Feds: Stadium subcontractor ‘repeat violator’ of wage laws (NV)

May 11, 2020 10:21 am

The company hired to paint portions of Allegiant Stadium is alleged to be “a repeat violator of the FLSA (Federal Labor Standards Act)” according to a U.S. District judge citing a Department of Labor complaint against Unforgettable Coatings, its owner Cory Summerhays and his partners for failing to pay overtime.

The DOL, which filed a complaint against Summerhays and the others on March 12, filed a similar complaint in 2013, that resulted in an order that Summerhays make good on overtime owed to employees.

“Instead of coming into compliance, it appears that Defendants then devised a new set of procedures to obscure its continued failure to pay overtime and then commenced a campaign to deter their workers from speaking truthfully to government investigators,” U.S. District Judge Kent Dawson wrote last month when he enjoined the company from cutting pay and from firing workers in alleged retaliation for cooperating with investigators.

“Defendants have tried not only to silence their workers, but also to actively manipulate them to provide false information to the government’s investigators,” Dawson’s order says. “When workers are first hired, Defendants advise them that they will not be paid overtime premiums, but they will make a flat $12 to $25 per hour – not minimum wage.”

“DOL investigators showed Defendants’ pay stubs demonstrating how an individual worker’s gross pay, when divided by the number of hours worked, always showed the worker being paid the worker’s straight time regular rate for all his hours worked – regardless of the number of overtime hours worked.”

“Wage theft is a rampant problem in the non-union construction industry and it drives down standards for all workers,” says the Laborers International Union of North America.

Between 2010 and today, the DOL has recovered more than $19 million in back wages from 1,615 employers in Nevada.

Taxpayers are often on the hook for providing services when workers don’t receive wages to which they are entitled.

The cost to taxpayers of providing Medicaid to Unforgettable Coatings’ eligible employees and family members in Nevada was $93,703 in fiscal year 2018, according to an annual report required by the Legislature.

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Newly available wage theft data shows nearly 130 Colorado employers with violation (CO)

Adrian D. Garcia
August 24, 2017

The state of Colorado is starting to name companies that steal wages from their employees, ending decades of businesses being able to shield their identities under claims of trade secret protections.

Nearly 130 employers have been ordered to pay employees $547,780.90 in back pay and penalties since April 13. The companies were also ordered to pay the state another $170,750 in fines in connection with wage-law violations, according to the data shared Monday by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

The new transparency around wage theft violations comes after a Rocky Mountain PBS investigation into Colorado’s wage-theft secrecy in 2015 highlighting how “you can’t know if your favorite bar stiffs its servers” or “if your future employer cheats its workers” because a state law from 1915 allowed companies to keep their wage law violations from the public by claiming the information contained “trade secrets.”

In 2016, state Rep. Jessie Danielson of Wheat Ridge and former state Sen. Jessie Ulibarri of Commerce City, both Democrats, attempted to change the law. They were unsuccessful.
This spring, Danielson tried again. She partnered with state Sen. John Cooke, a Greeley Republican, and ultimately got through the Wage Theft Transparency Act.

The act, signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper in April, clarifies that wage law violations are not confidential and should be released to the public. The state still has the ability to withhold some information like an employer’s exact vacation policy if the company can successfully show why the info is a trade secret and shouldn’t be released to the public.

“These companies, in theory, without this new law could continually commit wage theft and continually cheat and steal from their employees,” Danielson said. “This is is the kind of legislation that will protect workers all across the state.”

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