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Getting the Word out about Wage Theft (MA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

by Sue Woodcock * March 22, 2019

Quite simply, wage theft happens when someone does work and is not paid for it.

“Immigrants are easy targets, most don’t realize it’s a crime,” said Kathleen Santora, a member of the recently appointed to the Lynn Wage Theft Taskforce and a union painter representing the Painters Union District Council 35 Local 939. “But wage theft can happen to anyone in any industry.”

“We have a very strong ordinance in Lynn, it has some teeth in it and can actually do something,” Santora said. Having a taskforce in place also makes a difference.

The Wage Theft Taskforce, comprised of one (1) designee submitted by the Lynn City Council, one (1) designee submitted by the Mayor, one (1) representative chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by the North Shore Labor Council, one (1) representative chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by the Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce, one (1) representative chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by the North Shore Latino Business Association, one (1) representative chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by the North Shore Building Trades Council, one (1) representative chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by the Lynn Worker Center, and one (1) representative from the Lynn community chosen by the Lynn City Council from a list provided by New Lynn Coalition. Members of the Wage Theft Advisory Committee may be reappointed annually and must be appointed no later than the second meeting of the new year.

The wage ordinance was passed by the Lynn City Council in March 2018 after it was offered as a motion by then City Councilor and now State Representative Peter Capano.

“A business owner has the opportunity to do the right thing and pay up. Then they can continue doing business as usual with a bond to cover paying the employee for a year or it can end up in the attorney general’s office,” said Santora, who is a leading advocate for the building trades. She was nominated to the committee by the North Shore Labor Council.

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How we investigated wage enforcement at the Illinois Department of Labor (IL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Matt Kiefer | August 9, 2017

“There ought to be a law.”

We throw that phrase around casually in our civic discourse. But sometimes a new law passes that doesn’t make a dent in the problem, as reporter Melissa Sanchez found when she looked into the bleak and arduous process of filing a wage theft claim in Illinois.

Long wait times and high dismissal rates are nothing new at the Illinois Department of Labor, where every year thousands of workers file grievances against employers who have allegedly shorted their pay. A 2012 Reporter investigation, “Waiting in Vain”, revealed the average wage theft claim took about seven months to resolve, with 41 percent ending up dismissed.

Five years on, the Reporter followed up on this story to see how things worked out. It took half a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests and several months of delays, denials and appeals before the department handed over all the wage complaint and other operational records we requested.

Our findings: Wait times for wage theft cases had increased to nine months and dismissal rates jumped to 58 percent. The promised reforms didn’t deliver.

To do our analysis, we loaded the records into a Django database, which is handy for sorting, filtering and looking up related records. When calculating case durations and dismissal rates for wage complaints, we narrowed the record set to wage complaints filed in 2014 due to the volume of pending cases in subsequent years that had unknown resolution dates and outcomes. (Other calculations, such as those counting case volume by year, or the total amount of wages claimed, include all available complaint data.)

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Department of Workforce Solutions ordered to stop rejecting wage-theft claims (NM)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Posted: Tuesday, January 31, 2017 7:00 pm
By Phaedra Haywood
The New Mexican

A Santa Fe judge ordered the state Department of Workforce Solutions to temporarily stop rejecting wage-theft claims under what a group of workers claims are misguided policies.

Attorneys who filed a class-action lawsuit last month claim the state agency has allowed businesses to get away with cheating employees out of receiving a required minimum wage and overtime pay. The complaint accuses the department of adopting policies that allow it to dismiss and deny claims for reasons that are not supported by law.

For example, the lawsuit says, the department has refused to investigate complaints of wage theft involving more than $10,000 even though no law precludes this and has ignored claims that date back more than one year.

The judge’s restraining order was jointly requested by the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty and workers’ rights groups including Centro de Igualdad Y Derechos, NM Comunidades En Accion Y De Fé, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment and Somos Un Pueblo Unido.

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