DA announces effort to fight wage theft

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

BY CITY NEWS SERVICE LOS ANGELES
PUBLISHED 3:43 PM PT APR. 14, 2022

LOS ANGELES (CNS) — Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón Thursday announced an agreement with the California Labor Commissioner to bolster the investigation and prosecution of wage theft.

The pact calls on the state’s Department of Industrial Relations to identify and refer investigative leads, complaints and referrals of possible violations to the District Attorney’s Office for civil and criminal prosecution.

“When hard-working people are not paid the money they have rightfully earned, they lose their ability to feed, clothe and house their families, creating a cascading effect that causes our entire community to suffer along with them,” the district attorney said in a written statement.

A 2020 study found that up to 21% of the construction workforce — some 2.4 million workers — are illegally paid off the books or misclassified as independent contractors, according to the District Attorney’s Office, which noted that losses to federal and state treasuries amount to some $8.4 billion.

Frank Hawk, president of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, lauded Gascón for helping to “fight against wage theft and fraud in the construction industry here in Los Angeles, the majority of which is happening in the multi-family residential housing sector.”

Meanwhile, the district attorney also announced a separate pilot pretrial diversion program with Southwest Carpenters for young adults facing criminal charges.

The program, dubbed “Ready,” will provide 20 people between the ages of 18 and 25 with a pathway to a career as a union carpenter with full benefits and a pension, and will partner with Homeboy Industries, Second Call and Volunteers of America to create a pipeline to the union’s pre- apprenticeship programs, including a four-week program in Whittier that is geared toward the under-served people of Los Angeles, including the formerly incarcerated, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

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Wage theft is criminal and should be prosecuted, Tompkins DA says (NY)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

FEBRUARY 6, 2019BY DEVON MAGLIOZZI

ITHACA, N.Y. – Employers fail to pay tens of thousands of dollars owed to Tompkins workers each year, according to a panel of experts and advocates organized by the Tompkins County Workers’ Center and the Worker Institute at Cornell’s ILR School.

Part of the reason the problem is so widespread is that penalties for carrying out wage theft are civil. Employers who fail to pay minimum wage, deny overtime pay, or misclassify workers to lower compensation might decide the risk is worth taking if the main penalty on the table is repayment of wages owed or a fine, panelists at Tuesday’s “How to Fight Wage Theft” event said. But through partnerships between labor organizations, state agencies and prosecutors, enforcement may start to look tougher in New York.

Asked whether wage theft is criminal, Matthew Van Houten, Tompkins County district attorney, answered unequivocally. “Yes – it is criminal, it should be criminalized, it should be prosecuted.”

Speaking on Tuesday’s panel, Van Houten said in over 20 years of work as an attorney in Tompkins County he has never seen a case of wage theft prosecuted in a criminal courtroom. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. The Workers’ Center recently said it handles between 80 and 100 cases of wage theft every year, and that only scratches the surface of what is happening in the community.

Typically, when a worker is not paid the wages they are owed their complaint is processed through agencies including the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board, often with advocacy centers like the Tompkins County Workers’ Center serving as intermediaries.

Civil enforcement can be a powerful tool for protecting workers’ rights. According to Milan Bhatt, assistant deputy commissioner for worker protection for the NYS DOL, his agency has recovered more than $35 million in unpaid wages each of the past four years across the state. Bhatt said the sums recovered by the DOL, though, are a fraction of total wages owed to workers.


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