During the golden age of the Village Voice, New York’s genre-defining alt-weekly, journalists Jack Newfield and Tom Robbins compiled annual lists of the city’s worst landlords to run in the paper. The feature’s popularity led Newfield to add a spin-off: New York’s worst judges, featuring mug shots shaming these crooked perverters of justice. The worst judges landed Newfield in legal trouble himself. As Martin Garbus, the paper’s lawyer, told Newfield after publication, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is the bar association is starting an investigation because of your article. The bad news is they are investigating you, not the judges.”
The spirit of that list lives on in New York City today. The city’s public advocate’s office compiles a worst landlords list annually. And we now have a new worst-of list, courtesy of the city’s comptroller’s office: New York’s worst employers.
In addition to the Employer Wall of Shame (inspired by similar tools in New Jersey and Suffolk County, New York), the comptroller’s office debuted a comprehensive labor-violations dashboard. Accessible online, the tool tracks businesses’ violations of a range of workers’ rights and protections, including workplace health and safety violations, wage theft, prevailing wage violations, illegal union busting, discrimination, and harassment.
“When companies steal their workers wages, commit unfair labor practices, or put workers’ lives at risk, the public should be able to clearly see it,” Comptroller Brad Lander said of the new resource. “By launching this dashboard, my office is making it possible to identify bad actors across multiple violations of workplace laws. This tool can serve as a resource for workers, customers, neighbors, and other businesses as they are looking to work with employers who respect workers’…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Alex N. Press
