Workers across Connecticut have been submitting thousands of complaints to the state’s Labor Department for years. There’s the case of 10 workers in East Haddam who claimed they were not being paid after removing asbestos from a local school. There’s the Ashford bakery waitress who said she was not paid over $7,000 in wages. And in an extreme case, there’s the Barkhamsted tree-cutting company owner who allegedly refused to pay one of his workers, then threatened the rest of his employees with a gun after they asked for their paychecks, and then assaulted an EMT while being arrested for the gun incident.
For decades, investigators from the state Labor Department answered those complaints, and they recovered an average of more than $5 million of those stolen wages every year.
But things have changed. Due to budget constraints, fewer investigators and the effects of COVID, stolen wage recoveries have dropped sharply since 2017, to only $2.4 million last year.
A recent report from the state Auditors of Public Accounts highlighted several concerns within the department, noting that in May of last year, more than 800 wage and workplace complaints, 41% of those received, had not be assigned to an investigator. This year, the backlog is about 1,000 cases, and thousands of new complaints come in every year, which investigators say is causing workers’ complaints to linger in the queue for months.
Thomas Wydra, the division's director, said that they have a broad mandate, including 160 statutes and regulations the unit enforces, including sick leave, meal periods, drug testing, breastfeeding in the workplace and other laws that are constantly evolving with every legislative session. He adds that each year’s wage recovery levels may vary due to anomalies including big ticket collection cases like an investigation involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Certainly we're doing the best that we can. Our staff are acutely aware of the demand and of the case law,” said Wydra. “Every complaint that's sent to us is important to us, and we have to follow proper investigative protocols and guidelines … We will not rush through a case simply to get through it and get through the backlog.”
Meanwhile, legislative proposals that would have increased staff at the unit have failed for two years in a row amid budget constraints.
The struggles facing Wydra and his unit, however, are not exclusive to the past few years.
The recent decline in investigators and legislative solutions
Pleas for more investigators at the wage unit go back decades. In 1949, the state’s Labor Department noted in its annual report to the governor that additional staff was “necessary,” given the backlog of cases.
In 2014, one of the wage unit’s field supervisors at the time, Sandra Barrachina, pleaded for more funding in the midterm adjustments to the budget, arguing that staffing levels were not keeping pace with changes in labor law, creating an “exorbitant” caseload and “tremendous” backlog. That same year, in the budget revisions for the 2015 fiscal year, the legislature appropriated $300,000 for six additional positions at the wage unit.
But staff levels since then are down. State payroll data show that the number of investigators has dropped in the past decade while managerial staff has barely increased. In early 2015, there were 29 wage investigators and agents, while in June 2024, there were 21. The number of supervisors remains the same, and the position of assistant director was brought back in 2023 after being defunded in 2015. There is currently one active job opening in the wage unit for a wage and hour investigator.
And in the past two years, as the backlog of cases has increased to record levels, two other investigators have asked lawmakers to support legislation that increases the number of investigators — but the proposals never made it to a floor vote after passing out of committee.
The bill's failure to pass was a "missed opportunity," according to several advocacy organizations around the state that issued a press release, including the Hartford Deportation Defense, Connecticut For All, the Connecticut Worker Center, the Naugatuck Valley Project and Council 4 of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees labor union.
"Our Governor is basically saying that it’s OK if people are forced to wait months or years for justice after they’ve been wronged by a bad boss," reads a statement by Fredy Huaman Cárdenas, campaign coordinator at Hartford Deportation Defense. "The reality for immigrant workers in our state is that exploitative employers can completely get away with not paying you overtime, or not paying you at all of the work you’ve already done, and still be able to operate that same business without hearing anything from the Department of Labor even after a complaint has been made. It’s a disgrace, and we must fix it.”
There are two types of investigators at the unit. Wage and hour investigators, currently five of them, focus on minimum wage and overtime violations, while wage enforcement positions, currently 16, have a broader mandate including commissions, bonuses and final paychecks, among other things.
The proposal in 2023 would have increased the number of wage and hour investigators to at least 45 over the next few months. There was no fiscal note for that bill, but the lowest current projected annual salary for a wage and hour investigator at the start of their hire is about $63,500, so an increase of 40 investigators at that rate would equate to some $2.5 million to be spent in the following fiscal year, if not counting wage enforcement agents as part of the requirement.
