When people hear the phrase “wage theft”, they may imagine someone flat out refusing to pay for work their employees performed.
This flagrant violation of federal and state law can happen, often when an employer is under financial distress but trying to cover that up and keep operating.
However, according to one nonprofit group that advocates for employee rights, wage theft is usually a much more subtle problem.
The fact that it is hard to detect wage theft does not mean it is a minor issue. Between 2017 and 2020, authorities recovered over $3 billion in wages that should have been paid to employees but were not.
Furthermore, the suspicion is that wage theft goes widely underreported. While fear of illegal retaliation is a factor as well, most employees do not report wage theft because it flies under the radar.
Most employees in the greater New York City area and the New Jersey suburbs may not even know that they are victims of wage theft. Even well-meaning employers sometimes do not understand their obligations and wind up violating federal or state wage and overtime laws.
Some more subtle forms of wage theft include the following:
- Requesting off the clock work, even for short amounts of time.
- Requiring an employee to correct a mistake or do a task on their own time.
- Deducting or withholding payments as a form of discipline, like refusing to pay for overtime because it was not authorized.
- Restricting an employee’s freedom to use their time as they please during an unpaid lunch break or otherwise interfering with an employee’s personal time.
- Improper deductions or withholdings, including tips and commissions due.
- Misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor or improperly claiming an employee as exempt from overtime without meeting legal requirements for doing so.
- Refusing to reimburse expenses that are clearly work-related.
- Miscalculations or using inconsistent or irregular methods of calculating time worked or employees’ wages.
Admittedly, for these harder-to-notice practices, the word “theft” may be a little strong. Often, employers make honest but still careless mistakes when paying their employees.
However, even if the employer meant no harm, they are still legally responsible to pay compensation for wages they owe as well as any other compensation the law allows on account of their withholding wages illegally.