Reports
Wage Theft: An Economic Drain on Florida
- Over $28 million in back wages have been recovered by the DOL, Miami-Dade County, and community organizations across the state.
- Industries with the highest number of complaints: tourism, retail, and construction.
- Since the full implementation of the Miami-Dade County Wage Theft Ordinance in September 2010, the County's Dept. of Small Business Development has recovered nearly $400,000 in owed wages for 313 employees who had been victims of wage theft.
Filling the Good Jobs Deficit: An Economic Recovery Agenda for Our States and Cities
Although the Great Recession officially ended more than two years ago, good jobs remain scarce for America's working families. In "Filling the Good Jobs Deficit," NELP looks at how states and cities can tackle the jobs crisis through innovative strategies that create good jobs and accelerate economic recovery in local communities.
The Movement to End Wage Theft
Over the last decade, grassroots opposition to Wage Theft has grown dramatically across the country. Wage theft, the illegal underpayment of wages primarily affects the working poor. It is widespread and occurs in various forms and industries. It is estimated that millions of low wage workers annually are not paid at legally required overtime rates, at minimum wages or for total hours worked. In response workers’ rights organizations have engaged in increasingly sophisticated and successful campaigns to strengthen enforcement and make sure that monies due employees are repaid.
Economic Recovery Agenda for Cities and States
Successful job creation strategies in states and cities across the country are offering a roadmap for how regional and federal lawmakers can create good jobs, a new report from the National Employment Law Project shows. Even as Washington, DC is gridlocked over recovery policies and job growth remains anemic, states and cities can harness a variety of innovative job creation strategies to accelerate their economic recovery and create good jobs.
Improving Job Quality: Direct Care Workers in the U.S.
This paper looks at strategies for improving job quality in the care work sector. American and British policy makers need to stop treating care as low-paid "women's work" that is incidental to a family's income. Social care is a growth sector and must be considered alongside green jobs and infrastructure investment when it comes to developing industrial and economic policy. Beyond public sector investment, as this paper shows, better jobs will come from a steady focus on three priorities: improving employer practice, appropriate regulation and workforce organizing.
Put America Back To Work
The biggest domestic policy failure has been the refusal of top officials in the White House and in Congress to recognize the severity of the employment crisis that has settled like a plague over American workers.
Fair Pay for Home Care Workers
Home care workers provide the vital care that allows older adults and persons with disabilities needing care to remain in their own homes. Since 1974, home care workers have been excluded from basic minimum wage and overtime protections as the result of overly broad U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) regulations. The regulations have converted what Congress intended to be a very limited exemption for workers providing certain “companionship” services into a wholesale exclusion of workers in the home care industry—one of our nation’s top growth fields—from wage-and-hour protections.
The African American Labor Force in the Recovery
This Department of Labor report highlights the dramatic and disproportionate impact of the unemployment crisis on African American workers.
Shattered Dreams and Broken Bodies: A Brief Review of the Inland Empire Warehouse Industry
Warehouse workers from Inland Empire warehouses testified to the deplorable conditions in those facilities and their effects on the 119,000 Inland Empire residents who work in the industry. Ana Sanchez, a former warehouse worker and “Evangelina Morales”, a current warehouse worker using a pseudonym because she feared retaliation from her employers, gave tear wrenching accounts of their experiences working and being injured in warehouses and the effect it had on their lives and the lives of their families.
How Unions Help All Workers
The Economic Policy Institute has released a new study called "How Unions Help All Workers." This report examines the effect of unions on wages, fringe benefits, total compensation, pay inequality and workplace protections.
Low-Wage Jobs and No Wage Growth
The American economy has been producing fewer middle-paying jobs. Studies by Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer and by David Autor have examined the profile of job creation in the United States since the 1960s. Each finds a shift toward a U-shaped pattern, with the bulk of new jobs in the 1990s and 2000s coming in occupations with either high or low wages. For many people in the bottom half of the skill and education pools, this means a greater likelihood of ending up in a low-paying job.
The Wal-Mart Economy
As the largest corporation in the world, Wal-Mart's business choices ripple throughout the global economy. This special report examines how Wal-Mart's growth affects low-wage workers, and whether the company's recent public relations makeover has brought about substantial change for its employees.
Unions Make the Middle Class
This report from the Center for American Progress says unions are the key to a healthy middle class. According to the report, over the last four decades the middle class's share of the nation's income has continued to diminish as union membership rates decline. While the middle class has suffered, the rich have gotten richer. In fact, the wealthiest .1 percent quadrupled their income over the same span of time. The report's findings dispel the myth that only union workers benefit from collective bargaining.
The sad but true story of wages in America
This report by the Economic Policy Institute outlines the struggles faced by American workers, asking why the richest 1% of Americans received fully 56% of all of the income growth in the country between 1989 and 2007. The answer?
Winning Wage Justice: An Advocate’s Guide to State and City Policies to Fight Wage Theft
For organizers, leaders, and policy advocates seeking to learn more about the most effective ways to fight wage theft, this report provides the most comprehensive array of tools gathered in one report.
The Big Rig: Poverty, Pollution, and the Misclassification of Truck Drivers at America’s Ports
"Sharecropping on Wheels" describes, in this report, the impact of misclassifying port truck drivers as independent contractors, denying them basic labor rights and causing environmental degradation on local communities.
America Gets a Raise, One State at a Time
The Discount Foundation commissioned this report, researched and written by Tom Gallagher, to learn about the impact of state minimum wage campaigns on low wage workers. The Foundation also wanted to understand the essential elements in these campaigns that accounted for their success, including the role of community organizing groups, unions, the faith community and other stakeholders. The report provides an in-depth analysis of campaigns in six states, as well as some broader analysis of the minimum wage movement, particularly focusing on 2006.
Joining Forces: Community Organizations and Labor Unions Form New Collaborations
This report, commissioned by the Hyams Foundation, documents and analyzes the experiences, challenges and impact of the Foundation's community organizing grantees in developing partnerships with organized labor.
Pursuing Democracy's Promise
A collaboration between Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, this publication seeks to help Foundations across a range of funding interests understand the contributions immigrants and their children can make to their communities, when given opportunities through strong organizations.
Newcomers in the American Workplace: Improving Employment Outcomes for Low-Wage Immigrants and Refugees
This report responds to the dramatic growth in the immigrant population over the past decade and calls attention to the crucial role that immigrants play in the U.S. economy. It highlights the multiple challenges immigrants confront in the labor force, from lack of legal status to language and cultural barriers.
Making Work Pay: The Discount Foundation Retrospective Report 1997-2002
This report provides information for Foundations and the broader community of non-profits concerned with combating poverty, and explains why and how Discount Foundation chose this focus for its grantmaking.