February 23, 2018
Biography
David Cooper is a Senior Economic Analyst & Deputy Director of EARN. David conducts both national and state-level research, with a focus on the minimum wage, wage theft, employment and unemployment, poverty, and wage and income trends. He also coordinates and provides technical support to the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN), a national network of over 60 state-level policy research and advocacy organizations.
… wage theft can occur in a variety of different forms. It can be everything from a worker not being paid for all the hours that they’ve worked, to workers not getting overtime for working more than 40 hours per week, someone getting paid less than the minimum wage, even things like illegal deduction from folks’ paychecks or not getting meal breaks.The really egregious cases are when folks don’t get paid at all and believe or not, that happens more frequently than we certainly would like, particularly in certain industries where there’s a lot of use of, for example, immigrant labor or sub-contractors who may not be paid, not just for all the hours that that they work, but some of them don’t actually even get any of the money that they’re owed.