According to The North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters, worker exploitation is a common practice in the Med City.
Posted: Jul 9, 2019 7:22 PM
Posted By: Annalise Johnson
ROCHESTER, Minn. – A group of Rochester area workers are pursuing a wage theft claim against Ed Lunn Construction. Workers allege Ed Lunn Construction duped them out of thousands of dollars in wages after working the majority of 2018 on a $40 million, city-funded affordable housing project that’s now filling with residents.
Lunn denies legal responsibility and says a subcontractor employed the workers who are accusing him of wage theft.
A new bipartisan law went into effect July 1st aimed at cracking down on wage theft. It doubles the amount of state investigators working on wage theft cases. Violaters can face 5 years prison and a $10,000 fine. The law will be enforceable beginning August 1st.
KIMT spoke to Mike Wille, business agent for North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters. The union advocates for workers rights. He tells KIMT that a labor broker business model exploits workers. He says employees often work long hours without overtime pay and don’t receive workers compensation of unemployment insurance. “They don’t get paid for the work that they performed, or they’ll perform work and they’ll withhold the money and then they’ll pay them for the past work as they do work in the future, so it’s like they’re dangling a carrot in front of this person and the carrot is the money they’re owed,” he explains.
According to Wille, roughly 70% of apartments and hotels built in Rochester in the last five years are built under this business model. “Shirking their responsibilities back onto the employees helps them keep their costs down and enables them to basically cheat and win jobs from contractors that play by the rules,” he says.
Minnesota’s new wage theft prevention law is one of the strongest in the country. “I hope it sets a precedent and a standard across the country for all states and cities and counties to abide by because there is no place for this kind of practice anywhere in the United States,” says Wille. “We’re better than that and our workers deserve better than to be cheated out of their wages.”