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Campaigns

Campaign to End Wage Robbery

The most frequent abuse of immigrant and temporary workers in RI is wage robbery, also known as non-payment of wages. This takes a number of forms: illegal deductions from paychecks, overtime hours paid as regular hours, paychecks that bounce, workers misclassified as independent contractors and not paid, workers told by their employer that they will be paid "next week" and after several weeks of free labor the employer disappears, and threats made by employers. In just one example, a temp agency in Pawtucket closed down in 2007 without paying an estimated 120 minimum wage workers. Some became homeless, others were arrested for their inability to pay child support after losing up to 5 weeks of pay. All were thrown into financial crisis. Despite the severity of the problem, the investigative unit of the RI Department of Labor and Training is criminally understaffed (there is currently ONE Labor Standards/ Wage and Hour Investigator for the whole state). In our campaign, we are working to expose wage robbery as a crisis in RI and build solidarity among workers to respond through direct action to unscrupulous employers.

Injured Worker Justice

Immigrant workers have the highest rate of workplace accidents of any group. This is due to a number of factors: working in dangerous industries, not receiving appropriate safety equipment, and not receiving safety training and information in their own language. Fuerza Laboral is part of the Immigrant Workers' Rights Project with the Institute for Labor Studies and Research and the Immigrants in Action Committee of St. Teresa's Church, which conducts trainings statewide on workplace accidents and workers' rights under the Workers' Compensation system. We are also a part of the Immigrant Worker Task Force at the RI Workers Compensation Court where we have a seat at the table to make the Workers' Compensation system more accessible to immigrant workers.

Fuerza Laboral's Theatre Brigade

Theatre can help us imagine how another world could be possible, it allows us to role play through difficult decisions or actions to prepare for the real thing, and it can be an educational tool to learn our rights and how to organize. Fuerza Laboral's Theatre Brigade, under the volunteer directorship of Maria Cristina Betancur, a founding member of Fuerza Laboral, does all of these things. We are currently rehearsing "El Raton y la Ratonera" (The Mouse and the Mousetrap), a fable about solidarity that stresses that our struggles are interconnected.