When people hear the word "theft," they usually picture a burglar or a shoplifter. The biggest source of theft in the United States by dollar value is something different. It is the wages that employers fail to pay the workers who earned them.
The Economic Policy Institute and other research groups have estimated for years that American workers lose more money to unpaid wages than they lose to all forms of property theft combined. Most of those losses involve a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per worker. Spread across millions of workers, the totals run into the tens of billions of dollars every year.
Most workers who lose wages this way never recover them. Two reasons account for most of the gap. First, the workers do not know the law gives them a right to recover. Second, the workers assume the cost of pursuing the claim would be more than the claim is worth. Both assumptions are usually wrong.
How wage theft happens
The most common patterns are predictable. An employer calls salaried workers exempt from overtime even though their duties do not meet the legal test for an exemption. An employer pays a flat day rate to oil-field hands or construction workers who put in seventy or eighty hours per week, without paying the additional overtime federal law requires. An employer deducts thirty minutes per shift for an unpaid lunch break that the worker never actually took. An employer treats a worker as a 1099 contractor when the working relationship looks identical to ordinary employment.
None of these patterns require the employer to think of itself as a thief. The employer usually believes the pay structure is normal, lawful, or industry-standard. The federal overtime law does not care about the employer's belief. It cares about whether the worker was paid what the law requires for the hours actually worked.
What federal law lets you recover
The Fair Labor Standards Act gives a worker who was underpaid the right to recover the missing wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages. The lookback period is two years from the date of filing, or three years if the violation was willful. Each week of unpaid wages is its own violation, so the recoverable period rolls forward week by week.
A worker owed five thousand dollars in unpaid overtime over the last two years can typically recover ten thousand dollars under this structure.
How to find out if your employer owes you money
The fastest way to get an estimate is to use the overtime calculator on this site. It walks through hourly, salaried, day-rate, and commission scenarios and produces a rough number in a few minutes. The estimate is not legal advice and does not account for every variable, but it is enough to tell whether your situation might support a claim.
If the number is meaningful and your work pattern matches one of the common wage theft patterns above, the next step is a free consultation. There is no obligation and no charge to find out where you stand.
If you have worked more than forty hours per week and you are not sure whether you were paid correctly, contact me for a free consultation. Use the overtime calculator first if you want an estimate before we talk.