By Jessica Lee | 08/08/2019
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance that establishes the city’s own set of rules to crack down on wage theft and force employers to be transparent with payrolls. The ordinance is similar to a state law that went into effect last month.
On Thursday morning, the 13-member council rewrote city code to give attorneys within the city’s Department of Civil Rights authority to enforce the municipal law against wage theft – which is when employers don’t pay employees, or pay them less than guaranteed – and require employers to provide earnings statements on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, a larger-scale effort is beginning within the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry and the attorney general’s office. Last month, Gov. Tim Walz signed a bipartisan bill to establish protections for workers that substantially grow the state’s resources for investigating allegations of wage theft – guidelines that are almost identical to the Minneapolis ordinance. Supporters call the new policies necessary considering the pervasiveness of underpayment that disproportionately affects Minnesota’s communities of color and immigrants.
But while labor and social-justice advocates celebrate the new efforts, which they describe as the toughest of their kind in the country, this question remains: Why is it necessary for Minneapolis to pass an ordinance that basically duplicates state law?
The state law
The state Labor Department estimates that up to 40,000 employees in Minnesota are not fully paid what they have earned each year. Examples of wage theft are when employees clock out but keep working, don’t receive sick and safe time or time and a half for overtime, or work more hours than promised at a flat rate.
That is what prompted the 2019 change to state law. The law set aside roughly $3 million over the next two years to establish a new investigative program and help pay the salaries of about 12 new hires, including investigators, communication personnel and researchers. In an interview last week, Labor Commissioner Nancy Leppink said the department is in the process of finalizing job descriptions. Once administrators establish the new team, she said the department will create new operating and training procedures.
Currently, Labor Department investigators mostly do “records-based” investigations by examining documentation such as employees’ pay stubs. But with the funding boost, investigators will be able to travel to employees’ workplaces to do in-person interviews and look around.
“[Onsite investigations] have greater capacity to detect various, certain kinds of wage theft, and also to detect things like labor trafficking, which you’re not going to see in … simply the review of paper records,” Leppink said. “It’s clear that we need to be getting into workplaces to find workers who may not even be on the books in terms of payroll records.”
She said the state welcomes Minneapolis’ efforts to create its own team of investigators and enforcement regulations, and staff within the city and Labor Department have been meeting regularly to coordinate strategies.
“The problem is significant, and so therefore additional resources to respond to these issues are always welcome and needed,” Leppink said. “Having more hands on deck can only make for improvements on this issue.”