This year, though, the bill was changed to require at least 22 investigators by October and 45 by the end of fiscal year 2026, thus tapering off the initial costs. The fiscal note for that bill indicated that, over the next two fiscal years, it would have cost $6.3 million in salary, overhead and fringe benefits, since more supervisory positions would have also been needed
The report notes, though, that the proposal would be less costly if the bill's interpretation of "wage and hour inspectors" includes both wage and hour investigators and wage enforcement agents, not just the former, in which case fewer positions would have to be added.
"I think that as we fall farther and farther behind, it will require that we act more quickly in order to solve the problem. So I would imagine that next year's bill will be different than it was this last session and the session before, because we're farther behind," said Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, co-chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee.
"I hope that people understand that if we want government to work, if we want it to really make a difference in people's lives, if we want to enforce the laws that we have on the books and create even greater conditions for Connecticut's workers and families, then we have to be willing to fund government. And those who argue for small government, they're really not helping the people of Connecticut," Kushner said.
"It seemed to us that this solved an issue," said Rep. Steve Weir, R-Hebron, ranking member of the Labor and Public Employees Committee. "Why Democrat leadership didn't take it up? Why the governor didn't weigh in on this? I don't know. That I can't speak for."
The appropriations committee, chaired by Democratic legislators, didn't take up the bill for consideration in 2023, and no adjustments to the budget were made this year.
Steve Weir at the Labor and Public Employees Committee Public Hearing on March 5, 2024.
"I don't know if they looked at the fact that, you know, does the offset of the income from the fines that are levied, do those offset the expenditures?" Weir added. "These are customer-facing people, employees who bring in revenue to the state. They're acting to protect some of the most vulnerable."
Weir was referring the civil penalties that the wage unit can impose on businesses for labor violations, which can range anywhere from $300 to $5,000 per individual offense. The funds go to a dedicated account that the Labor Department can use for any expenses. Since 2012, the civil penalty fund has received anywhere from $600,000 to $1.8 million a year, totaling over $13.1 million as of last year.
It's what Ed Hawthorne, president of the CT AFL-CIO, brought to legislators' attention earlier this year in public hearing testimony.
“They [investigators] actually bring in more money than we pay them. There is no legitimate excuse as to why we should not have an army of them out there,” Hawthorne said.
When the law authorizing this fund came into effect in 1993, it was written such that civil penalty funds could only be used for any personnel expenses at the Labor Department, including wage investigators.
“It was monumental and changing of what we were able to do. We were able to hire six people immediately, and that increased our staff up to almost 40, which was very important,” said Gary Pechie, who was director of the wage unit at the time the law was passed.
A year after the law went into effect, the law was changed to allow the civil penalty funds to be used for all other expenses, not just personnel matters. In recent years, civil penalties have been used for Labor Department expenses such as IT support, electricity, rent and internet and the wage unit’s case management system, among other services.
Civil penalty funds also continue to be used to hire more staff at the division. In the fiscal year ending in 2006, eight of the 36 positions in the entire division were funded by civil penalties, while in 2022, six of the 26 positions were civil-penalty funded.
Civil penalties started off as a $150 fine for each violation of wage and state contract law. A few years later, in 1997, the fine was increased to $300. Since then, penalties have been added for violating laws regarding child labor, workers' compensation, employee regulation and their personnel files, and stop-work orders. The last time changes were made to civil penalty amounts was last year, in which penalties were increased for stop-work order violations.
“I think increasing the penalties is something that should be addressed. When an employer breaks the law, they need to know that there's consequences to that,” Hawthorne said earlier this year.
Weir expressed caution. "The goal is not to, as I look at it, to be punitive to business. What we want is compliance. And so having huge penalties, I don't necessarily equate that with more compliance."
Kushner said she's open to increasing the fines for guilty employers.
"I think there's another reason, not just because it helps fund the positions," she said. "I think it's also important to have fines that will actually work to be a deterrent to the violations, so that we stop violations before they occur."
Inner workings of the wage unit
Declining staff was not just increasing the pressure on the investigators that remained at the unit — it was even proving difficult for Labor Commissioner Danté Bartolomeo. In 2022, she testified against a legislative proposal regarding paid sick leave due to the need for more resources to enforce the legislation if it were to pass.
