Ariela Lopez, Contributing Photographer

Bella Vazquez prides herself on being a good judge of character. So when her employer of six months stopped paying her weekly wages in the spring of 2022, citing temporary financial difficulties, she felt confident that he would eventually square up with her.

“I believed him until the last moment,” Vazquez confessed in Spanish. “The expression he had, the way he spoke — I said to myself, ‘I have also suffered hardships, so why don’t I support him? I know that, in the end, he will repay me.’”

The employer was a New Haven-based contractor who hired Vazquez and two dozen other construction workers to renovate a building in September 2021. Vazquez noted that most of the contractor’s employees, herself included, were undocumented immigrants struggling to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the contractor did not compensate them for working overtime and occasionally paid their salaries late, she described him as a kind employer who always offered his workers a smile and a free coffee. “There was no work [during the pandemic],” Vazquez said in Spanish. “So, the people put up with it.”

Work on the construction project concluded in April 2022, leaving Vasquez without a job. Neither she nor the other workers received a salary for their last month of work. It wasn’t until months later — facing radio silence from her former employer — that Vazquez realized she would never be fully compensated for her work.

She estimates that the contractor withheld about $5,000 of her wages, including the unpaid overtime and salary during the final month of the project.

Spurred on by other stories like Vazquez’s, Eamon Coburn LAW ’25 proposed in June 2023 a city ordinance that would punish wage theft. In Connecticut, wage theft cases fall under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Labor, rather than city police departments. If implemented, Coburn’s proposed ordinance would allow city enforcement of labor laws in wage theft cases.

Coburn said city alders were “pretty receptive” to his idea. Yet almost two years later, no progress has been made on the proposal.

At the forefront of the fight to address wage theft in New Haven is immigrants’ rights organization Unidad Latina en Acción, or ULA, which assists victims of labor exploitation.

“If I go to a Stop and Shop and I steal a salsa or a gallon of milk… they will call the police on me and I can be detained for larceny,” John Jairo Lugo, ULA’s community organizing director, said in Spanish. “But if my boss makes me work the whole week on a roof — with the risk that I fall, that I get sick, that I die at my workplace — and he steals $1,000 of my salary, I can’t go to the police to denounce him because the police of New Haven will tell me that this is a civil offense and I need to go to the Department of Labor.”

The proposed ordinance — drafted by Coburn and other members of Yale Law School’s HAVEN medical-legal partnership — suggests granting the city Department of Health the authority to suspend or even revoke the licenses of businesses that violate labor laws, something Lugo has advocated for since 2013.

The ordinance is the latest in a string of community-based efforts over the past two decades to combat wage theft on the local level. But stalled progress on the proposed reforms has left victims of wage theft to navigate a convoluted Department of Labor system alone.

Case backlog in Connecticut Department of Labor

For Coburn, the recent understaffing of the state Department of Labor, or DOL, makes the proposed New Haven ordinance even more imperative. With a slashed budget and a reduced number of investigators, Connecticut’s DOL faces a growing backlog of cases — and a 63 percent drop in wages recovered in 2024 compared to fiscal year 2014.

Last year’s audit found that as of May 2023, the Connecticut DOL had not begun to investigate 843 of 2,000 workplace complaints since 2021, including a case that took nearly a year to be assigned to a state wage inspector. The audit’s findings sparked outrage among Lugo and other ULA members, who rallied outside the DOL on Aug. 1, 2024.

Lugo condemned the DOL’s delayed response to workplace complaints, which he believes discourages people from reporting future instances of wage theft to the state. 

“A year [after submitting the complaint], it’s possible that I changed my job, I changed my phone number, I’m not living in the same house,” Lugo said in Spanish. “Or the DOL is asking me for documentation that I already lost because a ton of time has passed and I got tired of waiting for them to call me.”

Juliet Manalan, a spokesperson for the DOL, acknowledged the “well-documented” case backlog and limited staff in the DOL unit that oversees workplace complaints. Still, she encouraged victims of wage theft to file a complaint with the department and affirmed that all complaints are reviewed. 

Modeled after similar programs in San Francisco and Santa Clara County, New Haven’s proposed ordinance is grounded in the argument that wage theft is a public health issue — justifying the involvement of the city Department of Health. A 2014 American Journal of Public Health study found that because wage theft contributes to income insecurity, it is linked to hunger, homelessness and other public health issues.

