Job Misclassification in New York Adds up to Billions of Dollars in Fraud

Companies have been trying to get around the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) since its enactment nearly a century ago. The law puts strict requirements on businesses to pay their hourly employees a fair minimum wage and overtime wages when they work more than 40 hours in any particular workweek. The law has some loopholes when it comes to classifying people that you are paying to work for you. Employers are misclassifying employees as independent contractors to avoid having to abide by the FLSA, and employment law attorneys have taken notice.

Independent contractors are exempt from the FLSA because the law considers them to be essentially running their own businesses that another company contracts to do work for them. The main test applied in New York courts to decide whether a person is someone is an independent contractor or an employee is how much control the business has over the person. Seasoned employment law attorneys in NYC have been increasingly success at proving to courts that these workers are employees and are owed significant amounts of wages under the FLSA.

The construction industry has been one of the biggest violators in misclassifying NYC employees as exempt from FLSA compliance. NYC employment law attorneys are helping misclassified construction workers take action and recover compensation. Construction companies face a competitive market in which labor is their only cost that isn’t necessarily fixed (material costs are going to roughly be the same for every competitor).  They abuse employees by not paying them their fair wages to get a competitive advantage in the bidding process. As competitors see each other doing this, they do the same to keep up.

Only legal action and financial penalties are going to force this downward spiral to stop. The law is on your side if you are an employee that is misclassified as an independent contractor by your employer. You can recover compensation whether you previously worked for them, or you currently work for them (and it is illegal for an employer to retaliate against you for taking legal action).

The New York City employment law attorneys at Hepworth, Gershbaum & Roth are here to help you analyze whether you are misclassified as an employee exempt from overtime wages. Contact us online or call us at 212-532-3801 to schedule a free initial consultation.