Unscrupulous Employers Research Articles

“Lots of Time They Don’t Pay”: Understanding Wage-Theft and Resistance in Bryan, Texas through Critical Community-Engaged Research

This critical community-engaged mixed methods study quantifies worker mistreatment on day labor corners in Bryan, Texas, and examines how day laborers resist labor exploitation. Day laborers seek work in open air spot markets. The work is precarious, with temporary and unregulated employment relations, weak enforcement, and poor working conditions. In this weak penalty and labor enforcement regime, labor violations are not surprising. Contrary to dominant theories, however, we argue that demand-side (industry) characteristics are more important for explaining the prevalence of labor violation than supply-side (worker characteristics). We use the Central Texas Day Labor Survey (2012–2021), 210 ethnosurveys consisting of 55% unauthorized workers, 24% authorized workers, and 20% Latinx, Black, and White citizens. We find that higher indices of labor violations and work abuse are not associated with lower-status workers; all workers, irrespective of legal status or citizenship, experienced abuse by employers. Demand-side characteristics were partially associated with higher levels of wage theft and mistreatment. In terms of wages, we found a gradation of wages with the lowest for unauthorized immigrants, then authorized immigrants, Latinx citizens, Black citizens, and lastly White citizens. Finally, workers collectively fight back against injustice by warning each other about unscrupulous employers.

Evaluating the Involvement of Social Partners in Tackling Undeclared Work in the Western Balkans

Although enforcement authorities play a key role in tackling undeclared work, social partners also have an interest in preventing undeclared work. Employer federations wish to tackle the unfair competition that results from other businesses operating in the undeclared economy and trade unions wish to protect declared workers and tackle unscrupulous employers who use undeclared employment. The aim of this study is to evaluate the current involvement of social partners in tackling undeclared work in the Western Balkans. To achieve this, a survey was undertaken of social partners in the six Western Balkan economies to evaluate: (i) their objectives in relation to tackling undeclared work; (ii) the current level of social partner cooperation with government authorities and (iii) the current range of initiatives pursued by social partners to tackle the undeclared economy. This study reports the findings.

Structural Injustice and the Human Rights of Workers

Abstract An increasing number of jobs are precarious, making workers vulnerable to various forms of ill-treatment and exploitation. The UK Government’s main approach has been to criminalise the actions of unscrupulous employers who seek to exploit these. This approach, however, has been ineffective, partly because it ignores the broader socio-economic structures that place workers in conditions of vulnerability. This article develops an alternative solution, seeking to identify structures that force and trap workers in conditions of exploitation. It focuses specifically on what I call ‘state-mediated structural injustice', where legislative schemes that promote otherwise legitimate aims create vulnerabilities that force and trap workers in conditions of exploitation. I use examples such as restrictive visa regimes, prison work and work in immigration detention, welfare conditionality programmes, and zero-hour contracts to illustrate the unjust structures. I finally assess whether these legal structures are compatible with human rights, such as the right to private life, the prohibition of slavery, servitude, forced and compulsory labour, and the right to fair and just working conditions.

An Overview of Fixed-Term Contracts of Employment as a Form of A-typical Employment in South Africa

A fixed-term employment contract is an example of atypical or non-standard employment. Fixed-term appointments can have many benefits when utilised for proper and lawful reasons. These contracts are frequently abused, however, by unscrupulous employers and are generally regarded as providing less security to employees than permanent employment. The article considers the general use of fixed-term contracts and addresses selected issues pertaining to the 2014 amendments to the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 in as far as these contracts are concerned. The article also considers the potential effect these amendments might have on common historic problems associated with fixed-term contracts and highlights certain unresolved problem areas and uncertainties.

Rights of Migrant Workers under Malaysian Employment Law

Labour migration is an important global issue that largely affects the labour market. Malaysia is among the popular destination countries for labour migration in Asia. The number of migrant workers that consist of documented and undocumented workers is increasing every year due to rapid economic development that captivates job seekers from undeveloped countries. In this regard, migrant workers frequently fall into the trap of unscrupulous employers who exploit them for their own interests. These employers do not pay their wages as promised and deny them their employment rights. This case is basically treated as ‘forced labour’ or ‘human trafficking’ by the Malaysian authority. This paper identifies the Malaysia’s legal framework of the employment of migrant workers. In addition, how to address the infringed rights of migrant workers is discussed in this paper. Although the framework deems comprehensive, it further recommends a stringent and fair law enforcement to combat exploitation towards migrant workers.