Coburn and Terri Gerstein, founder and director of New York University’s Wagner Labor Initiative, see suspending business licenses as a far bigger disincentive from breaking labor laws than simply requiring employers to pay back the stolen wages. 

“If [employers] have their license suspended for five days, that’s real, that’s reputational harm, that’s income,” Gerstein said. “And also, why should businesses be able to get licenses … if they’re just repeatedly not paying their workers?”

Proposed city ordinance faces legal barriers

After Coburn proposed the ordinance, attorney Patricia King, who represents the city of New Haven, wrote that state law does not permit municipal departments of health to suspend or revoke business licenses in wage theft cases. She added that, unlike San Francisco, New Haven does not have a city labor standards enforcement office that could inform the Department of Health if businesses violated labor laws.

Gerstein, who previously served as Labor Bureau Chief in the New York Attorney General’s Office, argues that attorneys can choose to interpret the law liberally. She noted that California also did not have a law explicitly allowing its city departments of health to revoke licenses because of wage theft.

“As someone who worked in government for a long time, when people say that something can’t be done… another lawyer reviewing the same information might have come to a different conclusion,” Gerstein said. 

Still, California attorneys highlighted a statute requiring all licensees to follow state and federal laws, allowing San Francisco and Santa Clara County to implement license revocation programs.

King questioned the legality of the proposed city ordinance. In her opinion, there are two possible legal alternatives to the proposed ordinance. 

First, she recommended assigning a New Haven police officer as a liaison between the DOL and local community members with pending workplace complaints. She later wrote to the News that the officer would not have the authority to aid the DOL’s investigations, so this would not reduce the DOL’s case backlog. And New Haven Police Department Officer Christian Bruckhart questioned the feasibility of this recommendation, noting that the NHPD has faced an officer shortage for several years. 

Another alternative, King said, would be a city ordinance requiring businesses applying for new or renewed licenses to comply with state and federal employment laws. Similar ordinances have been adopted in Jersey City, NJ, Somerville, MA and Northampton, MA.

Since HAVEN, the Yale clinic where Coburn volunteers, is focused on a public health approach to wage theft, its members have zeroed in on King’s licensing suggestion, he said. Coburn described it as a “very promising option” that captured the spirit of the original proposal, and said he is optimistic that the ordinance will eventually be implemented.

Yet in the past year, the Yale clinic has not completed a new proposed ordinance based on the city’s feedback, nor have they met with city alders about a tweaked proposal. 

Both James Bhandary-Alexander, director of the HAVEN medical-legal partnership, and city alder Sarah Miller, who was involved in early conversations about the ordinance, declined the News’ requests for an interview. Miller explained that “no further progress” has been made so far on the proposal, and Bhandary-Alexander wrote that “it is being held up a bit by the current total chaos,” alluding to the second Trump administration’s impact on New Haven.

John DeStefano — who served as mayor of New Haven from 1994 to 2014, when immigrant community organizers first began raising the question of how the city could enforce state wage claim laws — put it more bluntly. “The fact that nothing happened is, in fact, a decision,” he said.

20 years of city inaction: advocates struggle to secure protection from wage theft 

Since its formation in 2002, ULA has advocated on behalf of immigrants who have experienced wage theft. Undocumented immigrants are especially vulnerable to labor exploitation, as they are overrepresented as workers in industries plagued by wage theft, like agriculture, food services and hotel work. Immigrants also tend to be reluctant to report wage theft because of language barriers and fears of interacting with federal immigration authorities.

ULA has also unsuccessfully spearheaded multiple efforts for the local enforcement of state wage laws.

The first of those efforts began in 2004, amid calls for city immigration reform from ULA, St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church and immigrant advocacy group Junta for Progressive Action. In conversations with DeStefano and other city officials, the organizations identified seven policy recommendations, including the enforcement of criminal wage laws by the NHPD.

DeStefano oversaw the implementation of three of the groups’ recommendations, although no progress was made on the proposed police enforcement of wage laws.

