Wage theft is a nationwide epidemic that costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year, according to a 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute. The report’s authors found that:

[w]age theft affects far more people than more well-known crimes such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies combined, and can be absolutely devastating for workers living from paycheck to paycheck. For low-wage workers, the wages lost from wage theft can total nearly 10 percent of their annual earnings.

In Massachusetts alone, workers lose up to $1 billion a year in stolen wages, according to the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Workers are not paid the minimum wage, are not paid overtime, are misclassified as independent contractors, or are not paid at all. Although it is a serious problem throughout our society, wage theft particularly impacts countless numbers of immigrants, many of whom are especially vulnerable due to their status issues.

Watch this 3-minute video taken at an event at the Massachusetts State House where those in attendance, including some of us, were supporting an anti-wage theft bill.

Some indications of the extent of wage theft in Massachusetts

  • In 2013, the Massachusetts Attorney General, who is responsible for enforcing the Commonwealth’s wage and hour laws, informed the Supreme Judicial Court: “Nonpayment of wages continues to be a significant economic problem.”
  • In 2014, the Massachusetts Legislature established a Council on the Underground Economy. Included among the council’s responsibilities is the coordination of the Commonwealth’s efforts to combat the underground economy and employee misclassification, including efforts to combat wage theft.
  • In 2015, the UMass Amherst Labor Center published a report funded by the Massachusetts legislature titled, “The Epidemic of Wage Theft in Residential Construction in Massachusetts.”
  • In Fiscal Year 2024, which runs from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division took 1,246 civil enforcement actions against 638 employers, on behalf of 40,370 workers across Massachusetts and assessed $9,341,455 in restitution and $22,389,917 in penalties and other sanctions. While this is an improvement in the enforcement of the Commonwealth’s wage and hour laws over previous years, it is still only a small fraction of the stolen wages in Massachusetts that year.

Wage theft not only hurts the workers and their families who are its direct victims. It also adversely affects their local economies of which they are a part. And it also deprives federal, state, and local government agencies of staggering amounts of tax revenues and other payments, such as payments for unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.

Learn more about the problem of wage theft throughout the United States

Get involved with the Task Force’s Wage Theft Project