Patrick Anderson
The Providence Journal
Feb. 16, 2022
In a renewed campaign to make wage theft a felony in Rhode Island, union leaders are pointing to new research that says more than 9% of the state’s employers misclassify workers as independent contractors.
The paper from academics at the University of Massachusetts Labor Center and a construction-industry research group analyzed the results of state labor department unemployment insurance audits of Rhode Island employers from 2016 to last year.
It estimated that that $185 million in workers’ wages and salaries went unreported to the Department of Labor and Training in 2019, and that it cost the state from $25 million to $54 million in lost taxes that year.
‘Restoring worker rights’
The paper’s authors, Russell Ormiston of Allegheny College and Tom Juravich of UMass Amherst, conclude that changes in state labor law “offer considerable promise in restoring worker rights and ensuring greater justice in Rhode Island’s workplaces. The first is to make wage theft a felony.”
That’s music to the ears of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, which has put making wage theft a felony offense at the top of its legislative priorities for this year.