BUSINESS
Updated Apr 15, 10:24 AM; Posted Apr 15, 5:00 AM
Cleveland, Ohio — Matthew J. Grassi got to savor victory for only a few minutes.
The Ohio Department of Commerce had just awarded him $1,701 in a wage theft claim against his former employer. Then the investigator told him, “It is going to really be difficult for you to see this money.”
A decade later, Grassi has “never seen a dime.” His former employer never responded to the state’s request for payment. The state says the debt probably can’t be collected.
Grassi was a victim of wage theft, a term commonly used to describe failure to pay workers fully for their labor. In Ohio, his story may not be that uncommon.
Ohio ranked second among the 10 largest states for a common type of wage theft, minimum wage violations, according to a report last year by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. It estimates that Ohioans annually lose $600 million to wage theft.
But the state generally denies claims of wage theft, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of 4,800 complaints filed from 2010 to 2017. Even when it approves claims, victims only have a 50-50 chance to collect what they are owed.
Experts say it stems from two problems: the below-average strength of Ohio’s laws against wage theft, and the state’s lax enforcement of them.
Officially, Ohio lets wage-theft victims collect three times their back wages, called treble damages. In practice, it often chooses to waive that penalty for first-time offenders.
“In Ohio, it is not a set policy that is geared toward protecting workers and advocating for their rights,” said Daniel J. Galvin, a Northwestern University professor who studied enforcement of the law across the states. “They’re in the business of employer assistance.”