It's rare for business owners to be charged with crimes for labor law violations, even though bosses steal—yes, steal—huge amounts of money from workers every year in unpaid overtime, time spent working off the clock, and more. But Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced grand larceny, insurance fraud and scheme to defraud charges for the owners, managers, and accountants of a construction company doing concrete work on a midtown Manhattan luxury condo building.
Overall, the theft totaled $1.7 million stolen from 520 workers over three years, and the company hid wages it did pay from the state to avoid workers’ compensation premiums.
At a news conference announcing the arrests, Mr. Vance said the victims were especially vulnerable to exploitation because they were not in unions and did not have immigration papers. “Often it’s the very people who are tasked with building this great city who are the most vulnerable to fraud from their managers and employers,” Mr. Vance said.
Yeah, and too few prosecutors will take this step of actually filing charges for employers’ crimes. For that matter, would charges have been filed here if there hadn’t been insurance fraud involved? Vance should feel free to prove that they would have been by charging a few more bosses on wage theft—guaranteed they will not be too hard to find.
● "No-fault" attendance policies penalize pregnant women and anyone who gets sick:
No-fault policies punish tardiness and absence with demerit “points” and, at a certain threshold, result in termination.
That’s exactly what happened to our clients Katia Hills and Cynthia Allen, whose pregnancies cost them their sales jobs with AT&T Mobility. Today, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project joined the law firms of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Indianapolis-based Cohen and Malad to file a nationwide class-action lawsuit charging that AT&T Mobility’s no-fault attendance policies for retail employees violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The suit also brings individual claims on Hills’s and Allen’s behalf under the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
● South Carolina legislators take on pregnancy discrimination. The United States Congress, on the other hand …
● The North Carolina teachers revolt was decades in the making.
● Serfdom in the Magic Kingdom. Disney workers rise up against poverty wages.
● The “closed ideological loop” of MBA programs and what that says about America's elite.
● A look back at what may have been the first teachers strike in the U.S.
● Federal court deals a blow to Uber, Lyft drivers trying to unionize in Seattle.
● A coworker of Mark Janus, the named plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that could deal a major blow to unions, explains how Janus benefits from a strong union.
● Any educational reform that ignores segregation is doomed to failure.
● Puerto Rico: The teacher uprising the media is ignoring.