Working Long Hours With No Overtime

Re “Working Longer--for Less?” June 11: On reading your article on employers who are compelling their workers to work unpaid overtime, my first reaction was outrage at these employers. But then I reflected on the business environment where most of these employers operate today; the penalty for having higher labor costs than competitors may well be that you go out of business, while the penalty for violating labor laws is usually no more than a slap on the wrist. In such an environment, a business that tries to obey the law will either be outcompeted by its lawbreaking competitors and disappear, or be forced into violating the law.

The greatest blame lies not with a businessman who does what is necessary to stay in business, but rather with those politicians who support weak penalties for violators and funding cuts for the agencies that enforce labor laws--rather than vigorous enforcement policies that would give the advantage to law-abiding businesses. And some share of that blame must also rest at the feet of those voters who, seduced by promises of “less regulation” and “lower taxes,” give their support to such politicians.

LORIN KUSMIN

Alexandria, Va.

As a private investigator specializing in this area, I am glad to see The Times has found that wage problems are not the exclusive province of garment sweatshops. In fact, sweatshop violations form a minuscule portion of overall violations on both state and federal levels. The real hotbed of overtime and wage cheating has always been in retail, with construction a close second and office workers pulling up behind. Once an aberration, wage cheating has become settled practice among employers.

Corporate lawyers claim that unions create violations out of whole cloth to bash nonunion firms. The truth is that the unions must pursue violators on their own, or watch the law-abiding sector of industry go under. It speaks volumes about current enforcement that I and many others can make a living doing what the state and federal government used to do so well--protecting basic worker rights on the job.

Every year I bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages for workers, many of whom had no success dealing with the state’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. In the modern workplace, as in criminal law, it is becoming a truism that you get no more justice than you can afford. Is anybody listening?

MICHAEL J. McGRORTY

Altadena

Corporate claims that overtime violations are “isolated incidents” are only relevant in that their being caught was an “isolated incident.”

RAYMOND R. NEWBY

Rancho Palos Verdes