Editor’s note: This article originated as a project by Karen Galvan, Lucia Qin, and Phatamarha Noel — Smith College students in a data journalism course taught by Naila Moreira and Ben Baumer.
In 2023, Massachusetts reached what was, at the time, its largest settlement in recent memory for a problem that plagues workers nationwide: wage theft.
The employer under scrutiny was one of western Massachusetts’ largest, the MGM Springfield casino. In a settlement agreement, the company admitted no culpability for alleged stolen wages, but agreed to pay $461,587 in restitution to employees identified by the attorney general’s office and another $6.4 million in penalties to the state.
That sum, while significant — it is still the third largest in the last ten years, behind recent fines against Uber and Lyft — pales in comparison to the money the casino makes. According to state data, MGM Springfield raked in over $25 million in taxable revenue this May alone.
Over 16,000 workers across Massachusetts have filed labor law complaints since 2023, resulting in 1,951 enforcement fines and settlements from the state Attorney General’s Office, according to a Shoestring review of state data. Of those enforcement actions, 264 of them were against companies based in Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin, and Berkshire counties.
Wage theft is a crime concentrated in the lowest paying industries, and for many workers who experience it, even one missed payment could mean choosing between expenses like rent, groceries, or childcare.
Last year, for example, the UMass Donahue Institute’s Economic & Public Policy Research Group found that 66% of workers at MGM Springfield earned less than a living wage in 2022 and less than 1% received a promotion that year. The casino did not respond to a request for comment, and no representative or member of the casino’s union could be reached for comment for this story.
The problem is hardly unique to Massachusetts: a landmark 2014 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in any given week, two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago experienced at least one incident of wage theft, a rate that they found could end up costing these workers an average of 10% of their take-home pay. Extrapolating these figures and comparing them to wages recovered by workers who took action against their employers in 2012, the study’s authors reported that wage theft could be costing American workers as much as $50 billion a year, dwarfing all other types of theft.
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Enforcement of alleged labor law violations, including everything from wage theft to child labor and failure to offer mandated breaks and sick leave, has increased during the tenure of current Attorney General Andrea Campbell. The nearly 2,000 fines and settlements issued by her office since 2023 average to 780 per year, compared to an average of 596 per year under former Attorney General Maura Healey, who is now the governor. Complaint data, which goes back to 2020, shows those numbers also increasing over that period, from a low of 5,071 in 2021 to 7,193 last year.
The attorney general’s office declined to make a staff member available to speak on the record for this story.
The Shoestring compiled a list of the largest enforcement actions taken by the attorney general’s Fair Labor Division in western Mass since July 2021. Some of the largest fines and settlements include those against a Hampden County Dunkin Donuts franchise, totaling $1.6 million; Theory Wellness, a cannabis company with a location in Chicopee that has since become a worker-owned coop; KleenRite, a Ludlow-based cleaning service; and the owners of Tellus & the Satellite Bar in Northampton.
No representatives from any of these companies agreed to speak with The Shoestring for this story. John Salema, the owner of Agawam Donuts, could not be reached.
Responses to investigations for labor law violations can range from cooperative to hostile, the latter coming with additional fines should employers fail to furnish investigators with relevant records. Sixteen western Mass employers paid fines as high as $7,500 for doing just that since July 2021.
Most employers are found not to have committed violations with specific intent to do so. In Theory Wellness’ case, the company said in a statement following its payment of restitution to affected workers that “mainstream payroll providers” were unwilling to work with cannabis companies due to the drug’s continued federal status as a Schedule I illegal drug.
There is little overlap between the list of largest offenders during Healey’s tenure as AG and Andrea Campbell’s current term.
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Enforcement of wage laws in the state relies on workers reporting possible infractions to the Fair Labor Division. Lack of knowledge of the law and other vulnerabilities, like immigration status, can be barriers for workers filing complaints.
This unequal playing field between law-abiding employers and those willing to exploit workers for profit has real consequences for labor markets, according to Tom Juravich, a labor researcher and sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied the issue of wage theft.
“If you’ve got a company willing to do a job for a very low price because they’re stealing wages… then the people who are actually paying legitimate salaries and have decent working conditions can’t compete with them,” he told The Shoestring.
The most blatant form of wage theft — not paying workers at all — is especially rampant in industries like construction, restaurants, and hospitality, experts say. Many of the victims are undocumented immigrants who face the added threat of retaliation or deportation if they speak up.
