“This is going to mean the trans­fer of mil­lions of dol­lars each year from cheat­ing employ­ers to low-wage work­ers,” says James Bhandary-Alexan­der, a lawyer for New Haven Legal Assis­tance who rep­re­sents vic­tims of wage theft.

This Wednes­day, Con­necti­cut Gov­er­nor Dan Mal­loy signed into law Sen­ate Bill 914, a mea­sure that will allow vic­tims of wage theft to col­lect dou­ble the amount due them. By mak­ing the cost of break­ing the law out­weigh the cost of fol­low­ing it, busi­ness own­ers will be deterred from com­mit­ting the crime in the first place.

For many employ­ers, wage theft makes good busi­ness sense. The prob­a­bil­i­ty of get­ting caught refus­ing to pay a work­er over­time, shav­ing hours off their check or pay­ing less than the min­i­mum wage is low. And even in the small num­ber of cas­es pur­sued by vic­tims that see the inside of a court­room, employ­ees often only recov­er a frac­tion of what they’re owed. A new law in Con­necti­cut, how­ev­er, aims to change this.

And yet, as Bhandary-Alexan­der notes, SB-914 is only a ​“mod­est” step in pro­vid­ing work­ers fair com­pen­sa­tion. Passed after years of effort by work­ers, immi­grant rights advo­cates and myr­i­ad grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions, SB-914 para­dox­i­cal­ly illus­trates how large the holes are in exist­ing labor laws across the coun­try — and what an uphill strug­gle it will be to achieve what Bhandary-Alexan­der calls ​“major” progress: a $15 and hour min­i­mum wage, fair sched­ul­ing leg­is­la­tion, the elim­i­na­tion of tip cred­it and oth­er provisions.

“We can see now how big a bat­tle it is,” he added.

Dou­ble down, triple to go

The new law is intend­ed to alle­vi­ate a num­ber of gap­ing holes in state law that allowed boss­es to get away with steal­ing work­ers’ wages. Up until now, Con­necti­cut employ­ees had to prove ​“bad faith, arbi­trari­ness or unrea­son­able­ness” on the employer’s part in addi­tion to wage theft, mak­ing it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for vic­tims to col­lect. Courts reg­u­lar­ly con­strued ​“bad faith” so nar­row­ly that the major­i­ty of wage theft charges couldn’t pass muster.

In a 2010 case, for exam­ple, Ann Maratea was denied dou­ble dam­ages because a Con­necti­cut Supe­ri­or Court held that her employ­er, Tay­lor Freez­er, sup­pos­ed­ly was ​“unaware” that it had to pay over­time for the entire 10-year peri­od she worked there. Accord­ing to the court, ​“although it was known to man­age­ment per­son­nel that Ann Maratea would arrive … well before the offi­cial 8 a.m. start of the work day,” fail­ure to pay a sin­gle cent for the 10 extra hours Maratea put in every week for a decade didn’t amount to proof of employ­er ​“bad faith.” And so the judge ruled that Tay­lor Freez­er didn’t have to pay Maratea the full amount she would seem­ing­ly be legal­ly enti­tled to.

Now, in order to avoid pay­ing dou­ble dam­ages, employ­ers who com­mit wage theft must demon­strate that they under­took spe­cif­ic inves­ti­ga­tion into how much con­sti­tutes a legal wage, and then some­how made a mis­take. SB-914 lifts the bur­den of proof from the employ­ee to the employer.

This is cru­cial because pro­vi­sions under the fed­er­al Fair Labor Stan­dards Act for dou­ble dam­ages only apply to work­ers who are part of ​“inter­state com­merce” and those whose employ­ers make over $500,000 a year. This means that, for mil­lions of work­ers around the coun­try, fed­er­al wage law sim­ply doesn’t apply — mak­ing leg­is­la­tion at the state lev­el, includ­ing SB-914, their only recourse.

Still, even advo­cates who pushed for the law say it’s far from ideal.

“To be hon­est,” said Megan Foun­tain, an orga­niz­er with Unidad Lati­na en Acción (ULA), a grass­roots work­ers’ and immi­grants’ rights orga­ni­za­tion whose mem­bers lob­bied hard for the law, ​“SB-914 is nowhere close to the best wage theft laws in the coun­try. Ten states make an employ­er liable for triple dam­ages.”

But even among those states that pro­vide for tre­ble dam­ages (Ari­zona, Ida­ho, Maine, Mary­land, Mass­a­chu­setts, Michi­gan, Nebras­ka North Dako­ta, Ver­mont and West Vir­ginia), few make the grade in wage theft pre­ven­tion. Accord­ing to one 2012 study which gave states a let­ter grade based on the strength of their wage theft pre­ven­tion laws, the two high­est-rank­ing states, New York and Mass­a­chu­setts, only got a C+ and a C. Con­necti­cut brought home a D — and 18 states scored effec­tive­ly zero.

