The DU Just Wages Project is a research and outreach project on wage theft experienced by day laborers in Colorado. It is being carried out by the Korbel Latin America Center at the University of Denver under the leadership and supervision of Professor Rebecca Galemba. Since January 2015, Rebecca Galemba has been leading a research team of graduate students at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver to investigate day laborers’ experiences with wage theft in the metro Denver area. Day laborers are characterized by their presence on street corners looking for work on a daily basis. Sometimes these jobs will turn into longer-term employment relationships, but often they are just for the day. Day laborers may have specifics skills, but also perform a variety of jobs, particularly in manual labor, construction, and services.For day laborers, who wait on street corners each day looking for work, wage theft may mean being underpaid for work completed. Yet, even more frequently, it may mean not being paid at all. Regardless of immigration status, wage and hour laws protect the right of workers to be paid the minimum wage. When employers illegally withhold earned wages or violate laws guaranteeing basic working conditions, they receive an unfair business advantage that degrades the wages and labor conditions of all workers and deprives states of necessary tax revenues. In order to understand the larger holistic climate in which wage theft occurs, Professor Galemba and teams of graduate students have been conducting interviews with day laborers, employers in the construction industry, lawyers, legal agencies, politicians, and non-profit stakeholders to understand the larger climate of wage theft that disproportionately affects low-wage and immigrant workers like day laborers. This qualitative research partnered with Raja Raghunath, a labor and employment lawyer and a former professor from the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. Raghunath and his students conducted legal outreach and intakes at the corners and helped prepare claimants for small claims court processes The study has currently expanded to survey 400 day laborers at El Centro Humanitario, Denver’s day labor center, as well as at four identified street corner hiring sites in the Denver metro area including Aurora and Lakewood. The survey will help document the pervasiveness of wage theft, demographic characteristics of day laborers, and day laborers' legal knowledge and perceptions and utilization of legal services. Surveyors also conduct "Know Your Rights" trainings on labor rights for day laborers as an advocacy strategy. We have partnered with the Colorado Wage Theft Task Force, Towards Justice (a non-profit legal services organization), and the Direct Action Team at El Centro Humanitario to help inform local policy and volunteer initiatives to prevent and redress wage theft for some of Colorado's most vulnerable workers. For updates in the project please visit the following sites: Official webpage of the DU Just Wages Project @ Korbel's Latin America Center: http://www.du.edu/korbel/latinamerica/research/wage-theft-home.html Wordpress website: https://dujustwagesproject.wordpress.com/author/dujustwagesproject/ Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/DUJustWages/