America’s largest retailers – including Lowe’s, Target, Amazon, H&M, Home Depot, Ikea, and Ross Dress for Less – have spent millions promoting their “commitment” to safe workplaces and fair treatment of workers in their offshore supply chains. However, retailers’ commitment to safe and fair working conditions in their supply chains stops when their imports are boxed up and loaded onto a container ship headed for the U.S. Once on U.S. shores, the cargo is hauled by truck drivers, and handled by warehouse workers, who are suffering from egregious wage theft and unsafe and filthy working conditions that no worker – overseas or in America – should have to endure.

Retailers can no longer pretend that misclassification, wage theft, and inhumane working conditions in the U.S. are not their problem. With the explosion of wage theft class action lawsuits – skyrocketing 358% over the past 15 years – supply chain workers in the U.S. are demanding change. New laws raise the specter of joint client liability, and new rulings, including the August 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that a Silicon Valley recycling center was a “joint employer,” have eviscerated corporate America’s ability to ignore law-breaking in their U.S. supply chain.

One of the causes for the flood of wage and hour litigation is a crackdown on the spread of illegal worker misclassification. Nowhere has worker misclassification been more pronounced than at our country’s seaports, where truck drivers who haul our nation’s imports and exports have been subjected to systematic wage theft through a misclassification scheme, which can leave drivers owing their trucking company money after working a full week because deductions for diesel fuel, insurance, lease payments, and new tires amounted to more than their gross earnings for the week.

Port truck drivers are challenging their misclassified status and attempting to recover stolen wages by filing claims. At our nation’s largest port complex, the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, drivers are particularly activated:

• Since 2011, 705 port truck drivers have filed wage and hour claims at the California Department of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE).
• Every case adjudicated to date has been found in favor of drivers’ claims of misclassification and wage theft. The average award per driver is approximately $110,000 per driver.
• There are at least 21 pending class action lawsuits, and numerous individual lawsuits, that have been filed against large port trucking companies for wage theft and illegal misclassification of drivers covering more than 3,000 current and former misclassified port truck drivers.
• The U.S. Department of Labor and the California Attorney General have filed misclassification lawsuits against major California port trucking companies.
• The National Employment Law Project (NELP) estimates that port trucking companies in California are annually liable for wage and hour violations of between $780 million and $998 million each year.

Please tell all of your retailers – particularly those that contract with port trucking companies like Container Connection and the California Cartage family of companies – that they can make a difference by telling their vendors to Stop Wage Theft and end the abusive practices that have helped fuel the onslaught of wage and hour litigation in the United States. There are good, law-abiding vendors ready, willing, and able to take the work now!

cc: Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, H&M Chief Executive Officer Karl-Johan Perssson, Home Depot Chief Executive Officer Craig A. Menear, Ikea Chief Executive Officer Petr Agnefjall, Lowes Chief Executive Officer Robert A. Niblock, Ross Chief Executive Officer Barbara Rentler, Target Chief Executive Officer Brian C. Cornell