Wage Theft Epidemic: Bosses Pocket 15 Percent of Workers' Pay

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http://www.alternet.org/story/155710/wage_theft_epidemic%3A_bosses_pocket_15_percent_of_workers%27_pay/

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Marco Jacal and Isidro Suarez were fed up with their employer, the owner of Veranda, an upscale nightclub and restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village. The two men worked as bar backs and busboys, but weren’t paid an hourly wage--instead they were forced to survive on tips handed off by waitresses after their shifts ended.

“We were very angry and upset, because one, two months turned into five months only paid in tips,” Suarez says. But the two men are also immigrants and were unsure of their rights.

When a new manager declared he would act as middleman for their tips, Jacal and Suarez’s “pay” began to shrivel. The waitresses told them how much they had been left, but the numbers didn’t add up. The manager was stealing part of their tips while the owner stole all of their wages. That was too much.

Jacal and Suarez approached Make the Road New York, an advocacy group for immigrant (and usually low-wage) workers, to help them win back their unpaid wages, unaware that a law had recently been passed to address this very problem. Legal procedures were soon opened against the company.

When the owner of Veranda learned of the suit he demanded all his employees’ working papers, a thinly veiled threat. He targeted Jacal and Suarez specifically, as known whistleblowers, reducing their hours, scheduling them during the Monday-Tuesday deadzone, and finally, firing them.