Proposed Fix to Get Business Owners to Pay Unpaid Wages (FL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Myriam Masihy
Updated at 8:50 PM EST on Jan 24, 2017

A proposed ordinance could help strengthen Miami-Dade County’s existing wage theft ordinance.

Commissioner Pepe Diaz introduced the plan that would add attorney fees to the amount a business owes an employee who takes them to court over unpaid wages.

“They can try to ignore it but it’s going to be a lot harder,” Diaz said.

The county has a wage theft ordinance that allows a worker to take a former employer to a hearing over unpaid money. A hearing officer can rule that a business owner has to pay. But the NBC 6 Investigators found business owners still not paying workers even after the deadline passes.

The new plan would require a business to pay attorney fees and costs that a worker takes on trying to get the money. An attorney is not required in the initial hearing portion of a wage theft hearing but could be needed to pursue a business that doesn’t pay.

“We’re going to continue to do things so hopefully, hopefully this will be a thing of the past in Miami-Dade County,” Diaz said.

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(Rhode Island) Senate passes two bills governing unpaid wages

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

3/31/2016

PROVIDENCE – The Rhode Island Senate passed two pieces of legislation Thursday designed to curtail the theft of wages from employees by unscrupulous employers. The measures offer employees improved methods for collecting unpaid wages.

The first piece of legislation passed was sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio, of District 4, North Providence, Providence. Ruggerio’s bill would establish a procedure for employees to secure liens against employers for unpaid wages and contested claims would be decided by the Superior Court.

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Editorial: State right to address wage theft

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Jeff Stahla 
POSTED:   01/24/2015 11:42:50 PM MST

 

When the Wage Protection Act went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, it gave the state of Colorado additional tools and authority to address the problem of wage theft.

The act requires employers to keep payroll records for up to three years and gives the Colorado Department of Labor the authority “to mediate situations that are just misunderstandings, investigate when there’s actual wrongdoing, and bring justice,” Rep. Jonathan Singer, a co-sponsor of the act, told the Associated Press.

That includes possible fines against employers who fail to respond to complaints and who are found to have illegally withheld wages from employees who earned them.

The number of state employees involved in investigations is increasing from four to nine, as part of the new law.

The need is clear. The state department of labor has been receiving an average of 5,000 complaints per year, and it has recovered about $1 million in unpaid wages to date, according to a recent I-News report.

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Wage Theft – How companies steal from our employees and communities

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

ARTICLE |  | BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN

 

Ben Basom of the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters gives the example of a worker who came forward and started talking to the union about the Portland company that he was working for and the scams he was seeing. Basom says the employee’s boss found out “and the next time we saw him, his arm was in a cast and he was all bruised up.”

The worker said, “This guy knows where my family is in Mexico.”

From July 2012 to June 2013, Oregon workers filed claims for more than $3 million in unpaid wages with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. Juan Carlos Ordonez of the Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP), which analyzed BOLI’s data on the claims, says that’s “just the tip of the iceberg” because workers fear retaliation if they complain about their missing wages, or they simply don’t know how or where to file a complaint. BOLI is the agency that investigates and enforces Oregon’s labor laws.

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