“You feel powerless,” said Luis Fonseca. “You see that companies are doing what they want and you can never do anything against them.” Fonseca is one of the workers who spent almost a year removing asbestos from the century-old headquarters of the United States General Services Administration. They should have earned $25.47 per hour but were only paid $15.84 an hour. Fonseca and 124 other workers filed a complaint with the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division in 2011, but six years later, the investigation remains open and the workers still haven’t gotten their back pay.
Their story is told in a terrific new report by the Center for Public Integrity: "Fleecing America’s builders; How workers on government construction jobs are victimized by contractors that stand little chance of being caught." We have a link to the full report on our website at dclabor.org Here’s today's labor history: On this date in 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—the Martin Luther King Jr. "I Have A Dream" speech march—was held in Washington, D.C., with 250,000 participating. The AFL-CIO did not endorse the march, but several affiliated unions did. Today’s labor quote is by John Lewis at the 1963 March on Washington. Then the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis is now the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district. John Lewis, who said: “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.”
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