systematic evasion and violation of employment and labor laws is threatening to become a way of doing business ....

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 by The Nation | What We Owe the Working Poor | by Annette Bernhardt

The Supreme Court handed down an astonishing decision June 11, ruling that under federal law, home-care workers are not entitled to overtime pay or the minimum wage. Upholding outdated distinctions between those who labor inside and outside the home, the Court excluded more than one million workers from the right to earn a fair wage.
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Some workers–like home health aides, domestic workers and agricultural workers–have for many years been excluded from one or more laws governing the workplace. Other workers are covered by those laws, but weak enforcement has left them unprotected. And growing numbers are falling through the cracks altogether, as employers push them outside the reach of legal protection by misclassifying them as independent contractors.

For the past three years, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law have been documenting this problem in New York City. Industry by industry, we’ve conducted hundreds of interviews with workers, employers, government officials, community groups and legal services providers. Our report, Unregulated Work in the Global City, was released June 19.

What we found is a world that lies outside the experience and imagination of many Americans. It is a world in which workers are paid less than the minimum wage, and sometimes nothing at all; in which employers don’t pay overtime for sixty-hour weeks or provide legally required meal breaks; in which health and safety regulations are routinely ignored; and in which workers are often punished for speaking up or trying to organize.

The traces of this invisible economy are everywhere in our daily lives. We shop at a gourmet grocery store, which may be paying as little as $5 an hour to the worker washing and sorting produce. We pick up clothes from the local dry cleaner, which has likely sent its work to an industrial plant rife with violations of health and safety regulations. We go to a restaurant–a small diner or one rated with four stars–and chances are that the dishwashers and cooks are not receiving overtime for the sixty to seventy hours that they have worked. We pay weekly visits to the neighborhood nail salon, which might well be part of a chain currently under investigation for underpaying its workers. We bring in a small contractor to paint or remodel our homes, and in all probability at least one of the workers has been cheated out of wages during the past six months.

These are not isolated, short-lived cases of exploitation at the fringe of the city’s economy. Instead, the systematic evasion and violation of employment and labor laws is threatening to become a way of doing business for unscrupulous employers–concentrated for now in low-wage industries, but increasingly putting pressure on firms higher up the wage ladder to follow suit.

New York City is not unique in this regard. ...