New York Outlaws Stealing From Your Workers, What Crazy Nonsense Is This?

No respect for tradition.

‘Detroit Industry’ mural by Diego Rivera, 1932-33. Detroit Institute of Arts. Public domain.

It’s supposed to be one of the most basic rules of a capitalist economy: You do your work, you get paid for the work you’ve done. A very simple bargain between employer and employee, as sacred as the unspoken understanding that you won’t microwave fish in the office break room, at least not more than once. But thanks to another time-honored tradition, the one where bosses will get away with whatever they think they can, all too often workers don’t get the pay they’ve earned, and getting any kind of justice when that happens can be hampered by poor enforcement of labor laws, or by penalties that don’t deter crooked bosses from cheating their workers again and again.

In New York, the state so nice they named it once and then New York City took the name too, businesses annually “cheat more than 2 million workers out of over $3.2 billion in wages, a third of which comes from those earning minimum wage,” which is not nice at all. Worse, even when wage theft cheats workers of tens of thousands of dollars in a single case, the crime has until this month been only a misdemeanor, leaving prosecutors few options to really crack down on it, according to an op-ed jointly written by state Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, state Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, and NYC carpenters union official Joseph Geiger.

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To give prosecutors more options to crack down on wage theft, New York governor Kathy Hochul last week signed into law the Wage Theft Accountability Act, which bumps wage theft up to a felony, allowing more discovery and a longer statute of limitations, to help victims of wage theft seek justice.

The bill, which went into effect immediately after the governor signed it […] allows prosecutors to charge larceny for stolen wages and to aggregate stolen wage amounts, which will now provide much more effective deterrence and consequences for employers who cheat workers.

The bill was among three bills protecting workers that Hochul signed just after Labor Day; the other two bills prohibited employers from punishing workers who choose not to attend meetings on political or religious topics, and increased the minimum weekly payments for recipients of worker’s compensation.

Beyond the New York law, Democrats in Congress announced a bill on Friday that would create a national law addressing wage theft. The “Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act” would help ensure workers get paid what they’ve earned, and give them better options to recover wages if they get cheated. Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker of New Jersey make the case for the legislation, which has a load of other cosponsors in both the House and the Senate:

Each year, wage theft denies workers tens of billions of dollars in pay they have earned as employers commit a variety of minimum wage, overtime, off-the-clock, and meal-break violations. Wage theft violations are pervasive at many large corporations. Between 2017 and 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered more than $3 billion in stolen wages on behalf of workers—representing just a small fraction of wages stolen nationwide. These illegal practices disproportionately hurt low-wage workers—amplifying poverty and inequality in America. 17% of low-wage workers report being paid less than the prevailing local minimum wage in their state—denying workers $15 billion annually from minimum wage violations alone.

The bill would toughen transparency and accountability for employers, and make sure that minimum-wage workers can recover the full amount of wages they’re owed. It would close a stupid loophole in existing law that has left minimum wage earners cheated out of overtime pay, as a summary of the bill explains.

Currently, workers can only recover wages at the minimum wage or for overtime worked; for example, an employee may be hired at $9.00 per hour, but would only have the right to recover $7.25 of every $9.00 she was owed. This bill would allow workers to recoup the full compensation that employers have taken from them.

Yeesh! It would also ensure that when workers are fired or quit, they receive the full amount that they’re owed in their final paychecks, and would toughen penalties for fraudy employers, increasing both fines and the amount of damages that can be awarded to workers who’ve been cheated. The bill would also increase damages owed to workers who are retaliated against for reporting wage theft.

On top of that, the bill requires employers’ record-keeping requirements, to keep ‘em honest, and strengthen the rights of workers to take collective action when employers ain’t honest. It would increase the amount of time cheated workers have to file a lawsuit, and would automatically include employees in class action wage theft cases unless they choose to opt out, instead of the current system that requires workers to opt in to such actions.

Well heck, if the government is going to make it harder for employers to cheat their workers out of an honest day’s pay, then how is anyone supposed to get filthy rich anymore? We suppose they’ll manage.

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[Times-Union / Office of Kathy Hochul / Sen. Bob Menendez]

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