The Shoestring spoke with an undocumented worker who requested anonymity. They stressed that immigrants do have labor rights and can file complaints against bosses for wage theft like anyone else. But because of their immigration status and fear of retaliation, they don’t.
“Many people think they can’t, and so they don’t,” the worker said. “They say, ‘I can’t or they’re going to fire me from my job.’”
But wage theft amounts to a boss stealing from you, the worker tells fellow immigrants now. And they have the right to challenge their boss to get paid what they deserve.
But the undocumented worker didn’t always know that. Years ago, after working the first two weeks of a new job, their boss didn’t pay them the $1,800 in wages they were owed. The worker cried and wondered why it happened to them. But they never filed a complaint.
“I didn’t know,” they said.
Subcontracting and staffing agencies have added another layer of opacity to the issue. Many employers now outsource their hiring and payroll to third-party staffing agencies. When workers aren’t paid, each party can point fingers at the other and the “people at the top of the food chain are not responsible for what happens below,” Juravich explained.
“This is a big industry, and it’s growing, and it’s going to get worse,” said Pablo Carrasco, a staff attorney at Justice at Work, a Boston-based multilingual nonprofit that offers legal support to workers in low-paying jobs. “The less money they pay the workers, the more money they make on each contract. And it’s sort of a race to the bottom between staffing agencies to get client companies.”
This cost-saving strategy leads to systematic underpayment, particularly in fast-growing sectors like warehousing, food processing, and janitorial services, advocates say. Workers are often stripped of benefits and legal protections, misclassified as independent contractors, or shuffled between subcontractors until accountability disappears entirely.
Lisa Clauson spent years working as an organizer for the carpenters’ union in western Massachusetts, where she saw firsthand how construction companies use subcontractors to hide wage theft.
For big jobs, Clauson said, cost estimates should generally look similar across different companies. “When material costs stay the same, the way they can cut costs are personnel costs or profits,” she explained. When a bid comes in much lower than others, “that generally means that they’re engaging in some sort of wage theft,” she said.
All too often, contractors and the companies or municipalities that hire them are willing to look the other way on a deal that’s too good to be true, and have historically been able to keep their names clean because subcontractors would take the heat if workers filed a complaint. She cited the case of Beacon Communities, which worked on the apartments in North Amherst’s Mill District. Clauson and the union were able to document and support subcontracted workers’ experience of wage theft during that project, which she said followed a classic formula.
“Workers get hired at a certain rate, work a week or two and get paid just fine,” she said. Then, “the foreman says ‘we’re short,’ and pays the workers only half of what they’re owed.” This continues, she said, and workers don’t want to quit because they’re owed so much.
So in the mid-2010s, groups like the carpenters’ union and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center began campaigning locally for ordinances that would create costs for businesses that commit wage theft as well as enforce oversight of construction projects supported by municipalities, including through tax breaks. Their efforts were successful in Northampton, Easthampton, Amherst, Chicopee, and Springfield.
That oversight is crucial, Clauson said, not only for enforcement, but for prevention. She cited the case of the One Ferry development in Easthampton, which received a tax break for the development and thus was subject to greater scrutiny and accountability for subcontractor wages. Ultimately, the Northampton-based D.A. Sullivan & Sons, which is union, was hired for the job. Clauson reasons that the bids “couldn’t have come in so different that the contractor went with Sullivan over non-union companies” — in other words, shadier subcontractors avoided the project knowing they’d be under extra scrutiny.
So while initiating an investigation from the attorney general’s office can help recover stolen wages, labor organizers and attorneys agree that real progress towards prevention requires systemic change through organizing.
“At the end of the day, it’s not the attorneys that make workplace changes,” Carrasco said. “It’s the workers themselves.”
If you believe your employer is committing wage theft or other labor violations, find resources from the attorney general’s Fair Labor Division here.
Additional reporting for this story was contributed by Dusty Christensen.
Brian Zayatz is the managing editor of The Shoestring. Since moving to western Mass from Cape Cod in 2014, Brian has been The Shoestring's Northampton city council beat reporter, co-founded Amherst Cinema Workers United, and been named one of Tomorrow's News Trailblazers by Editor & Publisher magazine. Find Brian's additional writing at Teen Vogue, DigBoston, Popula, Shadowproof and the Montague Reporter, or reach out at bzayatz@theshoestring.org.