Barack Obama's Emancipation Proclamation: An Essay in Memory of Judge Richard D. Cudahy

In a case involving whether illegal immigrants were protected under federal labor law, Judge Richard Cudahy, observed that illegal immigrants are often at the mercy of unscrupulous employers and that immigrations laws provide employers “with a powerful tool for unfair and oppressive treatment of migrant labor.” There are millions of people in the United States who are vulnerable to exploitation in the workplace due to their illegal immigration status. In 2012 and 2014, the Obama administration announced programs designed to provide limited security to some of the millions of illegal immigrants present in the United States. These programs are, in many important ways, analogous to President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which was designed to provide security and dignity to millions of enslaved people living in the United States. This essay, a memorial tribute to Judge Cudahy, is designed to explore the parallels between President Obama’s immigration reform and emancipation from slavery, including similarities in the way the opposition reacted to Lincoln’s and Obama’s actions.

ТРУДОВІ ПРАВА ПРАЦІВНИКІВ ПІД ЧАС КАРАНТИНУ

This scientific article is devoted to the problems of realization and protection of workers' rights due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article examines the changes that occur in connection with the introduction of quarantine, and analyzes the difficulties that arise in the parties to the employment relationship. The legislative changes that took place in 2020 in order to adapt to new forms of society are analyzed. The article reveals the essence of remote work and the conditions under which the employer has the right to instruct employees to perform such work. It is analyzed how the employer provides the employee with working conditions that are necessary for remote work. It is indicated in what form the employment contract on home-based work is concluded, as at the time of the threat of spreading the pandemic the condition on transfer to remote work can be established in the order of the employer. Attention is also paid to the grounds for dismissal of employees during quarantine, as employers, being in a difficult situation due to quarantine restrictions, often dismiss employees illegally, which leads to violations of workers' rights and guarantees. The paper analyzes the introduction of downtime at the enterprise, as during the quarantine period, many employers are forced to make some changes in their work schedule. Particular attention is paid to wages during downtime. The article also examines the issue of sending an employee on leave "at his own expense", as it is another widely used way of registration of labor relations during quarantine, which are used by unscrupulous employers to minimize production costs and pay for work performed.

THE LEGAL PROTECTION OF DOMESTIC WORKERS IN SOUTH AFRICA: A SQUARE PEG IT IS (INTO A ROUND HOLE)

In an ideal world working as domestic worker would arguably be nobody’s choice, but as things stand the socio-economic realities we find ourselves under dictates. There are fewer number of job opportunities than there are people looking for opportunities. According to statistics South Africa, the unemployment rate in South Africa is a shocking 25.4%. Out of desperation and the need to survive most unemployed people have sought solace in the domestic sector. Little do they know that, what seems to be a breakthrough may actually turn out to be quite worse than they reckoned. It is no secret that most domestic workers do not know their job scope, a problem which can be attributed to quite a number of factors, for example, an inherent illiteracy level, desperation after an unsuccessfully long search for competitive opportunities, or unscrupulous employers who exploit them, often with impunity. In line with this, Grossman concluded that pay and working conditions of domestic workers depend on the employer’s “goodwill”, as employers are not impeded by labour legislation in their actions. The purpose of this article is to show and stress the point that the general labour law framework and the interventions made in South Africa to date do not empower domestic workers as long as they fail to take cognizance of occupational uniqueness of this sector. The author will define “domestic worker” and then proceed with the comparison of the existing legislative framework in South Africa with the best international standards in as far as they provide for domestic workers, and the extent thereof, while also arguing that infusing value dosages into law, such as ubuntu, may restore the lost dignity of the domestic worker in South Africa.

Earning an Age: Migration and Maturity in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1952

This article explores the migration of boys and young men from their parents’ homes out onto the coffee, sisal, and tea estates of the settler colony of Kenya. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home and work for wages. Young men viewed their physical mobility, financial independence, and distance from elder surveillance as essential to enjoying their youth and rethinking their manliness and coming of age. As they made demands on their elders to acknowledge and ritually authenticate their newfound maturity, they sparked heated debate about and complicated their generational and kinship relations. Age also mattered a great deal to the British colonial state. One of the primary tasks of the state was to ensure the profitability of the settler and multinational firms that produced Kenya’s most important cash crops. With one hand, the state levied its authority, often violently, to draw the young into the wage labor market. With the other, pulled along by social reformers, British officials tried to shield communities from what they believed to be the breakdown of generational, patriarchal authority by legislating underage labor, regulating recruitment, inspecting farms, and fining unscrupulous employers.

