Opinion | H R 1 Is a Non-Solution to a Non-Crisis politico.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from politico.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Hans Bader | June 3, 2021 | 10:55am EDT
Lady Justice holds her scales. (Photo credit: LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images)
Left-wing reform prosecutors want more criminal prosecutions of businesses for red-tape violations and so-called “wage theft,” and fewer felony prosecutions of criminals for stealing from businesses and homeowners (such as shoplifting, which some leftist prosecutors have essentially stopped prosecuting, resulting in an explosion of shoplifting).
Prosecuting wage theft was one of the campaign planks of Arlington, Va. Commonwealth s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, a progressive Democrat who unseated a moderate Democrat incumbent in the 2019 primary election. In her campaign, she said she wanted to prioritize prosecuting wage theft, even while complaining that Arlington prosecuted felonies at a much higher rate than neighboring jurisdictions like Alexandria. She also called for more use of restorative ju
State and local prosecutors across the United States are increasingly bringing criminal charges against employers who violate their workers’ rights by stealing wages or providing unsafe work environments, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive, Washington DC-based think-tank.
“This is happening now in large part because worker organisations – like unions and advocacy groups – have pushed for it in many instances. This is happening now also because we have in our country a growing understanding of how extreme workplace violations have become,” Terri Gerstein, a senior fellow at EPI and the report’s author, told Al Jazeera.