(C) Minnesota Reformer
This story was originally published by Minnesota Reformer and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Wage theft case is a test of whether we have two justice systems in America [1]
['More From Author', 'January', 'J. Patrick Coolican']
Date: 2024-01-23
Bosses at a dairy farm with operations in Stearns and Redwood counties have been housing their workers in barns and stealing their money, according to a recent civil suit filed by Attorney General Keith Ellison.
The alleged conduct isn’t necessarily surprising — we know labor and especially immigrant labor are exploited all the time. What’s truly alarming, though, given the allegations, is that detectives armed with search warrants haven’t shown up at Evergreen Acres Dairy scouring the place for evidence.
According to Ellison’s civil suit, the workers routinely put in 12 hour days, six days per week or even 13 out of 14 days in a pay period. They were supposed to earn between $12 and $17 per hour, but the company decided they were salaried, meaning: no overtime. You can imagine how the wage theft piled up given work weeks of 72-84 hours; indeed, Ellison says it’s the largest wage theft case in his office’s history at more than $3 million. Evergreen also systematically withheld first and final paychecks, while also shaving hours off timesheets, according to Ellison’s filing. Proving it won’t be easy because the company destroyed records like timecards, Ellison’s office alleges.
Evergreen, which is run by Keith Schaefer and his daughter Megan Hill, is also alleged by Ellison to have deducted pay from workers for rent in substandard company housing. They were uninhabitable — at least for humans — and fashioned out of barns. At least one of the rental units lacked a toilet. Cockroaches crawled around an old and rusted refrigerator. Bedrooms lacked windows and heat. The spaces were covered in mold and mildew.
Will there be a criminal investigation? It’s unclear, as the Reformer’s Max Nesterak reports today.
Minnesota has made great progress on wage theft, passing the toughest criminal statute in the country in 2019. Still, prosecutors have only brought a handful of cases, and if you think wage theft is that rare, I have a decrepit Blatnik Bridge to sell you.
Although police and prosecutors face proper constitutional hurdles in investigating and charging these crimes, I suspect the biggest obstacle is that wage theft isn’t considered theft in the public’s narrow moral imagination. A $3 million heist of a Minneapolis bank would make national news, whereas when the attorney general alleges a company stole $3 million from its workers, it doesn’t even make the front page of the Star Tribune.
That’s because we have two justice systems in this country: One for people who knock over a liquor store and come away with a few hundred dollars, and an entirely different one for people who steal millions from their own workers.
The first group is made up of poor people. Roughly 90% of people charged with crimes rely on a public defender. Someone who deals Oxycontin to support an Oxy habit, for instance.
Compare that Oxy dealer-addict to a company and its executives who develop and sell opioid medication and aggressively market vast quantities of their drugs to addicts, hurting countless families and communities. This second group, let’s call them white collar criminals, can afford fancy lawyers and use their political connections to avoid the kind of draconian consequences that befall regular criminals.
Why do we treat these two groups of people so differently?
Race and class surely play a role, as they often do in American life. In the case of the Evergreen Dairy, the alleged victims are mostly immigrants from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Ellison alleges that “after Schaefer physically threatened a coworker, Schaefer told Employee A that if he didn’t like how employees were treated at Evergreen he could ‘go back to Mexico.’”
But race isn’t the whole of it. The root of the problem is a bottomless well of propaganda about criminals and faux heroic capitalists, which shapes public consciousness about what constitutes a crime and who should be called a criminal.
After the movie “Wall Street” came out, you could buy a poster festooned with “greed is good,” the monologue of the criminal villain Gordon Gekko. In the public imagination, Gekko — not the machinist union man played by Martin Sheen — was the story’s hero. If Oliver Stone sought to show the moral bankruptcy of finance capitalism, he failed.
During his recent news conference announcing the alleged wage theft suit, Ellison turned to a more distant piece of pop culture, comparing the details of the Evergreen filing to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
I went and looked, and the resemblance is striking. In the 1905 novel, the Lithuanian immigrant family of Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite come to America for the false promise of riches, only to find themselves in the appalling living and working conditions of the Chicago stockyards, where Sinclair spent weeks researching his book. The family starts off in a shoddy tenement, where “a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double shifts of men” — just as Ellison alleges about Evergreen Dairy housing. One worker would leave his bed for his 12-hour day shift, and the bed would then be filled with another worker returning from his 12-hour night shift.
Sinclair describes the routine wage theft that workers had little choice but to endure; hundreds of other men desperate for work would replace them if they complained: “They did not pay for any fraction of an hour. … A man might work a full 50 minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him.”
We read “The Jungle” in high school less as literature than as a historic marker — it’s the beginning of the end of a monstrous, pre-modern past before a minimum wage, a weekend, job safety and all the other benefits of living in a rich, modern society.
But even this small — and ultimately inadequate — slice of human dignity was fought for over the bitter objections of capitalists and their ideological fellow travelers. It required decades of hard-fought victories by unions and progressive reformers and was never assured.
Once won, it’s not guaranteed in perpetuity. The human instinct for greed and cruelty didn’t magically dissipate with every new printing of “The Jungle.”
It skulks just below the surface, ready to exploit moral lassitude. If you don’t believe me, just read the civil suit, State of Minnesota v. Evergreen Acres Dairy.
The fight for human dignity goes on, day after day, without rest.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/01/23/wage-theft-case-shows-we-have-two-justice-systems-in-america/
Published and (C) by Minnesota Reformer
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/MnReformer/
