For fast-food worker Tatiana Conway, 17, having some 33 hours shaved off her paycheck totally derailed her life for a while.
She had transferred from one Tampa fast food franchise to another within the same chain, and her name had yet to be added to the timekeeping system at the new store. She spent months trying to recover the lost pay; in the meantime, her phone was shut off for a month and she had to cancel major plans.
“It made me unable to pay bills that I needed to pay,” she said. “I was expecting that money and I had plans for the money and it didn’t come through …My plans for my money fell apart.”
It took Conway three months to recover the wages she was due.
If Tampa or Hillsborough County had a method of recourse for retrieving unlawfully withheld wages on its books, Conway said she would probably have gotten that money back a lot sooner.
She believes she was a victim of wage theft, a surprisingly common phenomenon in which workers, typically in the service or construction industry, somehow get shorted on their pay. This could be through an employer’s failure to pay the full amount (or anything at all) for hours worked, making an employee work off the clock, or withholding overtime pay or shorting a worker on tips owed (pretty easy to do when credit cards are involved).
The Tampa Bay area shows the second highest incidence of wage theft in the state behind the Miami area. County by county, Hillsborough trails only Miami-Dade in terms of the severity of the problem.
“Wage theft is extremely widespread,” said Bruce Nissen, director of research at Florida International University’s Center for Labor Research and Studies. “It’s widespread throughout the country, also in the state of Florida. And most definitely in the Tampa Bay area.”
Hillsborough reported 4,705 cases between September of 2008 and January of 2011, for a total of $3,266,775 in wages lost. The average amount recovered was $694 — the bulk of a monthly rent payment for many people. In Pinellas over that same period, 3,615 cases were reported at a total of $1,874,978, with an average recovery of $519.
From the standpoint of employers, advocates argue, wage-theft ordinances are good for business, since they level the playing field by removing the unfair advantage enjoyed by those who commit wage theft.
“If I’m an honest businessman, and I don’t steal wages from my employees, I get undercut by the dishonest businessman who does underpay and cuts corners,” Nissen said. “It actually hurts the honest businessman when these bottom-feeders, these lawbreakers are allowed to get away with things.”
There aren’t any protections against wage theft at the state level. Indeed, the state shut down its own Department of Labor and Employment Security in 2002, under then-governor and likely presidential contender Jeb Bush.
At the federal level, there are protections through the U.S. Department of Labor, but critics say they are weak and hard to enforce.
So officials at the city and county level, including Tampa Bay, have taken it upon themselves to address the problem. Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Osceola and Alachua counties have all passed ordinances targeting wage theft, as have a handful of cities; the latest to do so is St. Petersburg, which unanimously passed a law in April.
“The data that we do have is the tip of the iceberg,” said St. Pete City Councilwoman Darden Rice, who spearheaded the discussion of such a law at City Hall. “For low-income workers getting shorted $60, $100, that makes a huge difference …When you get shorted your wages, it all compiles. It’s just really hard to climb out from underneath it.”
Somewhat modeled after the law Miami-Dade passed in 2010 (which has since helped recover about $3.8 million in stolen wages), the new St. Pete ordinance sets aside $75,000-$100,000 in funding for a full-time staff position to handle wage-theft claims.
The staffer will review claims of wage theft of $60 or more, and contact the employer, who then has 21 days to respond before a subpoena is issued. If it is determined that the employer did commit wage theft, he or she will owe the back wages as well as twice the amount of wages owed in fines to be paid to the city.
If someone files a bogus claim, he or she will be responsible for administrative costs.
St. Pete is the first local government in the Tampa Bay area to pass such an ordinance. Both the Pinellas and Hillsborough boards of county commissioners have been studying ways to implement such laws.
In Hillsborough County, the debate has been contentious.
Commissioner Kevin Beckner, one of two Democrats on the panel, pitched such an ordinance, and after a presentation in which that county’s damning wage theft statistics were presented, the commission opted to take up the issue.
