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.