As we kick off the new year, lots of places give away pocket-sized paper calendars with their logos–banks, churches, tax and insurance offices, and stores. They are also easy to find in your local dollar store or corner bodega. With the popularity of smartphones with built in calendars, they’re not as popular as they used to be, but these pocket calendars can be a powerful tool to help you recover stolen wages.

Fuerza Laboral’s first and longest-running campaign has been the fight against wage theft, and it is the most common labor abuse by far for which people come to us for help. We submit hundreds of wage theft complaints to the RI Department of Labor and Training and the US Department of Labor. The hardest thing about filing a complaint is when the worker doesn’t have a good record of their hours worked–both regular and overtime.

The flip side of this is that employers who commit wage theft frequently don’t keep good records either. If they did keep records while stealing wages, the numbers just wouldn’t add up. We can use this to our advantage.

If the employer doesn’t have reliable wage and hour records and a worker does, the worker’s record is taken as fact in a wage theft case. Taking just 30 seconds at the end of each work day to note your hours worked is all it takes to create this record.

What you should keep track of:

Each day, write down three things on your calendar:

The worksite address and city (if your worksite changes),
The time you started work,
The time you ended work.

It will look something like this:

Make sure to also document:

The first and last name of your employer
The phone or cell number of the employer
Name and address of the company or temp agency that gives you a work assignment.

The US Department of Labor suggests keeping track of your breaks, but if this extra bit of documentation is enough to discourage you from keeping your daily record, don’t worry about it. It’s extremely unlikely your supervisor is going to let you take a break that’s longer than your legal minimum break time when you are a wage worker.

The time you spend driving or getting transportation from your house to work and back home does not count towards your hourly wages, but any time you spend driving or being transported between worksites, or from the office/garage you report to at the beginning of the day to a worksite, counts as working time.

Ultimately, our power as workers comes from our solidarity with each other, from our willingness to stand up for and with each other in the face of injustice, and to be part of organizations which help us build our collective power. This includes worker centers like Fuerza Laboral, forming or joining a union, or launching a worker-owned cooperative. If you are experiencing injustice on the job and want to learn how to organize with your coworkers, or how to start a co-op and own the fruits of your labor, contact us.

But keeping a written record in a calendar can be a key tool in helping you recover stolen wages if you experience wage theft.

On October 5th, 2023, Fuerza Laboral celebrated our 17th Anniversary with a milestone event: the inauguration of our very own building, which we purchased this past summer, thanks to a loan from the Cooperative Fund of the North East and a grant from the US Department of Agriculture. This purchase has us reflecting on the nature of ownership.

Over our seventeen year history, we have been housed in some pretty diverse places. In the nine-month gestation period prior to birthing Fuerza Laboral, the George Wiley Center, a direct action economic justice organization, gave us space to meet, dream and plan in their office in Pawtucket. When we launched, the Catholic Diocese of Providence gave us significantly below-market rent in our first office, subleasing from their social services program, Project Hope. But when Project Hope moved, we had a slumlord who didn’t respond to calls when the heat went out, and who rented the shared space (that once housed a food pantry and social services) to a pawn shop. On multiple occasions, we arrived at the office to find the door that separated our spaces broken. Needing to get out quickly, we then spent a year working out of borrowed space in two janitor’s closets, keeping the doors open for air.

Our next rental was a room in an old factory on Clay Street, with a high ceiling, enormous windows and a floor polished smooth with a hundred years of sweat and machine grease rubbed into it by the soles of workers’ shoes. We could hold meetings of over a hundred people in that space (and did), but we had to wear coats and hats and huddle around space heaters in the winter, and run a noisy industrial floor fan all day in the summer, that made one-on-one conversations difficult, let alone membership meetings. Our last office was in the same mill building, and luckily there was more temperature control, but it was far too small to house our vision, our growing projects, and the network of co-ops we work with.

For a long time, we’ve been wanting to own our own building. Part of this desire was for stability; to not be at the mercy of landlords with regards to maintenance, health and safety, and constant rent hikes. But there is something else:

We subscribe to a different vision of what ownership can be.

As a workers’ rights organization, we see a strong connection between housing and labor injustice. In our society we are generally forced to sell our labor to a boss, and then rent our housing from a business. Our labor and our rented housing both become objects for purchase. The worker / renter exists solely to make profit for the owner, and as much profit as possible. Anything that doesn’t increase profits, like health and safety, or fairness, is often seen as a distraction.

In organizing for justice, we have seen many times over, employers who threaten workers with physical violence and exploitation of people’s marginalized statuses to coerce and terrify them to work in terrible conditions for low-to-no pay. But we don’t have to accept this as the way things are–there is another way.

To imagine how both housing and labor can be different, we start by asking,

What would it look like for no individual to exercise control over another person and deprive them of rights or power in this relationship?
What would it look like if we didn’t imagine this as a zero-sum game, where, in order for someone to benefit, others have to lose?
How can we undo barriers that have worked to exclude communities from their own autonomy and sovereignty?

The goal of our Worker-Owned Cooperative Incubator is to build a vehicle for workers who have been excluded from ownership to have direct control over their employment decisions and conditions. Worker-cooperators own the business, yes, but they also own their labor, and the fruits thereof.

We can build businesses that let us be the architects of our lives, and be guided not by profit alone, but by higher values of justice, dignity, community and the environment. We can build businesses that are successful financially while also being successful on all the fronts, when we value, to paraphrase singer and storyteller Utah Phillips, “making a living without making a killing.”

It was exciting to see our new headquarters pulsing with life, conversations, affirmations, music and dancing at our inauguration. This is our house, and that “our” is one that contains multitudes. The building is shaped like the letter “C,” for community, cooperatives, and connection. Together, we will ensure it is a space guided by these values.

Wage Theft Protection in your Pocket

On Ownership