New online platform helps immigrant workers recover stolen wages
New online platform helps immigrant workers recover stolen wages
For years, 42-year-old Hermes Diaz has seen fellow construction workers like him — many of them undocumented immigrants — leave their worksites emptyhanded.
“Do you know what it’s like to work all day from 6 a.m., sometimes without a sip of coffee, many times with no lunch break, and then not having the money to take the train?” Diaz said in Spanish.
For Diaz, it happened in New York in 2015 after a contractor hired him on a job at the rate of $150 a day. “She started to miss payments or pay me late, and then she stopped paying me altogether,” Diaz said.
Years after filing a Department of Labor complaint, he and two coworkers are still owed money — even after the contractor agreed to pay out some $10,000.
Employers steal billions of dollars from workers like Diaz every year by withholding wages and benefits. Low-wage immigrant workers are uniquely vulnerable, and getting their money back is complicated, time-intensive and often doesn’t work.
But Diaz got some money back. He sought legal help from the New York-based advocacy group Make the Road. Together, they built a case against the contractor. The process was time-consuming and required filling out extensive paperwork.
Now, a new online platform tries to streamline that process to make it easier to recoup stolen wages.
The bilingual platform, called ¡Reclamo!, which means “reclaim” in Spanish, is a user-friendly online tool similar to TurboTax — but instead of filing taxes, it helps people file legal complaints to get back stolen wages.
“It’s helping the worker understand their rights to figure out how much money is owed,” said Rodrigo Camarena, who created the platform for the nonprofit tech incubator Justicia Lab.
While using ¡Reclamo!, various prompts ask for worker and employer information, hours worked and pay offered.
Answers from the online form are used to populate a letter, a wage complaint form for the New York State Department of Labor, as well as demand scripts, which can be downloaded after all the correct information is entered. Demand scripts — which are usually read over the phone with an employer — can be a highly effective way to recoup wages. And official wage theft complaints not only can open a legal case but also can be used to protect an immigrant from deportation as victims of labor exploitation.
“Typically, it used to take upwards of a week or more for an attorney or paralegal to gather this information. ¡Reclamo! can do this in an hour, as long as the worker has key facts and dates in front of them,” Camarena said.
The tool enables advocates and paralegals at nonprofits to help low-wage workers who can’t afford a private attorney.
“What we’re trying to do with this platform is empower the thousands of people that are already helping immigrants but maybe aren’t lawyers, but with the right training, with the right support can do a lot of the work that we now pay private attorneys for,” Camarena said.
“It’s been simplified and a huge time saver,” said Make the Road community organizer Rodman Serrano in Long Island. He has filed a couple of claims through ¡Reclamo!.
“It also just kind of makes folks feel a little bit more encouraged,” Serrano said.
It builds confidence in the legal system, when half the battle is getting people to file complaints in the first place.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found workers were owed $213 million in back wages in 2022, though due to underreporting, one study by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that the amount of wages stolen from workers annually could actually be as high as $50 billion.
“Due to fear, a lot of people don’t get close to seeking help,” said Diaz, who has seen language barriers and a lack of information keep other immigrants from making wage theft claims.
And even when legal action is taken, Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute, said there’s poor enforcement of the wage and hour laws on the books, as the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division has just hundreds of investigators to police a labor market of some 160 million people.
“If you get caught — and very rarely you will get caught — you just have to pay back what you already owed,” he said.
¡Reclamo! has been used to file roughly 100 wage theft claims so far — equaling about $1 million. While currently operating in New York, the creators hope to expand the platform to other states.
Diaz, who repairs houses after natural disasters, believes the new platform can be a force multiplier in the fight for fair treatment under the law.
“Every day, there are injustices with workers who are only trying to feed their families,” he said.
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