“Connecticut Department of Labor needs to oppose this bill due to a fiscal impact,” the Commissioner told the Labor and Public Employees Committee regarding the paid sick proposal. “The reality of going from businesses that are covered with 50 or more employees and 69 job classifications to all employers and their employees does require that the agency would need additional staff in our wage and workplace standards division, as well as our legal division.”
The bill had a fiscal note that indicated additional staff requirements at the unit.
Different inspectors, different results?
Over the years, with fewer investigators on the ground, wage recovery levels dropped, but internal reports show that the amounts collected by each investigator can also vary.
In the last fiscal year, for example, one investigator recovered over $400,000, almost a fifth of the total, compared to others who recovered less than $50,000 in the entire year. As Wydra noted, though, some cases may be anomalies, such as big ticket collection cases that not every investigator works on. Other investigators may end up working on more cases dealing with smaller amounts.
Anthony Soto, a former wage enforcement agent who supported legislation to increase staff and left the division last year, said there needs to be more accountability across the division.
"I think the numbers will support, you'll see that there's a group of people that consistently are performing at a high level, and there's a group that's always performing at a lower level," Soto said.
But experience plays a part too, he said, noting that many investigators with years of experience, who often provided guidance to the rest of the team, have retired.
"The tables now are shifting a little bit, where there's fewer people with a lot of experience and a lot of people with three to four years' experience where you understand the work, you know what you're doing, but you still kind of need guidance, because not every case presents itself the same," Soto said. "When you have less experienced people there, it kind of delays the process and makes it harder to get through."
Along with staffing levels, the number of investigations and complaints also dropped in recent years.
From fiscal year 2014 to 2022, the number of complaints dropped from just under 4,000 cases to 2,500, a 36% decrease, but the number of completed investigations dropped faster, 52%, from 4,500 to 2,100 in the same time frame, according to data detailed in the governor's proposed budgets over the years.
Some years may have more investigations than complaints because investigators are going through the backlog of cases, reopening cases or pursuing non-complaint-driven investigations. Fiscal year 2022 was the first time that more complaints were received than investigations were completed.
Anthony Soto was a wage enforcement agent at the Connecticut Department of Labor and vice president at Local 269 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees labor union. He provided testimony in support of House Bill 5854. CREDIT: SHAHRZAD RASEKH / CT MIRROR
Soto said that the cases they received vastly differ in complexity and are not “predictable” since some cases might involve one worker while another involves dozens. Two years with the same number of cases or recoveries may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, he said.
But as cases and investigations went down, the backlog of cases went up from 200 in late 2020 to almost 1,000 this year, extending the amount of time a worker waits to have their case assigned to an investigator.
An audit released last month for the fiscal years 2021 and 2022 recommended that the Labor Department’s wage unit continue to improve its tracking procedures, highlighting that pending and unassigned cases accounted for 41% of the total in May 2023. There was one case that had not been assigned to an investigator for 336 days.
“The department agrees that delays in processing claim investigations decrease the likelihood of wage restitution for employees and has already identified insufficient staffing as the primary factor in these delays,” the Labor Department notes in the audit. The Labor Department added that legislative proposals to increase staff have not moved forward in the past two years.
Soto noted that the backlog could include cases that the wage division has no jurisdiction over or duplicate cases, inflating the total. The Labor Department indicated that, in the current pile, there are 27 duplicates out of 997 pending cases.
Even after the backlog is dealt with, Soto insists that additional staff is important when trying to be more proactive about wage enforcement.
“Having more boots on the ground never hurt,” said Soto.
What he meant by being proactive is that they’ll go beyond the complaints they’re receiving and target specific industries known for labor violations.
That's known as "strategic enforcement," according to Jenn Round, a director at the workplace justice lab at Rutgers University, where she helps labor enforcement agencies across the country improve their efficiency while creating resources, curriculum and training. She also helped to launch and led enforcement at the Seattle Office of Labor Standards.
Round notes that this strategy starts with tracking data on the number of violations and complaints by industry.
"By looking at these two data points, we can really pinpoint which industries there's a lot of violations happening, but not very many complaints coming in the door. And a lot of times, these are the industries where workers are the most vulnerable, and they're not filing a complaint."
Bartolomeo echoed the need for more proactive enforcement in an interview for her reappointment as commissioner last year.
