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After a thunderstorm tore across Iowa in August 2020, causing some $4 billion in damage, six construction workers drove from Texas to Cedar Rapids, to help rebuild. Promised daily pay of around $200 cash plus travel and housing costs, the men arrived in Iowa in October and began work on a senior living center, painting walls and installing sheet rock and moldings, three people familiar with the arrangements said.<\/p>\n
Soon, however, the men stopped getting paid. Crammed into a battered, roach-filled apartment with no furniture and little heat, they were running low on food, according to one worker. BluSky Restoration Contractors, of Centennial, Colo., the environmental remediation company hired by the senior center to complete the job, hadn’t supplied the money to pay them, Pablo Ramirez, the subcontractor in charge told NBC News.<\/p>\n
The men were experiencing a practice labor economists call “wage theft” \u2014 when employers or their subcontractors don’t pay workers what they are owed \u2014 said Robin Clark-Bennett<\/a>, a labor educator at the University of Iowa Labor Center in Iowa City.<\/p>\n Watch Cynthia McFadden on NBC Nightly News tonight for more on this story.<\/strong><\/p>\n Wage theft can include paying less than legal minimum wage, not paying overtime, barring workers from taking meal breaks or requiring off-the-clock work. And it affects the most vulnerable workers, those who are desperate for pay and willing to take temporary jobs, who may be undocumented and who may be paid by subcontractors in cash. The emergency repair and clean-up business \u2014 which has proven an attractive investment target for private-equity firms<\/a> in recent years as natural disasters have intensified \u2014 combines many of the factors that can expose workers to wage theft.<\/p>\n The practice lets companies cut their costs and raise profits. And while labor researchers say wage theft is hard to measure because many workers are afraid to lodge complaints, incidents of it typically rise during economic downturns such as the one caused by Covid-19.<\/p>\n Wage disputes are nothing new of course, and many incidents involve dueling claims that are difficult to verify. Still, the Iowa incident stands out, Clark-Bennett said, telling NBC News, “The level of abuse in this case was shocking to everyone.”<\/p>\n