“I’d say wage theft is the biggest crime wave in the coun­try,” Bhandary-Alexan­der added.

Orga­nize, orga­nize, organize

In 1938, Con­gress passed the nation’s first-ever wage law, the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA), which made dou­ble dam­ages a fed­er­al require­ment. Yet near­ly a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the gap between actu­al prac­tice and nation­al paper pro­vi­sions is enormous.

In protests that con­tin­ue to rip­ple across the coun­try, work­ers have attest­ed to the vari­ety of ways by which they are deprived of their due pay: Employ­ers reg­u­lar­ly pay below min­i­mum wage, with­hold over­time pay or tips, mis­clas­si­fy their employ­ees as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors and engage in a whole host of oth­er tac­tics to pay work­ers less than what they are legal­ly owed. In many indus­tries, wage theft is endem­ic.

Nation­al stud­ies find that over 60 per­cent of work­ers in low-wage indus­tries suf­fer wage vio­la­tions each week, and that wage theft costs work­ers $50 bil­lion a year. In 2013, the Con­necti­cut Depart­ment of Labor recov­ered $6.5 mil­lion in unpaid wages. But many work­ers use civ­il suits instead of going through the DOL, and one can safe­ly assume that many did not file com­plaints because of lan­guage bar­ri­ers or fear of retal­i­a­tion. The way the legal odds are stacked — and thanks to years of bud­get cuts that have reduced DOL Wage and Hour inves­ti­ga­tors to only about 20 per­cent their num­ber in the 1970s — there are few incen­tives for an employ­er to not steal wages.

In her tes­ti­mo­ny in front of the Con­necti­cut state sen­ate in sup­port of the new law, Karim Calle, a full-time stu­dent and work­er from East Haven who said that in years past she had made as lit­tle as $30 a day wait­ress­ing, told the court what can hap­pen to a work­er try­ing to get back stolen wages. Calle spoke about two nail salons in Darien and New Canaan where man­i­curists were dis­crim­i­nat­ed against, sex­u­al­ly harassed by their boss and paid nei­ther min­i­mum wage nor over­time. In addi­tion, work­ers devel­oped health prob­lems because of the tox­ic chem­i­cals they came into con­tact with daily.

In 2008, six of the women who worked in the salons filed a law­suit for $370,000 in stolen wages. As the case wound its way through the courts, the employer’s three hous­es sud­den­ly went into fore­clo­sure, and he sold the two salons to his niece before dis­ap­pear­ing. ​“Fraud­u­lent employ­ers use these prac­tices fre­quent­ly,” Calle said. Even though the court came to a judg­ment for $209,000, the employ­ees had no way to col­lect it.

Calle is a mem­ber of ULA, and fought hard for SB-914 as part of a pack­age of laws, includ­ing one that would have brought wage liens to Con­necti­cut. Wage liens enable work­ers to put a legal hold on an employer’s prop­er­ty when fil­ing a wage theft claim and ensure that an employ­er can’t ​“dis­ap­pear” assets before being ordered to pay what they owe — as the nail salon own­er did.

Liens have been used suc­cess­ful­ly in Wis­con­sin, Mary­land, Alas­ka, Ida­ho and Wash­ing­ton, and are being fought for in states like New York, where it’s known as the SWEAT bill (Secur­ing Wages Earned Against Theft). Yet SB-914 is the only bill of the group that made it through the Con­necti­cut Con­gress thus far.

Yet per­haps the most impor­tant advance to come out of SB-914 was the high lev­el of com­mu­ni­ty and work­er orga­ni­za­tion that coa­lesced around the law. Groups like ULA joined forces with Legal Ser­vices lawyers, union mem­bers, local stu­dents, activists from the Con­necti­cut Immi­grants’ Rights Alliance, the Fight for $15 cam­paign and oth­ers to secure the bill’s pas­sage. Accord­ing to Calle, this coali­tion is what made the bill’s pas­sage successful.

“This isn’t just a legal prob­lem,” said Bhandary-Alexan­der, ​“it’s a polit­i­cal prob­lem and a cul­tur­al prob­lem, too. We need to keep fight­ing the legal bat­tles, yes, and keep increas­ing the cost of wage theft, but, on the bot­tom end, it’s orga­niz­ing, orga­niz­ing, orga­niz­ing… SB-914 shows you both what you can do with not a ton of resources but a lot of patience and ener­gy,” he con­clud­ed. ​“But the ques­tion is, how do we accom­plish more?”

The law becomes effec­tive Octo­ber 1, 2015.