Actual Problems of Human Trafficking and Illegal Migration in the Russian Federation

Human trafficking in the Russian Federation is closely linked to irregular migration into which huge numbers of people from the former USSR have been drawn. The European Parliament's fight against organized crime and money found 880 thousand. Modern slaves in the EU, writes the German weekly Der Spiegel, become familiar with its report. In this business was involved about 3,600 international criminal gangs. Only trafficking in human beings brings € 25 billion a year. Comparable income - € 18-26 billion - brings together trade bodies with a prohibited wildlife trade; the report said (Enslaved Europe, http://www.crime.vl.ru/index.php?p=4835&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more4835, 2015)). The author analyzes the problem of illegal migration, which became relevant in the present time in Russia. The data for the research was collected by employing statistical, sociological, cartographic and analytical methods. The report analyses the scale of trafficking for labour exploitation in the Russian Federation and its link to irregular migration. The system for the regulation of labour migration in the Russian Federation can be viewed as imperfect and currently incomplete, enabling the possibility for labour migrants to be actively drawn into human trafficking and labour exploitation by unscrupulous employers and criminals. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s1p621

All Work and No Pay: Establishing the Standard for When Legal, Unpaid Internships Become Illegal, Unpaid Labor

During the early twentieth century, working conditions in the United States were rough. Employees worked long hours under dangerous conditions and received very little pay. People used the term sweating to describe these difficult working conditions. Sweating is defined as “the unfair exploitation by unscrupulous employers of the necessities of the poorer and more helpless class of workers by requiring them to work for wages inadequate to their needs or for excessive hours or under insanitary conditions.” Today, while working conditions have improved for most, the term sweating could still be used to describe conditions for a certain type of worker—unpaid interns. Abusive labor practices may not be as widespread or as visible as they were in the early twentieth century, but they are still a prevailing problem in the current intern labor market. Illegal unpaid internships subject a countless number of workers to “unfair exploitation by unscrupulous employers.” The intern market is massive and so is the potential for abuse. In the United States, it is estimated there are between 1 to 2 million interns and as many as 50 percent of these interns

What's Left to Remedy Wage Theft? How Arbitration Mandates that Bar Class Actions Impact Low-Wage Workers

For low-wage workers who suffer “wage theft” – employers illegally withholding portions of their wages – the dollars missing from their paychecks violate existing law and significantly impact the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Despite this dire societal problem, the Supreme Court continues “closing the courtroom doors” in two ways: allowing employers to force workers out of court and into private arbitration; and prohibiting aggregate claims. Such trends, in combination, silence wage theft, leaving many claims unheard while unscrupulous employers gain direct advantage.This Article explains how various procedural rulings have combined to prevent meaningful redress for wage theft. Because of high transaction costs and relatively low potential damages, low-wage workers are likely to recover their lost wages only if they band together with similarly-situated workers in an aggregate lawsuit. However, collective action is under attack: AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the latest Supreme Court case to approve of mandatory arbitration clauses, allowed a corporation to impose “agreements” mandating individual arbitration and barring class actions.This Article brings new insights into the widening blind spot the Supreme Court has for the impact procedural rules have on the substantive rights of low-wage workers. Moreover, it touches upon a greater trend in American jurisprudence of courts shutting out plaintiffs, especially those unlikely to afford legal representation. By drawing attention to the unjust effects of facially neutral rules on low-wage workers, this Article contributes to the national conversation on how Supreme Court precedent limiting judicial access affects society’s most vulnerable.

A Thing of the Present: Contemporary Challenges in Battling Slavery and Human Trafficking - An Interview with Dr Aidan McQuade; Director of Anti-Slavery International

There are a number of vulnerabilities for migrant workers. First there are limited options for safe migration and these options are even more limited for poor people from socially excluded communities. Second many countries maintain rather xenophobic migration regimes. These can be exploited by unscrupulous employers to exclude migrants from the basic protections of rule of law. Third many poor countries don’t take the welfare of their migrating citizens seriously and don’t, for example, assign labour attaches to the embassies of countries to which their citizens travel for work, to assist with standing up for their rights. As a result of high levels of discrimination against them and the intrinsically vulnerable nature of many of their employment, such as in domestic work, women are generally at higher levels of risk. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated when women are physically weaker than men, and therefore vulnerable to increased physical and sexual threat.

Moral Hazard, Insolvency and Employees as Creditors: What Governance Lessons can be Learned from the Hong Kong Model?

This article argues that each of the US, the UK and Australia could take inspiration from Hong Kong's Protection of Wages on Insolvency Fund (POWIF) because it has the makings of a world-leading model for the protection of employee entitlements in circumstances of business failure. In particular, it is argued that although POWIF is open to fraud by unscrupulous employers it does not unduly increase moral hazard because its coverage provides only a modest safety net, it is funded by a mandatory private sector levy and it operates on a self-sustaining basis.