John Jairo Lugo, ULA’s community organizing director, speaks before a crowd gathered in front of City Hall in 2021. Photo by Mackenzie Hawkins

In 2014, ULA organizers submitted a letter outlining recommended wage theft programs to Toni Harp, then-mayor of New Haven. The organization proposed license revocations, quicker criminal prosecution of employers that committed wage theft and a database rendering employers that violated labor laws ineligible for city contracts and tax incentives. None of ULA’s three proposals got off the ground, according to Lugo.

In conversations with the News, DeStefano and Harp struggled to recall the details of the wage theft programs proposed during their respective terms. While none of ULA’s ideas faced strong opposition when they were introduced, the former mayors were skeptical about the feasibility of the proposed programs. DeStefano doubted the city’s ability to staff the programs, and Harp was unsure if undocumented immigrants trusted the police enough to report labor law violations.

Lugo highlighted a minor success in 2010, when the NHPD agreed to assist ULA’s efforts to recover stolen wages from employers. After ULA organizers attempted to contact an employer accused of wage theft, calling for the employer to repay the wronged employee upfront, rather than undergoing a lengthy DOL case, an NHPD officer would support those efforts by sending the employer a message urging them to meet with ULA. 

But since these efforts were a “formality” without any real enforcement power, Lugo said, they were not successful in convincing employers to negotiate with ULA and soon ceased. NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson, who joined the NHPD in 2007, was unaware of the initiative described by Lugo. He thinks these were likely efforts by an individual officer, rather than a department-wide policy.

Lugo, city officials grapple with lack of local progress on wage theft

Several former and current city officials flagged the unknown scope of the issue as a factor in the city’s lack of action in tackling wage theft. 

Between 2018 and April 2023, the Connecticut DOL received over 13,000 worker complaints, averaging over 2,700 cases each year. Specifically in New Haven, Lugo said ULA assists victims in 20 to 30 wage theft cases annually, though he called this the “tip of the iceberg.”

“With wage theft, there are so many workers whose rights are being violated who do not come forward, either because they don’t know their rights or because of fear of retaliation, fear of losing their job,” Gerstein, the NYU labor law expert, told the News.

Bruckhart, the NHPD’s public information officer, echoed former Mayor Harp’s point about undocumented immigrants being reluctant to contact the police if they experience wage theft and other labor exploitation, despite New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city — a municipality that discourages local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Current Mayor Justin Elicker estimates that only one or two wage theft cases make their way to the NHPD each year, contributing to the uncertainty around the issue’s prevalence.

Lugo expressed frustration about the lack of local change to address wage theft, despite over two decades of advocacy. Past ULA efforts around wage theft have been met by city resistance, he noted. Lugo has been arrested multiple times in connection with ULA’s protests of businesses that allegedly committed wage theft.

He was especially incensed by a January 2023 Board of Alders public hearing about proposed revisions to the city charter, during which an alder cut off a ULA member testifying about facing wage theft and sexual harassment from her employer. This prompted Lugo, the woman providing testimony and two dozen other ULA members to walk out of the meeting.

Lugo believes the alders’ refusal to hear immigrant testimony reflects the larger disinterest among city officials and a lack of political will to address wage theft.

Elicker disagreed with Lugo’s view that the city has not done enough to address wage theft. He emphasized the legal challenges that King, the city’s attorney, raised in connection with HAVEN’s initial proposal.

“We would, of course, want to do more to help address wage theft if we have those tools,” he said. “But I wouldn’t frame this as, ‘if only the city cared about this issue, we could do something more.’ Our assessment is we can’t do anything more under state statute.”

Challenges to address wage theft at the state level

King, Elicker and other city officials also pointed to insufficient funding for the state DOL. The DOL currently employs 12 wage enforcement agents, according to Manalan, compared to 18 in November 2022. The department’s budget and staff cuts have coincided with its growing case backlog.

“The proper place to direct advocacy energy is towards more resources for the Department of Labor at the state, because that’s the main mechanism, the primary mechanism, to enforce wage theft violations, and it’s very clear they don’t have enough resources,” Elicker said. 

Yet state legislators have failed to pass bills that would have increased the state’s number of wage and hour inspectors, who ensure that employers are complying with labor laws, in the two most recent legislative sessions. A similar bill, introduced in the current legislative session, was added to the calendar for the state House of Representatives on March 27 but has not advanced since then.

