By: Brian Johnson
October 1, 2019
At least three concrete workers on the $300 million Digi-Key expansion project in Thief River Falls have received thousands of dollars in back pay after a state agency found that a project subcontractor violated state wage laws.
In a Sept. 24 letter to concrete worker Franklin Flores, an investigator with the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry said Flores’ employer, Millennium Concrete, was “in violation of state labor standards and prevailing wage laws.”
Millennium owed back wages for work performed between April 1 and Dec. 1 of last year, according to the letter.
A laborers’ union official who assisted the employees confirmed to Finance & Commerce that three affected workers each received checks “in the $8,000 to $9,000 range” along with the letter from the department.
Illinois-based McShane Construction is the general contractor on the Digi-Key project.
“While McShane is not aware of the number of workers involved or amounts due them, we are pleased the wage issue is being resolved,” McShane President Jeff Raday said in an email. “We mandate that all of our subcontractors comply with all federal and state minimum wage requirements, including compliance with prevailing wage requirements on projects subject to the Davis-Bacon Act. We are committed to fair compensation for each and every worker on our job sites.”
The Minnesota and North Dakota chapter of the Laborers Union International of North America and others raised concerns about potential prevailing wage violations on the state-subsidized Digi-Key project last June.
“We were happy to finally see it in writing that there were prevailing wage violations. This isn’t just us speculating on it,” Kevin Pranis, the union’s marketing director, said in an interview Tuesday.
Flores and the two other workers, Jairo Cruz and Walter Torres, filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights last week. The complaint alleged the workers suffered discrimination and mistreatment while working on the Digi-Key project.
Cummins & Cummins, a Minneapolis-based law firm, is representing the workers in the human rights claim.