Wage theft rife in oil and gas industry cheats workers out of millions

[Unregulated big business is NOT your friend - Bozo]
.
Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades)
Thursday, September 25, 2014, 7:14 pm
.
As my colleague Laura Clawson has repeatedly reported, wage theft is one of the nation's major rip-offs. Employers steal from fast-food employees and software engineers and Amazon warehouse workers. They don't call it stealing, of course.
.
A ProPublica review of U.S. Department of Labor investigations has found that the oil and gas industry is also rife with this kind of of corporate banditry. Naveena Sadasivam reports:
.

The DOL investigations have centered on what is known as worker "misclassification," an accounting gambit whereby companies treat full-time employees as independent contractors paid hourly wages, and then fail to make good on their obligations. The technique, investigators and experts say, has become ever more common as small companies seek to gain contracts in an intensely competitive market by holding labor costs down. [...]

.
In 2012, the DOL began a special enforcement initiative in its Northeast and Southwest regional offices targeting the fracking industry and its supporting industries. As of August this year, the agency has conducted 435 investigations resulting in over $13 million in back wages found due for more than 9,100 workers. ProPublica obtained data for 350 of those cases from the agency. In over a fifth of the investigations, companies in violation paid more than $10,000 in back wages.

[...]
{Source}