Cheated at Work

This repo contains code and data for "Cheated at Work," a Center for Public Integrity investigation of the effectiveness of federal wage theft laws and the agency charged with enforcing them.

The series consists of four major stories:

• "Ripping off workers without consequences" published on May 4, 2021.

• "USPS has cheated mail carriers for years" published on August 31, 2021.

• "Wage theft hits immigrants — hard" published on October 14, 2021.

• "As guest workers increase, so do concerns about wage cheating" published on March 2, 2022.

All stories were published in partnership with The Associated Press and Univision.

Here's what's in this repo

wage_theft_repeat_violators.R

This R file contains code used to produce the analysis in "Ripping off workers without consequences."

wage_theft_immigrants.R

This R file contains code used to produce the analysis in "Wage theft hits immigrants — hard."

wage_theft_guest_workers.Rmd

This R Markdown file contains code used to produce the analysis in "As guest workers increase, so do concerns about wage cheating."

Some notes about the data

• The files relating to wage theft investigations in this repo's data folder were provided in response to a FOIA request to the U.S. Department of Labor completed on Dec. 10, 2020. The files contain investigations closed from Oct. 1, 2005 to Sept. 30, 2020.

• More information about the wage theft files can be found in the data dictionary in the data folder.

• The citizenship_industry.dat and citizenship_industry.xml files relating to the citizenship of particular industries' workforces come from IPUMS USA.

• The visas_by_type_and_year.xlsx file comes from the U.S. Department of State.

• More information about the data reporting behind this series, including challenges we faced and key findings, can be found here.

Questions?

For questions about the contents of this repo, email Joe Yerardi at [email protected].

License & Attribution

This data is being released under a CC BY 4.0 license. You are free to copy, redistribute and adapt this data. All that we ask is that you provide appropriate credit and a link to this license. You can view the full LICENSE here.