Mills Administration Cracking Down on Wage Theft, Recovered Nearly $500,000 in Stolen Back Wages in 2021
[/caption]
When an employer cheats a worker out of their hard earned wages by failing to pay overtime, violating minimum wage laws, misclassifying workers as independent contractors, forcing employees to work “off the clock” or simply not paying the employee at all, the crime is officially known as a “wage and hour violation." But we call it wage theft.
When Governor Janet Mills was elected in 2018 there were just four inspectors at the Maine Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division to cover Maine’s nearly 700,000 workers. But since then, the Maine AFL-CIO has worked with the Governor and the Maine Legislature to more than double the number of wage and hour inspectors at the department and add an additional Assistant Attorney General to crack down on labor law breakers across the state.
As a result of this additional enforcement capacity, the amount of unpaid wages recovered by the state has increased. In 2021 alone, the Maine Department of Labor recovered nearly a half million dollars in owed back wages and even shut down two of the most notorious wage thieves in the state. The number of wage theft violations found by MDOL has grown from about 353 in 2019 to more than 1,050 last year. The total amount of back pay MDOL ordered employers to pay grew from nearly $516,000 to over $770,000. The Department is even publishing the names of businesses and details of their labor violations on this website.
However, as a recent Maine Telegram investigation reported, the department is still woefully understaffed to cover the roughly 50,000 businesses in Maine, amounting to an over 5,500-to-1 ratio of workplaces to inspectors — a much more lopsided ratio than MDOL had in the 1970s.
“It is really significant and important that the department is making this information public and really trying to move forward with smart, strategic enforcement,” Matt Schlobohm, executive director of Maine AFL-CIO, told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “It is also true that there is much more across the board that all of us need to do to create a culture of compliance and make sure the law is respected in the workplace.”
Unfortunately, the declining collective strength of unions, the proliferation of forced arbitration agreements that require workers to take labor violations to private arbitration and the “gig economy” has allowed wage and hour abuses to flourish.
Anyone who has questions about labor laws, or thinks their rights have been violated, should contact MDOLs Bureau of Labor Standards at (207) 623-7900 or go to its website.