Local 269 President Xavier Gordon, who heads the union that represents the DOL’s wage and hour inspectors, attributed the previous two bills’ failure to the “powerful corporate lobby” that discourages lawmakers from increasing state spending.

Brian Anderson — legislative and political director for Council 4, which encapsulates Local 269 and other unions for Connecticut’s public employees — echoed Gordon’s argument, pointing to two major lobbyist groups: the Connecticut Business Industry Association and the Connecticut Yankee Institute.

“Their mission is to cut the state budget so that corporate executives pay as little in taxes as possible,” Anderson wrote to the News, referring to the fact that tax revenue partially funds the state budget. “By attempting to suppress the budget and eliminate revenue that could hire more DOL wage and hour inspectors, they aim to ensure that laws designed to protect workers are unenforceable so that the balance of power remains on the side of corporations and the rich.”

Both groups have lobbied against loosening the state’s fiscal guardrails — a strict state spending cap instated in 2017 — in the past. Yet spokespeople for the groups emphasized that they did not directly oppose either of the bills that would have increased DOL funding. Indeed, the public hearing testimony for both bills is solely composed of supportive statements from activists and victims of wage theft.

Like Elicker, DeStefano thinks the unclear scope of wage theft on a statewide level was likely the main factor behind the bills’ failure.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of issues that meaningfully affect people and their lives and their families that don’t come to resolution in legislative sessions,” he said. “Sometimes things don’t move because they’re not big matters to other folks.”

City officials, activists double down on immigrant protections 

The challenges to address wage theft on the state level again raise the question of how New Haven officials can fight the issue on the local level. 

Although the HAVEN clinic’s proposed ordinance is still at a standstill, labor law expert Gerstein outlined a host of alternative ways municipalities can fight wage theft. Other cities have established worker protection units to streamline the criminal prosecutions of employers that violate labor laws, have carried out stop-work orders against offending businesses and have formed municipal labor standards offices to directly enforce labor laws.

Coburn and Ward 15 Alder Frank Redente, who represents part of Fair Haven, the city’s immigrant enclave, pointed to the actions of the second Trump administration as a potential influence on the fate of the ordinance. With President Donald Trump promising to nix federal funding for sanctuary cities like New Haven, Redente said he and other city officials are especially focused on protecting the city’s immigrant community.

“Issues around the dignity of workers — workers generally, and also around the workers who are most affected by the misconduct that we’re targeting, who are immigrant workers — will be really central the next four years,” Coburn said.

Lugo remains skeptical about the city’s willingness to address wage theft. Right now, his priority is getting city officials to understand the wide-reaching impact of the issue.

Though former and current city officials expressed uncertainty about the issue’s scope in the city, several of them cited New Haven’s most notorious examples of wage theft: Gourmet Heaven, a 24-hour deli often frequented by Yale students, shut down in 2015 after its owner was charged with withholding over $250,000 in wages. Another infamous example is that of Italian pastry shop Rocco’s Bakery, whose owner was found to have underpaid and physically and sexually abused his undocumented immigrant employees between 2007 and 2008.

Lugo hopes to keep holding protests outside of offending storefronts to boost awareness of the city’s wage theft problem. He continues to turn over one question in his head: “How can we create these scandals so they can no longer be blind to the reality that we are experiencing downtown?”

ULA members protest outside the Graduate hotel in Sept. 2024. Photo by Maia Nehme, Contributing Photographer

As for Vazquez, the construction worker who has yet to receive $5,000 in owed compensation, she and a dozen former coworkers submitted their pay stubs and other documentation of the wage theft experienced to the state DOL in mid-2022. Three years later, they’re still waiting for justice to be served — and so Bella Vazquez continues to tell her story.

“What are they waiting for?” Vazquez asked in Spanish, referring to the DOL’s wage enforcement agents. “Others don’t dare to denounce [their employers] because they see that we still haven’t accomplished anything. So, what are [the DOL] doing? They’re wasting time.”
In Governor Ned Lamont’s biennial budget proposal, he allocated $83.3 million to the DOL’s budget for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year, a nearly 7 percent increase from the previous fiscal year.

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MAIA NEHME
Maia Nehme covers cops, courts and Latine communities for the News. She previously covered housing and homelessness. Originally from Washington, D.C., she is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in History.