Tucked into the Senate’s massive end-of-session jobs bill (SF 4019) is a provision that would limit penalties against employers for wage theft.
The proposal is unlikely to pass a Democratic-controlled House but represents the first significant proposed change to the state’s wage theft law that passed in 2019. Then, it was heralded as one of the toughest in the country for making wage theft over $1,000 a felony.
Despite the tougher law on the books, prosecutors have yet to bring a criminal case against an employer for wage theft, even though employers cheat their workers out of $12 million a year in Minnesota, according to one estimate by the state Department of Labor and Industry (DLI).
Currently, there is no limit to the penalties that can accrue to employers who fail to promptly pay back wages to their employee once they’re ordered to do so by DLI.
Employers have 10 days to make their employee whole, after which they must pay the employee an additional day’s wages for each day they’re late.
Under the new proposal authored by Sen. Eric Pratt, R-Prior Lake, the penalties would be limited to 20 days of an employee’s average daily earnings.
Pratt argues the change is justified because he says it’s the only penalty in state law that’s not capped. And he says without a cap, employees are incentivized not to settle and to hold out for a larger payout while employers are disincentivized from appealing their cases.
“There ought to be a cap that (incentivizes) both sides to come...
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