This map of New York shows which local businesses steal from workers

Many employers have a penchant for dipping into employees’ paychecks. Every year, U.S. workers lose as much as $50 billion to wage theft, the largest type of theft in the U.S., which can include employers stealing tips or not paying overtime. But some new digital tools are helping employees fight back.

One such tool, called the Wage Theft Monitor, was recently released by Documented, an immigration-focused nonprofit news source. The publication describes it as “the largest public repository of data on New York businesses found guilty of wage theft.” 

The tool itself allows workers to search a database for businesses, locations, or industries, to see which companies or employers have been found to have stolen or withheld wages from workers. The database comprises data from the New York State Department of Labor and the federal Department of Labor, and was compiled using Freedom of Information requests and open records, according to Documented. A recent analysis from ProPublica found that in New York State, more than $200 million in wages had been stolen from roughly 127,000 workers between 2017 and 2021.

“Wage theft ranges from not being paid minimum wage to straight up not being paid, or showing up to a job and the person that hired you suddenly isn’t there anymore,” Rodrigo Camarena, director of immigrant justice technology incubator Justicia Lab told Fast Company earlier this year. “This is a longstanding issue that immigrants, low-wage workers, and women are disproportionately affected by.” 

When using the Wage Theft Monitor, users can also toggle to a map of a given geographic area, in which certain employers or companies can be identified as yellow dots. For example, the tool can be used to find that a specific hotel in the Albany area collectively owes tens of thousands of dollars to 10 workers, sourced from data from the federal Department of Labor.

The tool has some clear use cases for many workers who may be employed in sectors that are notorious for wage theft, including construction and the restaurant industry. It gives workers, or prospective employees, a chance to see if they may run into wage theft issues in the future, or if an employer may have had issues related to wage theft in the past.

Max Siegelbaum, Documented’s co-executive director, notes in an announcement for the Wage Theft Monitor: “It is likely you will find businesses that you know, and maybe some you love. Everything from small corner shops to major New York institutions are included in the data. Government agencies, nonprofits, and major profitable corporations were all found to have stolen their workers’ wages.” 

He continues: “Behind the dots on this map are the stories of over 100,000 workers, some of whom missed rent, went hungry, or were unable to pay for medical care after losing a paycheck.”

Given how broad an issue wage theft is, there’s no silver bullet for ending it, either. The federal government has a wage theft claims process, as does New York State. But those processes can be slow, and may not resolve a claim. In fact, further reporting from ProPublica and Documented shows that the New York Department of Labor is still trying to recover 63% of the wages stolen from workers from the analyzed period between 2017 and 2021.