Jim Stillman
Nevar
Government welfare available . . . but only to the “worthy” few.
July 19th 2008 15:48
One of the persistent assertions of conservative pundits and those who get their news and opinions from Fox News (radio and television) and the various talk show hosts on Clear Channel is that liberals are in favor of indiscriminate welfare programs. The analogy is of the ancient Romans’ “bread and circuses” whereby the masses re kept quiet, satisfied and lazy by governmental benefits. The work ethic is destroyed and the nation is weakened. The next thing that happens is socialism, communism, and endemic acne. (OK, the last is hyperbole but if The New Yorker can try, so may I.)
The only problem with that scenario is that it does not reflect reality.
We have become accustomed in the United States to a government that disdains welfare for the poor, who by definition are “unappreciative” and “unworthy”. We are shown Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen, grossly overweight and the third or fourth generation receiving welfare, subsidized housing and food stamps. The Truth: The primary beneficiaries of welfare, certainly on the federal level, are wealthy mis-managed corporations. As I will discuss, the average guy very short shrift from Washington.
Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quickly fashioned a plan to keep mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac liquid and solvent by using billions in taxpayer loans and guarantees. Within the past few months, the Feds came to the rescue of Bear Stearns (after indicting several corporate officers), providing financial support to JPMorgan Chase. Other major Wall Street investment banks have received Federal support following irresponsible bets on subprime mortgages. The Fed jumped to open its discount window allowing them to borrow money using their near worthless securities as collateral.
Investment interests falter and our government is nimble and responsive.
But when the lowest paid workers in our nation are cheated out of their modest wages, the lifeboat, it seems, is full.
Reports from the Government Accountability Office released last week provide dramatic proof of this Administration’s setting of priorities. The Government Accountability Office [GAO] is a non-partisan audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress., established in 1921 and is charged with the duty of being the “watchdog” of the public purse.
The reviews reflect the way workers' complaints have been mishandled and ignored by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department. The two reports released last week highlight the way the division has failed to follow through on valid complaints, particularly for low-wage workers, leaving some cheated out of thousands of dollars in earned wages.
More than 130-million workers in America rely on the Wage and Hour Division to enforce laws that mandate overtime pay and minimum wages. But they had better not depend on it.
Over the last 10 years, the number of enforcement actions has been reduced by more than a third, which GAO partly attributes to a declining number of investigators on the job.
Just to give you a sense of how uninterested government has become to the plight of underpaid workers, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, gathered these data. In 1941 the division conducted 48,000 on-site investigations of businesses in industries known to play “games” with workers’ pay... Fifteen hundred investigators visited one in every 10 businesses annually, helping to keep things honest. Today, the division has just 732 enforcement staffers who conduct fewer than 30,000 investigations per year. They are able to contact about one-third of 1 percent of businesses, mostly by phone.
"There is a crisis in the quantity of wages being stolen and an inability of the department to respond," Kim Bobo, of the Interfaith Worker Justice organization, says.
At her group's 19 worker centers around the country, 90 percent of the employees who come in seeking help have suffered wage theft. "They were either not paid for all their hours worked, not paid for valid overtime or, in the case of day laborers, not paid at all.”
The GAO reports document some of these cases.
In one, rather than assist a homeless employee owed thousands of dollars in back wages for work at an assisted living facility, she was told to find a private attorney to file suit. The agency dropped the complaint because the employer said in August 2006 that it was unable to pay the wages owed. Yet the GAO found that the facility was still operating as of June 2008.
In another case, a delivery driver for an alcohol distributor with $25-million in annual net sales was not paid overtime. It took 17 months for the agency to assign an investigator to the complaint that was dropped six months later for possibly having passed the two-year statute of limitations.
When the division does follow through on complaints, the Reports continue, it will often obtain only a portion of what's owed the employee as a "settlement." That means an employer who gets caught stealing wages suffers no downsides.
The low-wage employees who work in construction, home health care, hotels and restaurants, and such, can't feasibly hire a lawyer to get back the few hundred or thousand dollars owed them. The government has to do it.
And there's the problem. There always seems to be plenty of money and will to rescue financial giants whose investments (gambles) turn sour, but when the working stiffs of America need help to get paid, our government doesn't have enough resources to help.