“We often are in a situation where we are responsive to complaints. It would be wonderful to be in a situation where we could do more proactive enforcement and less responsive to complaint enforcement, because we do know that it's needed,” said Bartolomeo.
Technology and efficiency
Near the end of this year’s legislative session, amid pleas for more staff from investigators, advocates and victims of wage theft, Gov. Ned Lamont expressed skepticism about increasing staff.
“I'd like to think about other ways we can address this, not simply adding more people," Lamont said at an event hosted by The Connecticut Mirror on April 30 when asked about budgeting for more wage investigators. “We can say the answer to this is more investigators and more people. I've also put a lot of money into it and technology, we've talked about AI … Technology makes them three times more efficient.”
“Gov. Lamont recognizes that improved technology can play a role in creating efficiencies throughout government, as does having additional staff,” Lamont spokesman David Bednarz said in a follow-up statement. “Wage and workplace investigations require humans to walk job sites, conduct interviews and review documents, but technology can speed up transcription or help identify filing duplicates, and that will help humans complete their tasks faster. The administration is always reviewing ways to create efficiencies in every office, and both of these are options being explored.”
Wydra confirmed that two of those improvements would help, including transcription and identifying duplicates. He also thinks it'd be helpful to have a platform that allows employers to pay civil penalties and wage payments online, as they currently only accept payments through mailed checks.
One of the most recent technological upgrades to the division was its case management system, which debuted in 2019. It was a $622,000 project that took almost two years to create. Since then, it’s helped digitize the wage complaint process by allowing workers to submit complaints online and to centralize case information.
An audit of the Labor Department for 2019 found that there were some problems in the use of the system.
“The division lacks sufficient controls to ensure that it properly documents all complaints in the eWage system,” reads the audit, published in 2022. “An instance was identified in which a serious allegation, involving child labor, was not entered into the eWage system. The complaint was received by the director and assigned to a field agent. Neither entered the case or any related information into the eWage system.”
The Labor Department acknowledged that there was a delay in inputting the data into their system, but they say that “the [child labor] allegations were investigated thoroughly and immediately on the same day that the information was provided to the Wage and Workplace Standards Division.”
In the audit report released last month for the fiscal years 2021 and 2022, auditors noted that the issue regarding how complaints are managed on eWage were resolved along with other accounting requirements.
As for public access to case data, individual complaint and employer information is not available on the Labor Department’s website, as opposed to states like Massachusetts and Maine, which have datasets available for download.
Leadership at the division
From the 1990s and well into the 2000s, the wage unit was recovering at least $4 million in wages a year. At the time, it was being led by Pechie, who rose through the ranks at the unit starting in 1977 as an investigator and eventually director in 1989 until he retired in 2016. He represented Connecticut as a member of the Interstate Labor Standards Association, an organization of state labor department officials where he served as president twice, in 1995 and 2012.
“It was just, you know, hard work and getting out there and making it your mission to act like it's your money that's not being paid to somebody,” Pechie said about his agency's recoveries.
Pechie noted that caseloads weren’t as big back then as they are now, saying he was assigned only about three cases a month as an investigator. He attributes much of his success as director to size of his staff, which was more than 40 people. It’s why he wrote to legislators this year in support of increasing the number of investigators at the unit.
“I think the current director and the staff can get things straightened out ... it’s just going to take time,” Pechie said.
When he retired in 2016, they hired another investigator who rose through the ranks: Resa Spaziani. In her first fiscal year, she recovered the highest amount of wages on record, over $8.9 million.
But during her time at the helm, clashing among employees became public. Human resources complaints driven by union disputes, allegations of favoritism and personal conflicts among employees caused Spaziani to step down after just over a year and a half in 2018, according to the Yankee Institute.
In her second and final fiscal year, annual wage recoveries dropped 44%, the largest year-to-year drop recorded since the 2000 fiscal year.
But the employee grievances didn’t end after Spaziani stepped down. Earlier this year, a federal lawsuit was filed against the Labor Department by Jide Ebo, a wage investigator since 1989. Ebo claims in the complaint that he was denied promotions due to his race, national origin, and age, alleging favoritism and intentional undermining by state officials, according to Connecticut Inside Investigator. The lawsuit seeks his appointment as assistant director, compensation, and a declaration of civil rights violations, while the Labor Department denies the allegations.
