We need new tools to deal with epidemic of wage theft

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

What happened in Amherst should never happen again

TOM JURAVICH
Apr 30, 2022

MASSACHUSETTS NEEDS new legislation to curb wage theft because what happened in Amherst should have never happened and should never happen again. Nine undocumented Hondurans worked 10 hours a day, six days a week for five weeks in a row hanging sheetrock in a new apartment complex in Amherst. Collectively they were owed $50,173 for their labor – but they did not receive one penny in wages. …

Despite Beacon’s commitment to building affordable housing, their progressive social values did not guide the way the development was built. They relied on multiple subcontractors who used undocumented workers who were illegally misclassified as independent contractors. This allowed them to defraud the state by not paying taxes, unemployment insurance, and workers compensation.

Our recent study that examined the records of the Commonwealth found that more than one in six employees in construction are illegally misclassified, and that this costs Massachusetts as much as $82 million annually. And paying workers in cash as independent contractors has created a hothouse for wage theft, as we saw in Amherst.

Beacon Properties hired Keith Construction as the general contractor, which awarded Combat Drywall the contract to hang the sheet rock. Combat, however, has no employees to perform the work and subcontracted the work to Alvarez Drywall.

Alvarez is not registered with the secretary of state in Massachusetts as a business, has no website, no phone number, no real company identity. In fact, Alvarez is not a drywall company. It is simply a labor broker that brought undocumented workers to the job to work as “independent contractors” under Combat supervision. They were not employees and Alvarez would pay them in cash – or Alvarez was supposed to. …

The right to be paid for the work we do in a timely fashion is perhaps our most basic employment right in Massachusetts. No worker in the Commonwealth should ever have to suffer what the workers at the North Square apartments had to go through. We need to hold employers and lead contractors responsible and stop this kind of wage theft with the passage of H1959.

We should all be able to drive or walk through our communities and not have to worry about what is taking place at building and construction sites. As I drive by the North Square Apartments on my way to work now, it stands as a monument to the mistakes that we made and how this can never happen again.

(Read More)

 

Construction workers walk off Omni Louisville site protesting wage discrepancy

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By CAITLIN BOWLING
May 24, 2017 12:53 pm

 

Some of the construction workers who are helping erect the more than $320 million Omni Louisville hotel and luxury apartments walked off the site this morning.

Roughly 100 workers who have been installing metal studs and hanging drywall at the Omni claim that they are being paid roughly $20 less an hour compared with other construction workers on the job, WDRB News first reported.

Marco Cruz, one of the workers who walked off the construction site, told Insider that he is not so much upset that they are making less than other workers as he is troubled by the fact that they were told they’d earn $24 an hour but are only receiving $17 to $20 an hour.

“I saw that that’s not right,” he said. “We feel like they are taking advantage of us.”

Louisville labor attorney Dave Suetholz told Insider in a phone interview that the construction workers, most of whom are Hispanic immigrants, were told that their wages were lowered because Gov. Matt Bevin repealed Kentucky’s prevailing wage statute this year.

Suetholz, an attorney with Kircher, Suetholz & Associates PSC, argued that construction on the Omni “started before the repeal of the prevailing wage,” making the argument invalid.

“Their employer has lied to them,” he said. “It’s all immigrant workers. They are the only ones being paid lower rates. …Just on the face, it looks very bad.”

The prevailing wage law required construction workers to be paid a wage and receive benefits comparable to what workers receive on average construction sites in the area. It applied to public construction projects, according to an article by Stites & Harbison attorney Joseph L. Hardesty.

(Read More)

Berkeley Makes History With Wage Theft Ordinance

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

BY JOHNNY MAGDALENO
AUGUST 16, 2016

Last year, at the start of spring, 21 construction workers were hired by a local contractor to hang drywall for a 79-unit apartment complex in downtown Berkeley, California. The workers spent five months on the project, but when they finally wrapped it up, they still hadn’t received a dime from their employer.

They filed complaints with their local trade unions, which were able to pass the message up to the Labor Enforcement Task Force and Joint Enforcement Strike Force, two coalitions of state and municipal agencies that have appraised $4.2 million worth of unpaid wages in California since 2012. Their investigation led California Labor Commissioner Julie Su to place a lien on the contractor for $60,000, the total amount the workers were owed, three months after they left the job site.

For Todd Stenhouse, a spokesperson for the wage advocacy nonprofit Smart Cities Prevail, the state’s response marks a turn for the best in what might have been a tragic finish for those workers. But successes like this represent a drop in the bucket when it comes to the hunt for unscrupulous contractors.

(Read More)