry consolidation and price drops of as much as 40 percent for farmers.
Some straight-up environmental crimes further stain Walmart's sustainability record: violations of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and federal pesticide safety rules, threatening both habitats and public health in local communities.
Responding to the report, Walmart sent a statement to The Nation explaining that, "While there are complex issues inherent in the global supply chain, we bring together numerous stakeholders, NGOs and other private sector companies to help find solutions."
FCWA, which promotes labor organizing across all food sectors, believes in systemic solutions at the grassroots. That means not boosting organics production at the expense of the wages of Mexican strawberry farm workers, and ensuring that cheap groceries for poor families in Bakersfield don't come with the kind of hazardous waste Walmart has dumped around Los Angeles. The problem is that Walmart's business model profits by maldistributing the social costs of mass production across an atomized food chain.
The FCWA calls on Walmart to redistribute resources up the supply chain by raising the hourly base wage for its direct workforce to $15. It can then spread those ethics through similar minimum wages for US workers at Walmart suppliers and "comparable living wages in other countries," plus basic benefits like paid sick leave. And Walmart should support all workers' right to organize and pursue collective bargaining, which the company has long suppressed, even in its own stores.
Of course, many of these demands could be satisfied if Walmart just followed existing law. Hence the central contradiction of "corporate social responsibility": the concept of private-market voluntarism reflects the subordination of government to brands that put profit above the law. As the industry lobby presses for more tax breaks, corporate benevolence thrives as a manufactured solution to a crisis engineered by corporations. Ethics is reduced to a matter of noblesse oblige, not human rights.
FCWA Co-Director Jose Oliva says via e-mail, "Breaking labor and employment law has become part of the business model for these firms," citing a "supply chain dominance" model at Walmart that "has pushed most of these suppliers to the breaking point where they've incorporated law-skirting and all-out law-breaking into their business model." But beyond demanding social responsibility from Walmart, FCWA would support "a third-party entity that would have power independent of Walmart" overseeing the supply chain. Ideally, this would require the designated government regulatory agencies to be fulfilling their own legal responsibilities.
But could Walmart's consumers have it both ways, retaining low prices and maintaining fair standards for workers? Oliva says this can be done by spreading around the company's unethically sourced profits: "Pay fair wages and prices so that people can afford the good food. Just like Ford did in the 1930's, pay your workers so they can afford a dignified life and you create an upwards spiral. Walmart's profit margins can afford it."
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