Word: bernhardt
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...There are plenty of responsible employers in these low wage industries who are trying to do the right thing and comply with our labor laws," says Annette Bernhardt, the study's author and deputy director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program. "But they're starting to come under pressure from unscrupulous employers, and they're getting dragged down in a race to the bottom, which is bad for our entire labor market...
...Bernhardt and her coauthors found that restaurateurs themselves readily acknowledged that overtime and other violations were widespread. A study conducted by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a worker advocacy group, found that 13% of workers earned less than the minimum wage, and 59% had suffered overtime violations, having pay withheld for extra hours of work. The average dishwasher makes just $180 to $300 a week for 50 to 80 hours on the job. Delivery people typically make just $120 to $200 for a similar number of hours, plus tips that can vary widely. Restaurant owners are required...
...that office alone is unlikely to remedy the broader problem of underpaid, undervalued work in urban restaurants. "They are not isolated, short-lived cases of exploitation at the fringe of the city's economy," writes Bernhardt in the report. "Instead, the systematic violation of our country's core employment and labor laws ... is threatening to become a way of doing business for unscrupulous employers. And yet from the standpoint of public policy, these jobs - and the workers who hold them - are too often off the radar screen...
...fights like this, retailers use the exit threat, then stay and expand," says Annette Bernhardt, a labor expert at New York University Law School. One of Target's most successful units is in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, and studies suggest there's $1.3 billion in untapped spending on the city's North Side and West Side alone. That, says Dorian Warren, a politics professor at Columbia University, "is going to be worth far more than the $10 wage costs them...
...improved anything. Terrorism is still a threat, and the Iraqis are still unhappy. For the sake of the future, I hope Americans will see the larger picture when voting in 2004 and, while naturally considering their own interests, acknowledge those of the rest of the world. WILLIAM A. BERNHARDT Geneva...