South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
Wage-theft laws help employees get money they are owed
Marcia Heroux Pounds
7:22 PM EDT, May 5, 2010
A domestic worker is expected to be available at all hours, but is only paid for a regular 40-hour workweek. An hourly worker is told to "clock out," but to finish a job before leaving without pay. A construction project comes to a halt due to financial troubles and the workers are never paid.
These are typical scenarios reported by South Florida legal services and community groups. Where are such workers to turn?
Miami-Dade County has passed the first county ordinance in the nation against wage theft — employers not paying workers what they're owed — and Palm Beach County is considering a similar ordinance. Could Broward County be far behind?
"It's rampant in almost all low-wage service industries," says Jennifer Hill, a staff attorney with the Workplace Justice Project in Miami. "In an economic downturn it's even worse."
Florida is a hotbed of wage-and-hour litigation. The cases often have to do with employers' misclassifying of workers as salaried when they should be hourly and paid overtime. But smaller businesses that don't have dealings with interstate commerce don't fall under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Federal law doesn't apply, for example, to workers who are employed by a small South Florida hotel. Domestic workers who clean houses, work as nannies, or care for the sick or dying have little recourse when they are not paid.
These workers fear they will lose their jobs if they complain. While there is small-claims court, taking the issue to court often costs more than is owed. "They are often very small claims and they have a hard time finding someone to help them. They're isolated and frightened to take action," Hill says.
The U.S. Department of Labor has eight offices in Florida and moves investigators where needed, said Michael Wald, spokesman for the DOL in Atlanta. The Government Accountability Office found in a June 2009 study of the Wage and Hour Department that it "responded inadequately to complaints, leaving low-wage workers vulnerable to wage theft and other labor law violations."
Wald said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has made wage-and-hour enforcement a priority and has added 250 investigators nationwide.
Community groups that have been working for wage-theft ordinances say more help is needed for workers who have complaints about pay.
"We had a man in my congregation who was paid $200 for working a 45-hour week in a local business. We think it's much more common than was actually talked about, especially in service, restaurant and service personnel," says Father Hallock Martin of the Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in West Palm Beach.
Martin is co-chairman of the wage-theft issue for PEACE, a community organization that brought the problem to Palm Beach County Commissioner Shelly Vanna whose staff is researching an ordinance proposal.
"We want to make sure Palm Beach County is a place where people can come to work and make sure they're treated fairly for the work they do," Vanna says. But she thinks the Miami-Dade ordinance may be too strong. "We want to make sure we don't go overboard and make it too punitive … We don't want to put a burden on people who want to do it right."
Miami-Dade, which is just implementing its ordinance, already is tweaking it. The ordinance says an employer has exactly 14 calendar days from the time the work is performed to pay the worker, but that's a problem for companies that routinely pay bimonthly. "What they're going to do is amend it to say 14 days, unless the employer has an established pay schedule," says Anne Marie Estevez, a partner with Morgan Lewis law firm in Miami.
Estevez also takes issue with the Miami-Dade's "wage-theft" label, and mandatory treble damages is "pretty strong," she says. Estevez, who usually represents employers, says sometimes an employer simply makes a mistake, such as failing to calculate overtime based on a bonus given an employee.
But the need for more protection for low-wage workers has existed for some time, community and business groups say.
"You hear about people working on a contract that ended and the employer never pays them their last two or three weeks of wages. There are domestic workers who must be available to work all hours of the day. It really runs the gamut," says Eric Brakken, Florida district director of the Service Employees International Union.
Jose Rodriguez, attorney with Community Justice Project of Florida Legal Services, says the Miami-Dade ordinance "adds an accessible forum that workers can go to if they're intimidated by some other process."
Marcia Heroux Pounds can be reached at mpounds@SunSentinel.com or 561-243-6650.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/fl-marcia-wage-theft-20100505,0,4962492,print.column
