OSCAR PERRY ABELLO
MARCH 3, 2020
Nadia Hewka has been fighting against wage theft pretty much since the day she first came to work at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia – in 1997. Then, the term “wage theft” wasn’t yet the established term. The going phrase at the time was “underpayment of wages.”
“It just doesn’t capture what’s happening,” Hewka says. “People’s labor and hours and time are being stolen when their wages are stolen.”
Wage theft comes in a few different forms. Employers may refuse to pay workers, pay them less than minimum wage, refuse to pay overtime, undercount workers’ hours or otherwise fail to pay workers for hours that qualify as work under the law. Employers may require workers to work before and after their shifts or before or after they have clocked in, without compensation.
All those forms of wage theft are already illegal, by state or federal law, or both. But enforcing those laws has been another story. Enforcing worker rights, from wage theft and beyond, has long depended on victims taking employers to court. Often, employers don’t get caught because not every wage-theft victim has the time and resources to meet with lawyers, give extensive depositions and go through a legal battle in court.
Wage theft most affects low-wage workers. In a landmark 2015 study from the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Beasley School of Law, which looked at wage theft across Pennsylvania, researchers found that in the five-county Philadelphia metropolitan area alone, every year an estimated 128,476 low-wage workers experienced minimum wage violations, 105,458 experienced overtime nonpayment violations, and 83,344 experienced off-the-clock violations. That report helped fuel the campaign in 2016 to finally make wage theft illegal at the local level in Philadelphia.