American workers are being robbed of millions of dollars in hard-earned wages each year, Kathy Mullady reports for Equal Voice News:

Workers nationwide are losing millions of dollars each week to wage theft as their employers, some unscrupulous, others scrambling to keep their businesses afloat, fail to pay the mandated minimum wage or overtime wages, or, in some cases, don’t pay their employees at all.

Wage theft is far more common than was known just a few years ago, according to a new report from the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University.

“Employers are under a tight squeeze and looking for different ways to save money. Some are using wage theft as a business model to cut costs,” said Cynthia Hernandez, co-author of the report.

The research institute’s study comes just as Florida is debating how to handle wage theft allegations. The state hasn’t had a labor department since former Gov. Jeb Bush dismantled the department a decade ago.

The U.S. Department of Labor has recovered an astonishing $28 million in stolen wages in Florida alone over the past two-and-a-half years, but that’s surely just a fraction of the total amount stolen in Florida alone. DOL can only enforce violations of federal law, and Florida has no state enforcement for wage theft. A recent study by the the National Employment Law Project estimated that workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are robbed of $56 million per week.

Read the rest at Facing South.

[Photo credit: Nisha A, Creative Commons.]