Documented has a piece out this week highlighting three bills that have been proposed to the New York State Legislature in an effort to curb rampant wage theft. This comes in response to a Documented/ProPublica joint project last year which found more than 127,000 New Yorkers to be victims of wage theft, (and that the New York Department of Labor was a mixture of understaffed, incompetent, and unable to prevent it).
Of these bills, they write that:
The proposed legislation — dubbed the Wage Theft Deterrence Package — includes three bills. The first (S8451) would empower the State Liquor Authority to suspend liquor licenses for bars and restaurants that the Department of Labor has determined owe their workers more than $1,000. [...]
The second bill (S8452) would enable the Department of Labor to place a stop work order on any business that has a wage theft claim of at least $1,000. That approach has been effective in other states, such as New Jersey, which shut down 27 Boston Market restaurants and eventually recovered more than $630,000 in back wages for 314 workers.
The third bill (S8453) allows the Tax Department to suspend a business’s Certificate of Authority — which allows it to collect sales tax and conduct business — in cases where wage theft exceeds $1,000.
The three bills include a provision that allows employers to avoid these punishments if they resolve the wage theft claims within 15 days.
You can find S8451 here, S8452 here, and S8453 here. Obviously if you live in New York I would strongly encourage you to contact your legislators about cosponsoring and helping pass these bills. (And while you're at it, maybe encourage them to help pass some of the other labor law proposals by the NY Socialists in Office!)