After Spaziani's departure, the Labor Department hired Wydra, a long-time member of the Hamden police department, to lead the wage enforcement division. Before joining the state, Wydra was a patrol officer in the 1990s, moved up the ranks as sergeant, lieutenant, deputy police chief and eventually chief of police in 2006, according to his resume, published by the city of Somerville, Mass., when he applied for the city’s chief of police job in 2014.
Unlike his predecessors, he had no experience as a wage investigator in the unit, but the Labor Department said that he had 26 years of labor law experience on both the union and management side of collective bargaining as well as in the enforcement of labor law.
"I brought my own insights and experiences for sure. And, in my opinion, I blended fairly nicely into the division. Again, it's a team effort," Wydra said of his experience at the wage unit. "We are all about fact finding and doing our job fairly and objectively. But we have a great team at the Wage and Workplace Standards Division."
In Wydra’s first fiscal year at the unit, ending in 2019, wage recoveries went up 11% to $5.5 million, still the second-lowest amount since 2000 to that point. The following year, in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, recoveries went back down to $2.7 million as businesses around the state closed.
The following fiscal year, ending 2021, recoveries bounced back to $4.3 million, what seemed a sign of recovery. But the next two years' recoveries dropped. After a low of $1.9 million in the 2023 fiscal year, 2024 recovery levels inched back up to $2.4 million.
Reactions from advocates
Miguel Fuentes, a member of the Carpenters Local 326 labor union who often relays labor violation information to the wage division, said he's had a positive experience working with Wydra.
"We're gonna continue to try to help them, but they've never not been willing to at least discuss a concern, and that's invaluable," Fuentes said.
Fuentes did express concerns about whether there was a succession and training plan in the unit as people joined and left. Wydra said that they hired an outside vendor to train staff on human trafficking cases and that staff is consistently trained on legal matters and case law, which is affected by changing statutes and regulations.
One of Fuentes' goal still surrounds advocating for more "manpower" at the wage unit, indicating that besides wage-theft, money laundering and human trafficking also occur in the construction industry.
Ardemar Torres, another member of the Carpenters Local 326, said that not catching businesses guilty of underpaying workers makes it difficult for other law-abiding contractors to compete.
"This is the reason why we get up every morning. There's good people out there that really want to do this. And competition is tough. It's tough for those contractors. They they want to pay the right way. They want to pay the correct wages, pay the taxes," said Torres, who regularly visits job sites with Fuentes to educate workers about their rights.
It's the case for Ben Whelan, a long-time residential contractor from Madison who said he has to compete with others who don't properly pay their employees.
"On the shoreline where I work, I'm in the minority ... we're one of the last few left that have actual employees that are paying the necessary payroll taxes," Whelan said. This, he said, makes his prices for clients higher compared to contractors who don't have to pay additional costs.
"Your average homeowner does not know what's going on with this," Whelan added. "Homeowners should be holding their contractors accountable when they come through the door and ask the questions: Are your guys properly classified? Is there proper workers comp on the job?"
He also added that since currently only registrations are needed to become a residential contractor, a licensing requirement should be considered so that the state has more oversight.
Kimberly Glassman, director of the Foundation for Fair Contracting of Connecticut, which monitors public works projects to ensure compliance with state laws, said that worker misclassification — for example, classifying a worker as an independent contractor instead of as a salaried employee who would earn benefits — along with lack of workers' compensation and not paying fringe benefits are ways that employers try to increase their profits.
"They are very stealth at this. They have companies and lawyers and insurance companies that are showing them how to circumvent these laws. Some of these loopholes are legal, some of them aren't, but they are very astute at it," said Glassman, who said that they are monitoring 60 to 70 construction projects at a given time. While her organization can't conduct audits, they do a lot of their investigations by combing through documents they receive via Freedom of Information Act requests.
In addition to advocating for more wage investigators, she also said that protecting and expanding standards for prevailing wages, licensing, apprenticeships and the bidding process is a focus of the organization at the legislative level.
"By and large, we're talking about low-wage workers or middle-class workers who are just trying to get by and take care of themselves and their families," said Glassman.
One immigrant rights organization, New Haven-based Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), called for Wydra's resignation earlier this week.
