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.