Staffing issues and budget constraints have left the Connecticut Department of Labor scrambling to respond to wage theft reports. Recovered stolen wages have decreased by more than 50% between 2017 and 2023.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s José Luis Martínez to discuss his article, “Wage theft complaint backlog grows, but Dept. of Labor lacks staff,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Hello, José. You've followed the wage theft crisis in Connecticut for a while now. Were you surprised by last month's state auditor's report that found complaints over wage theft are piling up while legislative proposals that would have increased labor department staff have failed?
JLM: Not really. You know, this is one of the many things that hasn't been funded by the state government. You know, it's not an issue unique to the labor department's wage and workplace standards division. It's an issue that's been seen across many agencies that say they're understaffed. This piece just took a very detailed look at this division in particular.
WSHU: You came up with some graphs here. One is a statistical analysis showing that wages recovered by the Department of Labor are at their lowest since 1984. The other illustrates that the number of investigators is lower than it was in 2015. Could you just explain what we see in those graphs?
JLM: Yeah, so in the wage and workplace standards division, what they do is they investigate complaints of unpaid wages among other labor violations. But every year, they report how much in wages they've recovered for workers. And you know, there's some data available online, through administrative reports to the governor that the labor department writes, but we wanted to go back in time we wanted to see, okay, are these levels we're seeing now, which are $2.4 million, as of last year, is this the lowest it's been in decades in a while? You know, is this a high? Is this low?
So we went to the state library, and we combed through these administrative reports. And we were able to paint a picture to show that these are the lowest level, the lowest level in wage recoveries that the department has seen in decades. At the same time, what we've seen in the past decade is that the number of stock levels at this unit has decreased, particularly the number of wage and hour investigators who investigate overtime, minimum wage, and also wage enforcement agents, which you know, have a broader mandate, they investigate things like commissions, bonuses, etc.
WSHU: Now, you showed that we were recovering about $5 million a year, and it's come down to $2.4 million. What does that mean for the workers who are affected? Because we have a situation here where they haven't been paid those wages?
JLM: Yeah, so at the same time that, you know, there are fewer investigators, so there are fewer investigators able to recoup wages for workers. Now, at the same time, because of this decreasing staff levels, there's also been an increasing backlog of cases. And what this means is cases that haven't been assigned to an investigator yet. So, to put things clearly, if a worker were to submit a complaint right now at the Department of Labor regarding unpaid wages, they'd have to wait anywhere from six to eight months, at least according to when investigators testified this year's legislative session. So you know, it's taken a while to just even hear back about these cases. So it's not just that the division is recovering less money, but they're also taking longer to do it. So workers are waiting longer to hear back about their cases.
WSHU: And some will probably never get those wages back.
JLM: Yeah, it depends. In some cases, investigators have noted that by the time they're able to investigate a complaint, the employer accused of not paying wages is already closed, or they filed for bankruptcy, or the worker has already moved out of state. So yeah, there are a lot of implications for it taking that long to recover these wages.
WSHU: Now, José, you spent some time examining what was being done in the legislature. What happened? They have proposals on the table. What happened to those proposals to increase the staff?
JLM: In 2023 and in this year's legislative session, there were proposals to increase staff at this division, and they both didn't pass. Mainly this year, they didn't pass because they just didn't adjust the budget. But last year, there was a bill that would have increased the number of investigators to 45 from the current, you know, depends on a definition, how you define wage and hour inspectors, but it would have cost a few million to fund this. But you know, what they told me last year, you know, simply put, it's that it's competing interests. There are a lot of things that need funding, but again, you know, the governor wants to keep piling up the rainy day. So, you know, it just didn't pass last year, they didn't pass this year, and advocates are hoping to be able to pass the bill again next year.
WSHU: Well, with this auditor's report, you think that we'll actually try and put some pressure on lawmakers to get this done next year because it seems to be getting worse?
JLM: From what I'm hearing, from what the legislators told me is, it's something that they want to focus on and that they're hoping to target next year. And you know, we reported on this figure, you know, this 800 figure that the auditors came up with this year. We reported, in fact, an increased number because of the audit report. Nolan's 800 case backlog is, as of a couple of years, only 23. That's a couple of years back now. That's as of 2020. So you see the backlog? 1000.
WSHU: Okay. So basically, it's getting worse than what the auditors are telling us.
JLM: Yes, correct. It's just now official, right? The auditors went in, and they put out the official report beyond what just the labor department was telling us.
WSHU: And so, what's the process right now? Is that fresh legislation that's going to be introduced next year? What's going on?
JLM: Yeah, advocates are hoping that the bills will be back on the table, you know; as for the specifics, from my understanding, they want to make sure they want to write a bill that passes. You know, the problem has been that it's too costly, you know, because, again, the fiscal note for this 2024 bill was $6 million. And not just because they had to hire more investigators, but they had to hire more supervisors, so supervisors to manage these new investigators. So whether it's by tapering off the initial costs, there's no indication as to what the exact billing will be next year, but they are hoping to pass it because as you mentioned, you know, the case backlog is growing.
Even if the backlog wasn't there, one thing that the Department of Labor wants to continue to do is proactive enforcement, which is where they go beyond just investigating complaints; they also do inspections. You know, they already do it, but they want to continue doing it. They want to do inspections of industries where now there are a lot of low-income workers who tend to suffer a lot of these labor violations.
