By Carl Prine
March 28, 2018
The U.S. Department of Labor announced Wednesday that investigators had reached a settlement with a Santee builder to repay back wages owed to the workers by a defunct subcontractor.
A & D General Contracting, Inc.. the prime contractor on a pair of federally funded projects for the Marine Corps, will compensate 16 workers $52,969 after El Cajon-based Amigos Design Build Landscapes failed to pay prevailing wages before declaring bankruptcy.
“The prime contractor in this case is stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing,” said Department of Labor spokesman Leo Kay during a telephone interview.
The case spun out of a probe by the agency’s Wage and Hour Division into Amigos Design’s work on two projects – a control gate at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego and Camp Pendleton’s Combat Training Tank and Instruction Facility, according to a Department of Labor press release.
Amigos Design filed for federal bankruptcy protection in late 2016, four years after the company was founded. In his Chapter 7 paperwork, company president Douglas Leal estimated $579,562 in debt to 113 creditors and only $482,182 in property to pay them.
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Wage and Hour Division investigators determined that Amigos Design violated the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts by failing to pay required health and welfare rates to its employees.
The firm also incorrectly categorized some workers in jobs so that they would receive lower compensation rates than they deserved. Others were slotted as apprentices to pay them below the prevailing wage rates but they weren’t enrolled in any apprenticeship programs.
And on top of that, the company falsified its certified payroll reports, according to the Department of Labor.