As Laura Clawson has repeatedly reported, wage theft
is one of the nation's major rip-offs. Employers steal from fast-food
employees and software engineers and Amazon warehouse workers. They
don't call it stealing, of course.A ProPublica review of U.S. Department of Labor investigations has
found that the oil and gas industry is also rife with this kind of of
corporate banditry. Naveena Sadasivam reports:
The DOL investigations have centered on what is known as worker
"misclassification," an accounting gambit whereby companies treat
full-time employees as independent contractors paid hourly wages, and
then fail to make good on their obligations. The technique,
investigators and experts say, has become ever more common as small
companies seek to gain contracts in an intensely competitive market by
holding labor costs down. [...]
In 2012, the DOL began a special enforcement initiative in its
Northeast and Southwest regional offices targeting the fracking industry
and its supporting industries. As of August this year, the agency has
conducted 435 investigations resulting in over $13 million in back wages
found due for more than 9,100 workers. ProPublica obtained data for 350
of those cases from the agency. In over a fifth of the investigations,
companies in violation paid more than $10,000 in back wages.
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