Press Contact: Linda Paris, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, 202-308-5186, [email protected]

The report urges the D.C. Council to increase penalties and enforcement for wage theft in the construction industry, and oversight of D.C.-funded affordable housing projects.

WASHINGTON – During her decade in office, Mayor Bowser has invested an astounding $1.4 billion in the Housing Production Trust Fund to meet D.C.’s affordable housing crisis. This sustained investment has made the Fund one of the nation’s “largest affordable housing chests of its kind.”¹ Major new construction, preservation, and revitalization efforts are only set to ramp up in the coming years. In July, the District of Columbia Housing Authority announced a revitalization plan to modernize and renovate 3,500 affordable housing units.

Unfortunately, these efforts are tarnished by “rampant” wage theft in D.C.’s construction industry.² One common form of wage theft is misclassification, where employers wrongly classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, making the workers ineligible for certain legal protections and benefits. D.C. construction workers who are misclassified are likely to earn $15,779 less on average than what they should be earning as employees. Misclassification alone enables contractors in the District to reduce their labor costs by 16.7%, allowing these actors to underbid and undercut employers who follow the law.

The report surveys wage theft litigation involving D.C. affordable housing unit construction projects in the last decade and highlights key findings:

• The majority of cases implicate public sector or public works construction projects funded by Mayor Bowser’s Housing Production Trust Fund.
• Wage and hour violations occur across a range of construction trades.
• Repeat players: in some cases, general contractors and subcontractors were alleged to have engaged in wage theft across multiple affordable housing projects.
• Cases overwhelmingly settle, an indication that current levels of enforcement may simply be considered the cost of doing business.

“To the workers out there and people like me, I just want to say that we should not be afraid. We must be brave, and we must raise our voices and speak out against the abuses at work—the wage theft, the sexual harassment of women, the psychological abuse we put up with. It must end,” said Vincent Morales*, a D.C. construction worker.

“Lifting D.C. residents out of housing insecurity, while simultaneously pushing D.C. workers further into poverty, is not the answer,” said Sarah Bessell, Supervisory Counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee. “D.C. agencies should make a concerted, coordinated effort to eradicate wage theft and, in the case of housing-related agencies, prevent repeat offenders from working on the District’s affordable housing projects.”

To combat wage theft, the report proposes the following recommendations for the D.C. Council:

• Ongoing monitoring and inspections of public works projects to identify wage and hour violations.
• Increased funding for the D.C. OAG’s Workers’ Rights Division to hire more investigators and attorneys to pursue wage theft cases.
• Strengthen D.C.’s wage theft laws to increase penalties for worker misclassification; mandate accurate prevailing wage reporting; and provide notice to workers of their rights.
• Debar repeat offenders, restricting repeat offenders from working on public projects.
• Prioritizing the use of union contractors when awarding grants and loans for affordable housing projects.

Read the entire report here.

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The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs works to create legal, economic, and social equity through litigation, client and public education and public policy advocacy. While we fight discrimination against all people, we recognize the central role that current and historic race discrimination plays in sustaining inequity and recognize the critical importance of identifying, exposing, combatting, and dismantling the systems that sustain racial oppression.

*pseudonym

 

^{1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/03/dc-affordable-housing-report-bowser/}  

^{2. https://oag.dc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/OAG-Illegal-Worker-Misclassification-Report.pdf}