War on Employees:
Wage theft outstrips bank, gas station and convenience store robberies
Fully 64 percent of low-wage workers have some amount of pay stolen out of their paychecks by their employers every week, including 26 percent who are effectively paid less than minimum wage. Fully three-quarters of workers who are due overtime have part or all of their earned overtime wages stolen by their employer. In total, the average low-wage worker loses a stunning $2,634 per year in unpaid wages, representing 15 percent of their earned income.
And enforcement? Forget about it. At the federal level, there's just one agent enforcing wage laws for every 141,000 workers. More than half of the states have cut wage enforcement staff in recent years, and some states have tried to eliminate those positions entirely. For instance,
In 2010, Missouri’s labor department collected $200,000 in res ution for minimum-wage violations and $500,000 for prevailing-wage violations, and issued 1,714 citations for child-labor violations. Yet [Republican state House Speaker Steven] Tilley charged that investigators were being “overzealous,” particularly in prosecuting complaints of employers cheating on prevailing wages.
For many Republican politicians, crimes committed by employers against workers don't really register as crimes at all in our political environment. And while the Obama administration has cracked down, the back pay it's collected is just a drop in the bucket of what workers have earned that their employers have taken.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...ore-robberies#
and
IRS Warns Businesses, Individuals to Watch for Questionable Employment Tax Practices
The Internal Revenue Service issued a consumer alert today for eight schemes where federal employment taxes are not properly withheld or paid by employers from their employees’ paychecks. The IRS alert to business owners and other taxpayers follows a string of recent convictions and court rulings involving employment tax schemes.
“Failure to pay employment taxes is stealing from the employees of the business,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “The IRS pursues business owners who don’t follow the law, and those who embrace these schemes face civil or criminal sanctions.”
There are many reasons employers don’t withhold or pay employment taxes. For some, it may be an attempt to use the government as a bank to 'borrow the money for a short while' with good intentions to pay it back later. For others, it may be a situation where an employer collects the taxes and elects to keep it during a period of financial difficulty rather than pay it to the IRS. For a small number, it involves philosophical differences with the tax law of the United States that courts consistently reject. Regardless of the reason, federal law requires employment tax withholding and payment by employers.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/IRS-Warns-Bus...-Tax-Practices
Missouri "1,714 citations for child-labor violations" had the candidate or politician who proposed repealing all child labor laws.