$99K Stolen from Longwood School Workers as Contractor Pleads Guilty of Wage Theft

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At this point, news on wage theft gets more infuriating for me as I dig deep but it's still far from surprising when you hear some of the ridiculous stories out there.

A contractor in Suffolk County, New York, just pleaded guilty to stealing over $99,000 from five employees.

They deal in millions of dollars, those big time contractors, so you might end up thinking maybe it was a bookkeeping mistake but no it wasn't. This was a willful, well calculated attempt to cheat workers out of wages they earned doing honest, hard labor. Geraldo DeAlmeida and his company, R&L Concrete, misclassified employees on a public works project in the Longwood Central School District and they ended up paying them far below the legal prevailing wage.

Workers who should have earned between $68 and $198 per hour were instead paid $22 and $25 per hour. That's more than half taken away.

One worker was even left off the payroll entirely. That was a worker doing the same job, same hours and made completely invisible on the books. The law states that you must pay prevailing wages for public works projects but for these employees, that law was ignored somehow. It was not an isolated mistake, it’s a systemic problem. Wage theft seems to be happening every day in construction, hospitality, retail and countless other industries. The more research you do into that area, the more you find disturbing cases.

The people doing the work are treated as expendable and the profits and I would say corporate gamesmanship are prioritized above all else.

This case is an example of the many examples pointing towards the problem of a critical imbalance in power.

DeAlmeida and his company were subcontractors on a school project so that means the money was public funds which was meant to improve a community. Yet someway, somehow, the ones actually building and maintaining public infrastructure were denied their fair share of the money.

They law stepped in and figured this out but the very fact that someone had to commit a felony to cheat workers out of wages shows just how easy it is for any boss to exploit labor.

The problem keeps going on because it's pretty obvious that a lot of these workers themselves don’t have the leverage to fight back, they usually depend on a paycheck to survive and that lifestyle makes them very vulnerable to underpayment, misclassification and other abuses.

The law as I said stepped in and their decision was to ban R&L Concrete from public works projects in New York for five years.

I'm glad there's law working at least but it doesn’t make the stolen wages any less real and it doesn’t undo the stress, lost savings and instability these workers endured when they were getting cheated.

I always say the system has a crack by design. It seems to reward cleverness in management and bureaucracy and sometimes the effect is that it punishes those who actually produce value. Workers, the people who keep the economy running and the buildings standing are expected to tolerate this because apparently, they are replaceable.

When workers complain, it's not necessarily about greed, some cases are though but for a lot of the cases, it's their push back on a system that consistently exploits labor and protects wealth at the top.

In all scenarios, workers deserve to be paid what they are owed, to be classified correctly and to have their contributions recognized well enough. I'll continue to say that they do deserve basic respect and fairness. It shouldn't be the case that workers need legal battles just to recover what’s rightfully theirs.

The headlines may say Contractor Pleads Guilty, but the bigger issue on the ground is that wage theft is normalized. Public projects, private construction, corporate offices, way too often, the people who do the work are undervalued and underpaid while bosses and accountants keep the profits flowing.

All these stories we hear out there gives more reason and purpose to why workers need to fight back, organize and demand not just enforcement of the law but a system that treats them as human beings.

Screenshot taken from the company's site, so not mine.

The shot's original site