My latest labor column is out at Matter News! Learn more about the Pay Stub Protection Act

My latest labor column comes with a backstory:

A decade ago, back in Birmingham, I started doing some PR/communications work for a local social justice nonprofit. This nonprofit had a food pantry, they helped with utility assistance and emergency bills, they helped people secure housing and medication, and around the time I started freelancing for them, they’d recently begun taking on wage theft. The timing was due to the notoriously Republican Alabama legislature had passed a slate of anti-immigration laws and companies that commit wage theft often do so by preying on undocumented immigrants.

It’s not a stretch to say that undocumented immigrants experience a form of enslavement by companies because they’ll promise a certain pay rate, then systemically underpay, and if the worker complains, the company threatens to call ICE—and this happens in far more industries than you’d think. Because of the experience of getting to go out alongside community organizers and confront wage-thieving business owners, I’ve had a heart for victims of wage theft, so anytime I can cover something the Central Ohio Worker Center is doing, I will.

Give my latest a read. It’s full of juicy data and you’ll definitely learn something new.