Contractors Cheated Workers Out of $450,000

Not long ago I received an email from an accountant who was ticked off that I said that wage theft was common during a radio interview. The accountant argued that this problem was a fabrication of labor organizers and, in fact, was extremely rare.

He is wrong. Evidence of wage theft, much of it by respectable companies, is everywhere and new cases emerge all the time. One recent egregious example involves ironworks contractors who pocketed $450,000 in funds meant for workers. Some workers received nothing for their work. Some are owed as much as as $19,000. The wage theft was revealed by Andrew Cuomo, State Attorney General of New York. The complaint by his office makes for depressing reading. 

Those arrested were Geewhan Mangal, President of G-1 Ironworks; Joseph Casucci, Chief Operations Officer of FJM-Ferro; and and Maurizio Randazzo, Principal of ANR Electrical Contracting, Inc. and Grand Electric, Inc.

What's disturbing about this case is that the wage theft was only revealed because there were government contracts involved. That is rarely the case and most wage theft goes unreported and unpunished, as has been widely documented by the Wage Theft Resource Center and author Kim Bobo.

Wage Theft in South Florida

Local organizing efforts against wage theft are being stepped up in different parts of the country. The latest campaign to go into high gear is in South Florida.

A new report shows that wage theft in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties occurs not only in low-wage industries but also in professional and higher salary jobs, including those in the legal profession, at architecture and accounting firms, public and private schools and in medical fields.

The report, by the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy for the Florida Wage Theft Task Force, analyzed documented wage violations from two community-based organizations in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties and the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor. . . .

The report found that from August 2006 to August 2010, there were 3,697 wage violations reported in the two counties, and those violations were worth about $3.6 million in unpaid wages.

You can read a full copy of the report here. The report also includes a number of stories of wage theft in South Florida that is quite disturbing.

The good news? Miami-Dade County passed an ordinance recently designed to stop wage theft.

Kim Bobo Describes Wage Theft Epidemic in Congressional Testimony