At the heart of the debate is how to model the ordinance. Progressives favor the Miami-Dade model, the one St. Pete used, which has shown to be cheaper and more effective.
Conservatives, including the majority of Hillsoborough’s commissioners, prefer the Palm Beach County model, which gives money — possibly more than twice as much — to an outside legal firm to handle the cases via the court system, and costs wage earners who are at 15 percent of the poverty level
or more.
A big concern for them seems to be the notion that adding a staffer to handle wage-theft claims in-house would essentially be growing government.
“I still worry about proliferation and this thing growing into two employees, three employees and before you know it you have a department,” Commissioner Stacy White said at a June 3 meeting.
Nissen said that reaction among the board’s conservatives wasn’t very surprising.
“They have an ideological opposition to any form of government regulation whatsoever,” he said. “Even regulation that keeps businesses honest and on the straight, they’re against it, basically. They claim that they can police themselves.
That’s proven to be absolutely wrong in the area of wage theft.”
Some on the board also said they wanted the ordinance to cover small businesses and contractors, which to Nissen seemed strange.
“I don’t think anyone has a problem with doing that. Whether you want to lump that in with a workers’ ordinance, which is basically what the wage-theft ordinance is about, is maybe debatable,” Nissen said. “I saw it as part of the tactics of obfuscating the issue, posturing that you really want to help workers, dilute it in various ways and confuse things, and probably get it back to some kind of a legal court-dominated mechanism, again, which is not a very effective one.”
At the June 3 meeting, Beckner became visibly frustrated at his colleagues, who seemed to favor the Palm Beach model despite the data showing Miami-Dade had a return on investment some 15 times higher and cost the county less. He accused them of being beholden to the same retail industry lobbyists who, unable to get the legislature to pass laws preempting local wage-theft ordinances, are pushing “watered down” laws at the local level.
“If you really wanted to do something and you care about these people, why would you adopt a model shown to be less effective?” he said to a chorus of applause from the audience. “Why would you not adopt a model that is shown to recover more for the people that you say you care about most? I hope it is the people that you’re passionate about, and not the special lobbyists that have been lobbying for this Palm Beach model across the state.”
Commissioner Victor Crist shot back at Beckner, questioning his motivation (Beckner is running for County Clerk in 2016).
“If you continue down the path you are going now, you will get the ink and the publicity, yes, which is what you may want, but you will get nothing for those people,” Crist said, raising his voice. “Nothing.”
Labor advocates like FIU’s Nissen say Beckner is right to dig in his heels.
“The difference between those two is, the Miami-Dade model is very effective, efficient and has proven itself very well,” Nissen said. “The Palm Beach model has not even raised as much money for the workers affected as they’ve spent on the program, which means Palm Beach could have given those workers their lost wages and still saved more money. It would have been more efficient.”
Hillsborough’s discussion ended with Commission Chair Sandy Murman suggesting that the county develop a process that’s unique to the county, and the commission vaguely directed staff to develop a wage-theft ordinance the board will discuss at an as-yet-undetermined date.
John Dubrule, Chief Operating Officer of Gulf Coast Legal Services, which helps low-income residents in Pinellas, Manatee and Sarasota counties, said while he views the Miami-Dade model as stronger, he appreciates that Hillsborough commissioners are having a discussion few other local governments are having.
“I applaud the [Hillsborough] County Commission for addressing this because many other counties have not done that,” he said. “So I think that even though there’s a debate as to how to come out on this, it’s evidence that they’re trying to address the issues of low-wage workers.”
As Hillsborough moves forward tenuously, the county across the bay is still developing such a proposal. Pinellas County did set aside $50,000 in the county’s 2016 budget to cover a wage-theft ordinance. While the board has had some discussion, it’s unclear what model they would adopt.
“I favor the Miami-Dade model because it has been most effective, but we (Commission & Staff) are still conducting our review of the other options,” County Commissioner Ken Welch told CL in a text message.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.