"We feel like he has like failed his job and his duties," said John Jairo Lugo, co-founder of ULA, who led a press conference on Thursday evening in front of the Labor Department's American Job Center in Hamden in response to the Labor Department audit report released last month.
"[The backlog is] outrageous. That's horrible for the working class and also in particular with the with the immigrant community," said Lugo, who said that ULA has been referring cases to the Labor Department for more than 22 years. "But lately it has been like the worst time for our organization."
"We are very disappointed that ULA would even make that suggestion," Bartolomeo said in a statement to the CT Mirror regarding the calls for Wydra's resignation. "CTDOL has worked with ULA for years, especially on domestic worker protections, and they know how hard CTDOL has advocated for additional Wage and Workplace Division staffing. CTDOL and state officials continue to seek workable solutions to clearing the backlog; we encourage ULA to join us."
Lugo said that in many cases, only part of the wages claimed were recovered, which the Labor Department pushes back on.
"A wage investigator’s top priority is to collect the full amount of verified back wages owed to each worker. Many workers, including those identified by ULA, were paid in cash, making those wages virtually impossible to track and verify," the Labor Department said in a statement.
The Labor Department said that it urges workers to keep records, such as a log of hours and pay, even if they're paid partially in cash, so that in the event of a wage complaint, they have some documentation that investigators can use. If no payroll records are available, wage-theft cannot be established, unless an employer admits guilt. "Due process for employers requires that investigators must be able to substantiate any wage bill they issue," the statement read.
And even if payroll records are available, recoveries can't be guaranteed due to scenarios out of the department's control. In cases of bankruptcy or lack of assets, investigators are not able to recover full wages immediately or at all. Another recourse investigators may take is putting employers on a payment plan. In the case that full wages aren’t recoverable, the wage unit negotiates as much as possible and disburses it across the pool of workers who are owed.
"Wage agents are in contact with workers throughout the process to get permissions to pursue, negotiate, and collect owed wages on their behalf. When investigations are finalized, CTDOL sends letters to impacted workers identifying the payment amount, the type of payment (full, partial), and reminds them that they may pursue their employer through the courts if they disagree with the payment amount," added the Labor Department.
ULA is also demanding that more money be allocated to the Labor Department to increase the number of wage investigators and that more attention be paid to helping noncitizen workers obtain labor-based deferred action, which allows workers to receive temporary deportation protections from the federal government if they're part of a state labor investigation. As of early 2023, the application process for this type of deferred action became more streamlined when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security centralized the intake of applications and required a letter of support from a federal, state, or local labor agency such as the Connecticut Department of Labor. The Labor Department confirmed that they had a deferred action process, but data regarding its use was not immediately available.
Lugo also placed blame on Lamont, suggesting some of the state's rainy day fund, which is around $4.1 billion, should be used for the Labor Department.
"The leadership of the state is also failing the working class community, and that's why we're here today. And we will be on the streets. And we will keep denouncing this situation that's happening with the Labor Department," Lugo said.
The sentiment was echoed by Hamden district council member Abdul Osmanu, who is running to be state representative and was at the press conference.
"Our state sits on $4 billion at this moment that it refuses to allocate to the houseless, the hungry, and today, those in need of a hand in pursuing justice," Osmanu said. "I'm here to stand in solidarity, as an attack against one of us is an attack against all."
Also in attendance were other members of ULA, Comunidad sin Fronteras and the Naugatuck Valley Project.
Within the hour, a handful of state residents took turns retelling their personal experiences regarding labor complaints, while they stood beside banners that read "Unidad Latina en Acción. PORQUE SOLO EL PUEBLO SALVA AL PUEBLO," which is Spanish for "Latino Unity in Action. Because only the village saves the village."
One former construction worker, Bella Vazquez, said that it took over a year to hear back about her complaint regarding unpaid wages.
"I won't lose hope. I know there will be justice. And it's outrageous because the same boss didn't just do it to us. He's still working and keeps doing it to other people," said Vazquez, who also testified to legislators in March.
Another worker from Ecuador at the rally who's been in the state for two years, Jimmy Torico, told the CT Mirror that he is yet to submit his complaint to the Labor Department regarding $3,000 in unpaid wages over three weeks.
"We have to keep fighting. Hopefully we'll see justice. It's not fair that one works and they [business owner] keep the money," said Torico.
This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror August 4, 2024.
