A recent spate of criminal prosecutions in New York and California against builders who don’t pay their workers the agreed wage suggests a hardening mood against corporate graft in the country.
27 June 2018 | By GCR Staff
In one case, a luxury home-builder in Manhattan has been charged with stealing more than $1.7m from 500 workers through payroll tricks.
Previously, failure to pay the correct wage was treated as a civil matter, putting the onus on the worker to bring a suit against their employer. But now state prosecutors seem more willing to treat the issue as a violation of criminal law.
Diana Florence, an assistant district attorney (DA) in Manhattan, said the aim was to stop companies in industries that rely on lots of low paid workers from “institutionalising theft as a business model”.
The new approach was illustrated most recently last week when authorities in New York announced that a Brooklyn construction company had pleaded guilty to second-degree grand larceny for underpaying 21 employees.
The Urban Group then made full restitution of $303,411 to the workers, all of whom were immigrants.
Contractors on public sector projects often commit to paying wages as a certain rate, and this case revolved around Urban’s falsely certifying that it had paid employees on a public schools contract at the prevailing wage rates of $63 an hour when in reality it had paid between $10 and $17, and had offered no overtime or benefits.
The discrepancy was revealed when the company was forced to post the legal wage on signs around its worksites.
As well as making restitution, Urban was debarred from public work in New York state as a contractor or subcontractor for five years.