Getting serious about wage theft

[Omaha Steve]

https://popular.info/p/getting-serious-about-wage-theft

Tesnim Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby

Feb 7, 2024

Over $203 million in wages were stolen by employers from nearly 127,000 workers in New York between 2017 and 2021, according to a report last year by Documented and ProPublica. Of that amount, more than $52 million was stolen from people working in restaurants – the most in any industry. Wage theft was also rampant in health care and construction, where employers stole $28.4 million and $27.6 million, respectively. Most of these workers never received the money they were owed.

New York lawmakers are now advancing proposals to hold more employers accountable. Last week, Senate Labor Chair Jessica Ramos (D) and Assembly members Kenny Burgos (D), Harvey Epstein (D), and Linda Rosenthal (D) introduced three new bills focused on aggressively deterring wage theft. The legislation takes a simple but powerful approach to curbing wage theft: violators would not be able to continue doing business in the state.

The first bill, S8451, would give the State Liquor Authority the power to suspend the liquor licenses of businesses that have racked up wage theft violations exceeding $1,000. The second bill, S8453, would empower the State Tax Department to suspend a business’s “certificate of authority” if it owes more than $1,000 in wage theft violations. The third bill, S8452, would authorize the New York Department of Labor to issue stop-work orders on businesses that owe more than $1,000 in back wages. This approach is already paying dividends in neighboring New Jersey, which issued "stop-work orders that shuttered the doors of 27 Boston Markets" last year until the company paid "more than $630,000 in back wages" to more than 314 workers.

Federal regulators lack both the resources and the authority to effectively deter wage theft. Due to a declining number of investigators at the Department of Labor, the likelihood that an employer will be investigated for wage theft is about 0.5%. In the unlikely event that an employer is found to have stolen wages, its actions are almost always treated as a civil offense, punishable by a penalty of just $2,374. For comparison, in Australia, employers can face fines of up to $630,000 per violation.

FULL story at link above.

[appalachiablue]

1. For shame, thanks for posting Steve.