How Would You Feel?
How would you feel if you were an independent contractor selected for a job, great pay; then, when the job was over you were not compensated? There are many New Orleanians who have experienced this. This is called wage theft. Wage theft is a crime that seems to be recurring, and it occurs when you are not paid properly for doing a job: it can be from not being paid for working late, not being paid at all, or not being paid the minimum amount per hour you are supposed to be paid. The widespread problems of wage theft in New Orleans should be minimized by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA).
Wage theft has been inconspicuous, but it came to light post-Katrina, and has become a tremendous problem. Countless …show more content…
This law has been amended numerous times. A provision needs to be made to have the FLSA to include independent contractors. Independent contractors need to be included in the FLSA, because the majority of the workers who work on the construction sites in New Orleans are independent contractors. At the state level, there is a law in progress, but it has not been passed yet. The FLSA amending their bill, will definitely have a positive effect on New Orleans, enabling more of their citizens who migrated out from Hurricane Katrina to come back to New Orleans, and also to help grow the economy. Reason being, is because those former citizens who relocated will see the law at work and the workers will also be able to recycle the money back into the economy. There may be difficulty of getting this law passed and amended because lawmakers will have to establish how to get the necessary information from employers to the workers. Similarly, there is the difficulty of those illegal workers who will not be able to get paid because they will be more than unlikely to get reimbursed, because they are not a citizen of the United …show more content…
Wage theft is not commonly found in the high class, but it is frequently a problem in the lower and middle class and those are the consumers who need to be paid the most. Waren wrote that an “[i]nvestigation of employee characteristics predicting wage theft revealed that foreign workers suffered nearly twice as many wage violations as native-born workers, women more likely to be victims of wage theft than men, and that African American workers were three times more likely to be victims of wage theft than white workers (Bernhardt et al. 2009; see also Milkman et al. 2010)” (Waren 8). To explain this, this quote shows that the majorities of the people that Americans consider to be lower and middle class are the ones pinpointed above, are usually the ones who have had problems against wage theft. For this reason, this FLSA bill needs to be amended in order for citizens to be fairly compensated. Likewise, this amendment needs to be made in order to keep the economy rolling in a positive