Companies Fined for Labor Violations in MA
Imagine working 40 hours a week, counting on your paycheck to cover rent and groceries, only to find it delayed or incomplete.
For over 40,000 workers in Massachusetts who took action against their employers and filed wage theft complaints in 2023 and 2024, and countless others who stayed silent due to fear or lack of resources, this is not a hypothetical scenario. It’s a lived reality.
At Chipotle in Hadley, workers were required to clock out for their legally mandated 15-minute breaks,claimed Luke Rotello, a former Chipotle employee and current labor organizer with the Communist Party USA. “That was a huge crisis,” said Rotello, “It’s illegal. But it was happening all the time.” Rotello added, “I know that Chipotle was involved in like thousands of child labor law violations… they got cracked down on for that in one instance, but we can’t assume that it stopped.”
In 2020, Chipotle was cited for 13,253 child labor violations and other wage law breaches at more than 50 Massachusetts locations. The settlement included $1.37 million in penalties and $500,000 toward a state-run fund supporting young workers and labor law education, according to the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General.
How many workers are affected?
Massachusetts employs nearly 4 million people, yet wage theft continues to rob workers of an estimated $1 billion annually. That’s enough money to cover nearly 27,700 years of rent at the state’s average monthly rate, or provide a year’s worth of groceries for nearly 120,000 families.
In 2024 alone, Massachusetts employers faced over $5.1 million in fines solely for late wage payments–a fraction of the true scale of wage theft. Despite the enormity of this loss, enforcement remains weak, disproportionately harming immigrants, people of color, low-wage, and undocumented workers.
This graphic visualizes civil citations issued to employers regarding labor violations from 2015–2024.
Notably, the restaurant and hotel sector stands out for its persistent volume of violations, suggesting entrenched issues in enforcement and labor standards.
The unequal playing field between law-abiding employers and those willing to exploit workers for profit has real consequences for labor markets.
“If they actually follow the laws, then they’re put at a competitive disadvantage,” Rose Bookbinder, former Pioneer Valley Workers Center co-director and a current organizer for Nurses Alliance, stated when explaining the prevalence of wage theft.
Professor Tom Juravich, labor researcher and sociologist at UMass Amherst, echoed this: “If you’ve got a company willing to do a job for a very low price because they’re stealing wages [and] working people very hard, then the people who are actually paying legitimate salaries and have decent working conditions can’t compete with them.”
The most blatant form of wage theft is also the simplest: not paying workers at all. This form of wage theft is especially rampant in industries like construction, restaurants, and hospitality.
Many of the victims are undocumented immigrants, who face the added threat of retaliation or deportation if they speak up. “They’d say, ’I’m sorry, but I don’t feel obligated to pay you. You’re here illegally,” said Bookbinder.
While undocumented workers form the backbone of industries like construction and agriculture, they’re often excluded from basic protections. “Undocumented workers are neither citizens nor workers… no one is responsible for them. So if they fall off a roof, they fall off the roof,” said Juravich.
Juravich noted that the current political environment has exacerbated the vulnerability of these workers: “It’s really difficult for undocumented workers to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t paid’… in this context right now, and this is what we saw, the effect of the Trump administration, is that it made people even less likely to complain, which means employers have much more of an upper hand.”
Subcontracting and staffing agencies add another layer of opacity. 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.
“You have a developer who develops a project, requires a general contractor, who then hires a specific subcontractor, who hires a labor broker… and people at the top of the food chain are not responsible for what happens below,” Juravich explained. “Builders have now exploited this system to really degrade work with regular wage theft, so they can make large profits. And they can’t be touched. There is no legislation, law, or suits that can be brought against them. That’s another thing that’s wrong with the framework.”
Pablo Carrasco, staff attorney at Justice at Work—a multilingual nonprofit that supports low‑wage workers—is currently litigating a case that challenges this lack of accountability. A group of long-term warehouse workers, employed through a staffing agency, were suddenly fired without notice when the host company switched contractors.
Despite many of them working there for over a decade, they were denied severance or transition support. The lawsuit invokes the WARN Act, arguing the host company should be held liable.
“If we get a good decision here, this will be very precedential,” Carrasco said.
“For whatever reason, you know, staffing agencies do the minimum they can,” Carrasco added. “Because 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. Workers are often stripped of benefits and legal protections, misclassified as independent contractors, or shuffled between subcontractors until accountability disappears entirely.
Lisa Clauson, interim director of Community Labor United, explained how construction sites use layers of subcontractors to avoid liability: “It enables them, when they get caught, to say,’ Oh, we had no idea that company was doing that.’“
Enforcement has NOT kept up with the scale of the problem. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division receives roughly 6,000 wage-related complaints per year but has the capacity to investigate only about 10% of them. Even when cases are resolved in a worker’s favor, employers often go on to repeat the offense elsewhere.
“So while it was important on an individual level that we got the wages back, it was sort of a band-aid approach because, you know, they would just turn around and do it in a different town or a different city,” said Bookbinder.
Ballot Question 5, which aimed to raise the subminimum wage for tipped workers and normalize wage standards in the restaurant industry, failed to pass last year despite strong grassroots support.
Jeff Jones-president of UFCW Local 1459, one of hundreds of locals in the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union-backed the measure as a way to give workers across Massachusetts a stable wage floor.
“Nobody should be making that little amount of money, and there’s no guarantee on any of those tips,” Jones said. However, some workers had concerns about the consequences.
A café employee in Northampton, who requested anonymity to safeguard their job, noted, “I think that we might get less tips if that was passed, which, you know, wouldn’t be ideal because I do rely on the tips to get to the point where I can pay my part of rent and pay the groceries.”
Still, there are signs of hope. Local unions, worker centers, and legal advocates continue to push for wage theft ordinances at the municipal level. In Northampton, a local ordinance allows the city to revoke business licenses from employers found guilty of wage violations. Though not always enforced, the law gives workers and organizers a critical tool. “We’d say, ‘We’re going to go to the city,’ and the employer would come to the table immediately,” Bookbinder explained.
Ultimately, labor organizers and attorneys agree that real progress requires systemic change, not just fines or lawsuits, but organizing.
“At the end of the day, it’s not the attorneys that make workplace changes,” Carrasco said. “It’s the workers themselves.”