The latest report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) stated that state and local attorneys across the United States are increasingly filing criminal charges against employers who violate their workers’ rights by stealing wages or providing unsafe working conditions. .

“This is happening largely because worker organizations (such as trade unions and advocacy groups) are working hard for this in many cases. EPI and reportThe author told Al Jazeera.

Gerstein said that prosecutors are also rethinking their roles and thinking about how to pursue prosecutorial powers by prosecuting bosses who violate the law in order to seek economic and social justice.

Gerstein’s paper is the second in EPI’s “New Enforcer” series, which focuses on state and local participants who are committed to safeguarding and promoting employee rights.This First The report released last year was also written by Gerstein, which advocates increasing state and local enforcement of workers’ rights.

The cases filed by state and local attorneys mainly target workplace crimes, including wage theft, classification of workers as independent contractors, wage fraud, labor trafficking, workplace sexual assault and unsafe working conditions.

Not everyone agrees that adding local and state prosecutors to deal with more workplace violations will ultimately benefit workers.

“[EPI] I try to put together with other things that everyone I know considers to be a serious crime. In my opinion, these things should not be classified as a crime, or sometimes it is not clear enough to define whether you commit a crime,” Walter Olson, a senior researcher at the Cato Institute, a liberal think tank, told Al Jazeera.

Olsen agreed with the report’s premise that wage theft, workers’ compensation insurance fraud and workplace sexual assault are serious crimes. But he said that in some cases, certain employers may misclassify workers as independent contractors because they “cannot figure out what the law requires.”

He said: “Many of these things are out of touch with the so-called “threshold” of the criminal law tradition, that is, “you know this is wrong, anyway you did it.”

Accountability system: transfer to state and local

Theft of wages (an employer’s refusal to pay the wages owed) is a multi-billion dollar crime.

According to the ten most populous states in the United States, 2.4 million workers lose 8 billion U.S. dollars per year due to violations of minimum wage regulations, or 3,300 U.S. dollars each year-nearly a quarter of their wages. 2017 EPI report.

Gerstein also said that in the past few decades, wage theft and other crimes against workers have not been part of the traditional practice of prosecutors. He is also responsible for the state and local law enforcement programs of the Harvard Law School Labor and Work Life Program. people.

She added that traditional methods are insufficient to address such violations of workers through government agencies with insufficient funds and resources.

In the past 40 years, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hourly Workers Division, which is responsible for enforcing federal wage and hour laws, has cut resources. In 1978, there was one investigator for every 69,000 workers in the department. According to EPI data, by 2018, its labor force investigators will be for every 175,000 workers.

Gerstein said: “The economy has grown significantly, but the ability to strengthen institutions has not.” “There are many people who cannot get remedies because of serious violations of the law at work.”

She went on to say that the decline in union density in the United States has also contributed to the high rate of violations we see today.

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1983 was the first year that union data was obtained, and the union membership rate was 20.1%. By 2020, the proportion of workers joining the union is only 10.8%.

The United States (at the federal and state levels) has expanded a range of worker protections, including paid wages and working hours, and workplace safety hazards. It also guarantees economic safety in the event of injury, unemployment, discrimination or sexual harassment.

But according to EPI, employers have also become shrewd in using mandatory arbitration clauses, which deprive workers of the right to take their bosses to court. Compulsory arbitration is an agreement signed between an employee and an employer, which promises that even if a dispute occurs, the employee will not file a lawsuit.

According to the 2018 EPI, more than half of all private sector non-union workers or 56.2% of employers require their employers to sign a mandatory arbitration agreement report.