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Wage theft is when your employer doesn’t give you, the worker, what they owe you. “Sometimes it is easy to spot, like when an employer fails to pay overtime and instead pays the normal rate of pay,” says Jonathan LaCour, founder and managing attorney of California firm Employees First Labor Law. “But unfortunately, sometimes [wage theft] can be hard for the employee to identify, and tens or hundreds of employees can be robbed of their hard work and labor in an effort to fatten the bottom line of the company.”

Workers were able to recover $3 billion in wages they had lost between 2017 and 2020 due to various forms of wage theft, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. But that’s a small fraction of wages lost during that period, EPI noted, because much of wage theft goes unreported. And low-wage workers, in industries such as construction, child care and food services, are disproportionately affected by wage theft. And many of these victims are immigrants.

Join us to learn more about wage theft, its prevalence in Minnesota, what unions and worker organizations are doing about it, and how we can help. We will hear from Carson Starkey, a researcher with the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters, Rev. Doug Mork, Executive Director at the Building Dignity and Respect Standards Council (BDC), and several workers who have been the victims of wage theft.

Free and open to all