Stealing Day Laborers’ Wages Could Worsen Due to ICE Raids, Researchers Warn

Alex finds temporary work as a business promoter in Oakland. It’s a difficult job, he said, that sometimes involves wearing a costume with little “protection” to draw people to businesses or events, sometimes in uncomfortable heat.

What makes his work more challenging, he told KQED in Spanish, is that his employers have on many occasions tried to pay him less than the minimum wage or deny him breaks or overtime pay.

“If a boss says they’re not going to pay me the same day of the job, then I don’t work. I refuse to work,” Alex said. He asked not to use his last name due to concerns of retaliation.

A report released Thursday showed that Oakland’s day laborers suffer widespread wage theft and labor violations, but few report it.

Fewer than a dozen advocates gathered before Oakland City Hall to share their findings on Thursday. The report focused on Oakland but stemmed from a statewide survey of day laborers — workers seeking temporary employment in informal settings, like landscaping and construction — conducted by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network last October.

Of the 138 Oakland workers surveyed, nearly one in three reported experiencing some form of wage theft, and one in four reported getting paid less than had been agreed upon in the previous two months. Workers rarely tried to file claims over the theft, researchers added, often due to a lack of awareness or confidence in their ability to recoup their lost pay, or fears of retaliation and deportation.

“Even among those who have attempted to recover [wages], an even lower percentage have actually done it,” said Nik Theodore, the report’s main author and director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “So our systems really are failing day laborers and are allowing this kind of abuse to continue.”

Theodore said common tactics of wage theft include employers promising to pay their workers at the end of the day or the end of a multi-day project, then abandoning the worker at the job site once the work is completed, or complaining about the quality of the work and trying to pay less than agreed upon.

Sometimes, Theodore said, employers pay a portion of the promised wage, but delay full payment to string along the worker.

“The day laborer has a choice: ‘Do I walk away from this job and lose the money that I am owed, or do I stay with it with the hopes of recovering those wages?’” Theodore said.

Surveyed workers reported that the average theft amount in the previous two months was over $1,300. Researchers said that the high figure is due in part to the fact that workers stay with a job over multiple days, expecting employers to eventually pay out.

Both Alex and Theodore said it’s not uncommon for employers to threaten to report workers to immigration authorities in order to get away with wage theft.

This concern has only increased with increasing immigration enforcement actions, some of which have included locations where day laborers gather, like Home Depot locations in Southern California.

“Those threats of turning workers over to the immigration authorities have increased force,” Theodore said. “And so unscrupulous employers feel emboldened even more so now than ever.”