After due consideration of records and testimony, the State of New York found that Marco Lino, who chopped vegetables and mopped floors and hoisted crates six days a week in a Bayside, Queens, greenmarket, was owed $51,025.20 in unpaid wages. For Gregoria Geronomina Jimenez and 34 other workers at three restaurants in Upper Manhattan run by the same owners, the Industrial Board of Appeals ruled that $385,364.34 in earnings had not been paid over four years. Jin Ming Cao, a waiter at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, was underpaid by $142,812.05, part of $1.8 million that a federal judge decided was due to 26 employees of that restaurant and two others run by the same people.

No one has collected.

“After considerable efforts to obtain restitution for you in the above matter, we find that we can take no further action for you at this time,” a State Labor Department investigator wrote to Mr. Lino in October.

Mr. Lino, like Ms. Jimenez, Mr. Cao and their several dozen co-workers, has not collected anything close to the money that various agencies, boards and courts have found was due him. State and federal laws intended to protect people from being cheated out of their earnings often yield only pieces of paper declaring what they are owed, not actual cash. In a report to be released next week, a coalition of public interest legal groups and labor advocates call for changes in New York’s laws that they believe will give workers a fighting chance to recover stolen wages.

“Our research identified at least $125 million in judgments and orders, providing a glimpse into the scope of the wage collection problem in New York,” concluded the report from the coalition, which includes the Legal Aid Society, the Urban Justice Center and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice.