Wage theft a scourge for low-income workers

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/18/MNGB1KAIB2.DTL

Li Shuang Li waited tables six days a week in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant where workers were yelled at for carrying only one pot of tea in each hand.

She had no health insurance, sick days or vacation. There were three servers for a restaurant that sat 80. Shifts could last 10 hours.

For that, the mother of two says she was paid $900 a month - less than $5 an hour.

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It's part of a national scourge known as wage theft. More than two-thirds of low-wage workers reported some type of pay-related law violation, according to a 2009 report by the National Employment Law Project, which interviewed 4,387 front-line workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.