It is no secret that one of the purposes of the Reagan-Bush-Phil Gramm tax cuts was to starve the Federal government so as to eliminate programs that did not serve to make the rich richer.
Maybe, just maybe, the American public has learned the lesson.
The only problem with that scenario is that it does not reflect reality.
We have become accustomed in the United States to a government that disdains welfare for the poor, who by definition are “unappreciative” and “unworthy”. We are shown Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen, grossly overweight and the third or fourth generation receiving welfare, subsidized housing and food stamps. The Truth: The primary beneficiaries of welfare, certainly on the federal level, are wealthy mis-managed corporations. As I will discuss, the average guy very short shrift from Washington.
Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quickly fashioned a plan to keep mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac liquid and solvent by using billions in taxpayer loans and guarantees. Within the past few months, the Feds came to the rescue of Bear Stearns (after indicting several corporate officers), providing financial support to JPMorgan Chase. Other major Wall Street investment banks have received Federal support following irresponsible bets on subprime mortgages. The Fed jumped to open its discount window allowing them to borrow money using their near worthless securities as collateral.
Investment interests falter and our government is nimble and responsive.
But when the lowest paid workers in our nation are cheated out of their modest wages, the lifeboat, it seems, is full.
Reports from the Government Accountability Office released last week provide dramatic proof of this Administration’s setting of priorities. The Government Accountability Office [GAO] is a non-partisan audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress., established in 1921 and is charged with the duty of being the “watchdog” of the public purse.
The reviews reflect the way workers' complaints have been mishandled and ignored by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department. The two reports released last week highlight the way the division has failed to follow through on valid complaints, particularly for low-wage workers, leaving some cheated out of thousands of dollars in earned wages.
More than 130-million workers in America rely on the Wage and Hour Division to enforce laws that mandate overtime pay and minimum wages. But they had better not depend on it.
Over the last 10 years, the number of enforcement actions has been reduced by more than a third, which GAO partly attributes to a declining number of investigators on the job.
Just to give you a sense of how uninterested government has become to the plight of underpaid workers, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, gathered these data. In 1941 the division conducted 48,000 on-site investigations of businesses in industries known to play “games” with workers’ pay... Fifteen hundred investigators visited one in every 10 businesses annually, helping to keep things honest. Today, the division has just 732 enforcement staffers who conduct fewer than 30,000 investigations per year. They are able to contact about one-third of 1 percent of businesses, mostly by phone.
"There is a crisis in the quantity of wages being stolen and an inability of the department to respond," Kim Bobo, of the Interfaith Worker Justice organization, says.
At her group's 19 worker centers around the country, 90 percent of the employees who come in seeking help have suffered wage theft. "They were either not paid for all their hours worked, not paid for valid overtime or, in the case of day laborers, not paid at all.”
The GAO reports document some of these cases.
In one, rather than assist a homeless employee owed thousands of dollars in back wages for work at an assisted living facility, she was told to find a private attorney to file suit. The agency dropped the complaint because the employer said in August 2006 that it was unable to pay the wages owed. Yet the GAO found that the facility was still operating as of June 2008.
In another case, a delivery driver for an alcohol distributor with $25-million in annual net sales was not paid overtime. It took 17 months for the agency to assign an investigator to the complaint that was dropped six months later for possibly having passed the two-year statute of limitations.
When the division does follow through on complaints, the Reports continue, it will often obtain only a portion of what's owed the employee as a "settlement." That means an employer who gets caught stealing wages suffers no downsides.
The low-wage employees who work in construction, home health care, hotels and restaurants, and such, can't feasibly hire a lawyer to get back the few hundred or thousand dollars owed them. The government has to do it.
And there's the problem. There always seems to be plenty of money and will to rescue financial giants whose investments (gambles) turn sour, but when the working stiffs of America need help to get paid, our government doesn't have enough resources to help.
It is no secret that one of the purposes of the Reagan-Bush-Phil Gramm tax cuts was to starve the Federal government so as to eliminate programs that did not serve to make the rich richer.
Maybe, just maybe, the American public has learned the lesson.
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