Texas Workforce Commission years behind on recovering back wages for workers, report finds ( www.dallasnews.com )

According to a new study by Rutgers University’s Workplace Justice Lab@RU in partnership with the Workers Defense Project, Torres is among the 3 million Texas workers that have been paid less than the stagnant $7.25 an hour minimum wage between 2009 and 2022. Some of them have outstanding wages ordered from the TWC that have not been collected from employers.

While nearly $99 million in wages were ordered across more than 57,000 cases from 2010 to 2020, according to the report, 80% of those payments have yet to be received by workers.

Wage theft is persistent across Texas, costing individual workers nearly $4,000 a year on average in minimum wage violations, and over $12 billion as a group over the last 14 years.

“Unfortunately, our findings demonstrate that the Texas Workforce Commission has failed to recover tens of millions of dollars, allowing non-compliant employers to violate workers’ rights with impunity,” said Jenn Round, director of the labor standards enforcement program for the Workplace Justice Lab@RU. “This inaction leaves low-wage workers vulnerable to exploitation and puts compliant employers at a disadvantage.”

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

Its crazy how this is theft and nobody that committed it is going to prison.

keeb420 ,

Another reason why Texas is the one star state.

Infinity187 ,

It’s Texas, I guarantee they don’t give two shits about getting that out. At some point, this fact must have come across Gimp Abbott’s desk, and he threw it in the trash.

queermunist ,
@queermunist@lemmy.ml avatar

“Behind” implies they actually intend to help all workers.

scoobford ,

They likely do. While they are extremely ineffectual, our state assistance agencies are staffed by very well intentioned people.

The problem is the corruption at the top, in political positions, and the idiots thinking they should pull the ladder up behind them by defunding everything that isn’t a police or roadway agency.

queermunist ,
@queermunist@lemmy.ml avatar

The intentions of the staff are irrelevant. They work for the TWC and they follow orders, and the commission has no intention to help.

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