Inside Look: Undocumented Workers Employed In The Shadows Of Restaurants Graduate Affiliate Brian Halpin quoted in Capital Public Radio
Capital Public Radio, February 2, 2016
Marcos Murillo was lured by the American dream. When he left
Chiapas, Mexico he promised his five siblings and his mom, who
were living in a single room shack without electricity, that he’d
send money from the other side of the U.S. border.
He says he thought, “I’m going to be rich, I’m going to be
sweeping money out of the floor.”
Brian Halpin, a Phd candidate at UC Davis, researches low income
workers — especially in food service.
“In one of the kitchens where I conducted research, at the end of
the year when all the W-2s get sent back there would be a stack
of 30 W-2s just sitting there and they’d sit there for six months
until the employer would just decide to file them away,” says
Halpin.
Some policy analysts, policymakers and scholars argue that
low-wage workers should “work their way out of poverty” by
acquiring the human capital that would enable them to leave
poverty-level jobs.
