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Abstract: Wage theft costs workers billions of dollars each year. During a time when the federal government is rolling back workers' rights, it is essential to consider how state and local laws can address the problem. As this Article explains, the pernicious practice of wage theft seemingly continues unabated, despite a recent wave of state and local laws to curtail it.
This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of state and local anti-wage theft laws. Through a compilation of 141 state and local anti-wage theft laws enacted over the past decade, this Article offers an original typology of the most common anti-wage theft regulatory strategies. An evaluation of these laws shows that they are unlikely to meaningfully reduce wage theft. Specifically, the typology reveals that many of the most popular anti-wage theft strategies involve authorizing worker complaints, creating or enhancing penalties, or mandating employers to disclose information to workers about their wage-related rights. Lessons learned about these conventional regulatory strategies from other contexts raise serious questions about whether these state and local laws can be successful.
Rather than concede defeat, this Article contends that there are useful insights to be drawn from the typology and analysis. It concludes by recognizing promising regulatory innovations, identifying new collaborative approaches to enhance agency enforcement, and looking beyond regulation to nongovernmental strategies.
INTRODUCTION
The opening months of the Trump Administration were full of bad news for low-wage workers. Among other things, the Administration announced it would abandon rules that sought to ensure that service workers would get their tips, help workers more easily recover minimum and overtime wages from employers, and drastically increase the number of workers entitled to overtime pay.1 It also put in place a hiring freeze that reduced the staff of the federal agency tasked with protecting workers' wages.2
State and local laws could help to lessen the blow. Over the preceding decade, energized worker movements have driven states and localities to promote the rights of low-wage workers.3 Across the country, they have enacted laws seeking to protect workers from misclassification as independent contractors, to increase the minimum wage, and to address wage theft.4
Wage theft costs workers billions of dollars each year.5 Stories abound of low-wage workers and their families who struggle to keep...