DENVER — When a construction company stiffed Candelario Gonzalez for $1,800 in wages in November 2004, it was as if they had stolen Christmas.
His three kids went without presents. "That was my Christmas money," said Gonzalez, 31, who had worked installing irrigation systems. Gonzalez didn't know where to turn for help. He couldn't call the police, because though he had been deprived of the salary he earned, he had not been robbed of any possessions.
Now the police can get involved. In an effort to protect largely immigrant day laborers from fraud, Denver has become the third city in the country to make nonpayment of wages a crime.
"If someone steals a wallet, the police can come and arrest you," said Councilman Doug Linkhart, who proposed the ordinance that unanimously passed the council last month. "But if you don't pay [a person], the police can't do anything" to you.
It's part of an effort by labor advocates to protect laborers from being shortchanged by employers and, hopefully, to raise pay across the board by preventing employers from cutting corners on temporary hiring.
"By protecting the wages of all workers, that brings up wages for everyone," said Minsun Ji, executive director of El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores, a day laborers advocacy group that pushed the new law.
The Denver Police Department's involvement in recovering people's back pay is likely to stay minimal. Ji said she hoped that by warning deadbeat employers that they could face criminal sanctions, it would become easier to recover lost wages.
In Austin, Texas, the first city to pass a law making nonpayment of wages a form of theft, the day laborers center was able to resolve 85% of unpaid claims by threatening to involve the police. The recovery rate in Denver is about 50%, Ji said. Kansas City, Mo., also has a wage theft law.
Colorado state law makes it illegal to fail to pay more than $500 in wages, but Ji said that the state had never filed charges against the numerous employers who have stiffed day laborers. "The whole department doesn't have an enforcement mechanism," Ji said.
And failure to pay an amount less than $500 could not be prosecuted anywhere in Colorado. But that is not a trivial sum for many laborers. "The people we're dealing with are very low-wage workers," Ji said. "Five hundred dollars is a huge amount for them."