“The Farmers Didn't Particularly Care for Us”:

Lack of adequate childcare is just one of many problems associated with a system of harvesting dependent upon migrant farm labor. To most consumers, migrant farm workers provide the invisible hands that produce the affordable fruits and vegetables that end up being stocked on grocery store shelves. Yet workers who move from farm to farm harvesting each year face chronic troubles finding adequate housing, safe transportation, and health care. They are perpetual “outsiders” wherever they move, and in the United States race and citizenship operate as identifiers that reinforce this outsider status. Their transience and disconnection from local support networks often leave them vulnerable to exploitative “crew leaders” and unscrupulous employers.

The Deportation Threat Dynamic and Victimization of Latino Migrants: Wage Theft and Robbery

Deportations have been increasing since the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, although the number of unauthorized migrants working in the United States has increased as well. These conditions enable the deportation threat dynamic, a social mechanism which plays out between unauthorized Latino migrants and those who seek to take advantage of them and exposes the migrants to the risk of wage theft and robbery. I use mixed methods to identify and describe this social mechanism and its consequences as it operated in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2007 to 2008 after Hurricane Katrina generated a construction boom. I find that Latino migrants who sought work as day laborers were more likely to experience wage theft but were equally likely to experience criminal victimization. These crimes occur because Latino migrants were visually identifiable by unscrupulous employers and criminals who assumed they were unauthorized and therefore felt confident that the migrants would not report them to law enforcement authorities.

TRANSCRIPT: A CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE ON IMMIGRATION AND THE WORKFORCE

Panelists discuss to what degree an expansive immigration policy might suppress wages or limit opportunities for workers in the United States. There is some competition between low‐skilled American workers and undocumented immigrants, and racism and poverty exacerbate anti‐immigrant sentiments. Poor public education is partially to blame for the high number of unemployed, low‐skilled Americans. Illegal immigration may be more likely than legal immigration to suppress wages because unscrupulous employers do not adhere to labor standards. Employer sanctions and wider adoption of programs like E‐Verify are needed. [Note: This is an edited and abridged transcript of a panel discussion.]

The Many Facets of Effective Immigration Reform

The United States needs a new immigration policy that is based less on wishful thinking and more on realism. Spending vast sums of money trying to enforce arbitrary numerical limits on immigration that bear no relationship to economic reality is a fool’s errand. We need flexible limits on immigration that rise and fall with U.S. labor demand, coupled with strict enforcement of tough wage and labor laws that protect all workers, regardless of where they were born. We need to respect the natural human desire for family reunification, while recognizing that even family-based immigrants are unlikely to come here if jobs are not available. And we need to create a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants who are already here so that they can no longer be exploited by unscrupulous employers who hang the threat of deportation over their heads.

The Invisible Corner: Expanding Workplace Rights for female day Laborers

Governmental approaches to regulating day labor markets have focused principally on industries such as construction, landscaping and agriculture, in which men almost exclusively work. Legal and social science scholarship regarding day labor has largely ignored the significant numbers of women working in domestic industries like housekeeping and child-care. Such workers are in all respects “day laborers,” who contract for no more than a day's or a few hours' pay, and who experience the acute contingency and imbalance of economic and political power that typify the day labor employment relationship. Despite some progressive advances for day laborers generally, including the creation of formal hiring sites, women are often forced to search for domestic day labor in unregulated public and private spaces, with few legal protections.The Article considers why women have largely been excluded from legislation and public policies designed to regulate day labor markets and improve day laborers' working conditions. The Article explores new models of regulation, organizing, and advocacy that can help shift the imbalance of power between domestic day laborers and their employers.Alternative models for improving working conditions for female day laborers are particularly important because domestic workers are specifically exempted from many of the major federal and state laws designed to protect employees, and are therefore particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by unscrupulous employers. Through the development of worker cooperatives and collectives, domestic workers have successfully organized for greater workplace protections and transformative changes within the domestic work industries. The Article recommends that federal, state and local lawmakers reexamine the historically gendered approach to day labor and enact legislation to bridge the gap between existing employment laws and the realities of domestic day labor markets.

Impact Of Globalization On Women's Health Due To Work In Pakistan

The process of globalization, financial integration, free trade and investment has profoundly transformed the lives of women through out the world. Globalization policies have been preceded by national adjustment proposals, privatization of state enterprises, restructuring of employment policies from secure employment to flexible, temporary work, relaxation of labour laws, etc. which leads to the opening of markets. The world Bank and IMF have created an unjust packet of neo-liberal policies called Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) and caused enormous difficulties for poor nations. Furthermore, behind the whole process of globalization unscrupulous employers are abusing the basic rights of a predominant young female workforce. This study has been designed to find out the effects of globalization on women’s health and their lives and show the human cost of the globalization experiment in Pakistan.