After President Obama's call for a higher federal minimum wage, much of the public debate over the proposal, including on this blog, has focused on the impact of the minimum wage on the labor market and on business profits. But a new study funded by the Foundation suggests that the potential disemployment effects of a minimum wage hike -- if any -- should be only one part of a wider discussion of working conditions in the low-wage sector. Using a novel measurement technique, the study investigates how many employers in low-wage industries pay the existing minimum wage -- and its results are quite sobering.

In their article in the latest Social Forces, Annette Bernhardt, Michael Spiller and Diana Polson draw from a landmark representative survey of frontline workers in low-wage industries to reveal disturbingly high rates of workplace violations, including minimum wage, overtime and other employment laws. The study is especially notable because measuring labor law violations is notoriously difficult: low-wage workers are hard to reach (and to accurately sample), and employers are unlikely to admit to breaking labor laws. For their data, the authors rely on the 2008 Unregulated Work Survey, which used Respondent-Driven Sampling to reach more than 4,300 workers in low-wage industries in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. The authors summarize their conclusions:

We found high violation rates of a wide range of employment and labor laws, with fully 67.5 percent of our sample having experienced at least one form of wage theft in the previous work week. We also document high rates of employer retaliation when workers made a complaint or tried to organize a union, and a workers' compensation system that is essentially nonfunctional in this part of the labor market. These prevalence rates, combined with the substantial amount of stolen wages (15% of wages due, on average), suggests that workplace violations are becoming standard practice in the low-wage labor market.

Here is a table that lists key workplace violations:

The findings suggest that setting a higher minimum wage rate needs to be coupled with more attention to enforcement and compliance rates. As the authors write, "While researchers to date have largely focused on declines in normative workplace standards—such as living wages, employer-provided benefits, job security and promotions—it may well be that going forward, legal workplace standards will increasingly become the contested terrain of labor relations in the United States, in what has been called the "gloves-off economy."

Read the full study: "All Work and No Pay: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City."