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A group of 11 House lawmakers testified together before the Labor and Workforce Development Committee Tuesday in support of a bill intended to discourage and penalize wage theft – the practice of not paying workers what they’re owed – despite the death of similar bills in previous legislative sessions.
“Massachusetts absolutely does have tough laws and many, many tools to use to go after violators. I’ve used them,” Rep. Daniel Cullinane, a Boston Democrat and former wage theft investigator, told the committee. “But at the end of the day, general contractors are paid a lot of money for the increased responsibility to be the lead on projects. They hire subcontractors, they choose who to trust. They need to be more accountable. There needs to be more skin in the game.”
Rep. Daniel Donahue, who filed the legislation with Sen. Sal DiDomenico, said it would empower the attorney general and workers to hold accountable employers who commit wage theft or look the other way while it is occurring.
The Senate has twice previously passed versions of the bill, including by a unanimous vote last year, but House leaders did not bring it to the floor for a vote in either of the last two sessions.
Like past versions, the bill would allow for lead contractors to be held responsible for wage theft violations by subcontractors and allow the attorney general to issue stop work orders in wage theft cases and bring civil wage theft violations to court.
Donahue said it goes further than previous bills by also providing workers greater protection from retaliation and by allowing workers and whistleblowers to also bring forward public enforcement actions in court.
“Exacerbate that by not getting paid, exacerbate that by working for subcontractors who don’t pay benefits to their employees, OK, exacerbate that when people underpay you or don’t classify you correctly,” Sen. Cindy Friedman of Arlington said. “So we’re asking them to do a job, to build all of our buildings and our schools and we’re asking them to come to work every day, but we’re not going to ensure that they get paid, and that is just fundamentally, deeply unfair.”
Fourteen of the 40 senators and 114 of the 200 state representatives are co-sponsoring the bill (H 1610, S 1066), Donahue said.
The Associated Industries of Massachusetts, which is among the business groups that have raised concerns with wage theft bills, this year is supporting a separate wage theft bill (S 1062) filed by Sen. Vinny deMacedo.
The AIM bill, according to a letter to the committee from Vice President for Government Affairs Brad MacDougall, “would provide avenues for employees to see relief through and receive wages in a timely fashion through a victim’s fund, by private right of action or stop work orders subject to due process.” MacDougall said the bill would “allow opportunities for employers and employees to correct clerical or other related allegations of wage and hour law violations.”
Rep. Paul Brodeur, who co-chairs the Labor Committee with Sen. Patricia Jehlen, asked MacDougall if there were any circumstances under which AIM would consider vicarious liability — through which lead contractors are liable for subcontractors’ violations – as part of the solution. Pressed by Brodeur, MacDougall then replied that the AIM bill does not include vicarious liability.
Cynthia Mark, chief of Attorney General Maura Healey’s Fair Labor Division, said her office receives an average 1,200 hotline calls a month and is on track to receive 6,000 complaints this year, which she characterized as “pretty typical.” In the first 10 months of fiscal 2019, Mark said, the division has ordered about $5 million in restitution to workers and mandated that violators pay more than $3 million in penalties to the state’s general fund. Supporters of the Donahue bill repeatedly cited the statistic that 350,000 Massachusetts workers lose an estimated $700 million annually to wage theft.
