Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

wage theft

wage theft

  • Stopping the Crime Wave in the Construction Industry

    Construction workers need protection (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


    There’s a crime wave affecting hard-working New Yorkers that you won’t hear about on cable news. Construction contractors are using underhanded schemes, shell companies, shady bank accounts, and check-cashing stores to avoid paying employees the full pay they have earned. In New York, that adds up to...

  • How New York City Must Support Low-Wage Essential Workers as They Support Everyone Else

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    (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


    Luz is a home care worker in New York City who routinely logged 24-hour shifts caring for patients in their homes during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Luz is a pseudonym to protect her privacy.)

    As a frontline worker, she was especially susceptible to the virus, yet she was forced to purchase her own gloves, masks, and other PPE because her employer refused to provide them. Despite the grueling hours, unsafe working conditions, and persistent wage violations, Luz could not leave her job because her

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  • The Next Big Step in Stopping Wage Theft in the Construction Industry

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    Construction workers (photo: governor's office)


    I’m an employment attorney at Make the Road New York, a community-based organization that helps low-wage and immigrant workers fight workplace abuses. Among the hundreds of low-wage workers our team serves each year, construction workers make up the single largest group. We hear daily from construction workers cheated of their wages by subcontractors who refuse to pay overtime or disappear when a project is winding down, a problem that’s especially prevalent on the non-union and residential sites where

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  • After Cuomo Veto and Pledge to Revisit, No New York Movement on Wage Theft Bill

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    Gov. Cuomo with workers (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)


    *This story was published in partnership with New York Focus.*

    Since 2014, Jin Gou Ke, an immigrant from China's Fujian Province, has worked as a delivery worker for Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Paid a pre-tip salary of just $3 per order, far short of the city’s minimum direct cash wage of

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  • New York Must Slam the Door on Wage Theft

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    Construction workers (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)


    The construction industry workforce all across this state is keeping New York’s economic engine revving, building new homes, businesses, hospitality and retail venues in communities from Buffalo to the Bronx.

    Yet for all their hard work, many are still being ripped off, or getting paid far less than what they were promised, and what they are legally entitled to be compensated.
    Whether they are being knowingly underpaid by contractors for overtime hours or the contractor who hired

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