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73 SMU L. Rev. F. 63 (2020)
Erasing Race

handle is hein.journals/smulrf73 and id is 63 raw text is: SMU Law Review Forum Volume 73 April 2020 63-72 ERASING RACE Llezlie L. Green ABSTRACT Low-vage workers frequently experience exploitation, including wage theft, at the intersection of their racial identities and their economic vulnerabilities. Scholars, however, rarely consider the role of wage and hour exploitation in broader racial subordination frameworks. This Essay considers the narratives that have informed the detachment of racial justice from the worker exploitation narrative and the distancing of economic justice from the civil rights narrative. It then contends that social movements, like the Fight for $15, can disrupt narrow understandings of low-vage worker exploitation and proffer more nuanced narratives that connect race, economic justice, and civil rights to a broader anti- subordination campaign that can more effectively protect the most vulnerable workers. [Blut racial justice and economic justice are really just two sides of the same coin.... - Gabrielle Hatcher (Fight for $15 Protester)' INTRODUCTION Much of the legal scholarship concerning race and employment law centers on traditional understandings of employment discrimination-that is, statutory violations that occur when an employer treats an employee differently in her compensation, promotion, hiring, or termination because of the employee's racial identity. Scholars and advocates typically do not consider the relationship between race and wage theft-the statutory violations associated with the failure to compensate a worker properly for their hours worked. Indeed, in my earlier work, I pointed out that the Department of Labor (DOL) does not seek or maintain racial demographic information of its complainants.2 As a result, the * Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law; J.D., Columbia Law School; B.A., Dartmouth College. 1. Willa Frej, These Are the Faces of the Fight for 15 Movement, HUFFINGTON POST (Nov. 10, 2015, 5:04 PM), https://www.huffpost.com/entry/faces-of-fight-for-15- movementn_56424398e4b0411d3072cc3e [https://perma.cc/VKK3-ENWHI. 2. See Llezlie Green Coleman, Disrupting the Discrimination Narrative: An Argument for Wage and Hour Laws' Inclusion in Antisubordination Advocacy, 14 STAN. J. C.R. & C.L. 49, 51 (2018). The DOL indicated it does not request demographic information from workers to avoid discouraging vulnerable immigrant workers from engaging with the agency. Id. at 51-52. While the concerns 63

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