Pay Dirt: Worker Protection Unit at Manhattan DA's digs up stolen wages 

Since its inception in February 2023, the Worker Protection Unit at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has recovered and disbursed $1.3 million in wages owed to about 50 workers whose bosses knowingly underpaid them. 

For the unit’s lawyers and investigators, their work, unfortunately, goes on. 

Already as far back as 2010, the New York City-based National Law Employment Project estimated that shady employers were stealing $18.4 million each week from low-paid workers. That would have added up to nearly $1 billion a year. 

That figure has likely only grown since then, with the pandemic’s health crisis and its attendant economic hardships only serving to encourage dishonest employers to shortchange their workers. 

But getting workers to come forward can be a challenge: a 2021 survey by the Law Employment Project found that workers in the city were 27 percent more likely to cite retaliation from their employers as the overriding reason keeping them from reporting concerns about workplace health and safety.

Now, the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants has made it even more difficult to ferret out unscrupulous bosses and recoup wages stolen and owed, said  Assistant D.A. Rachana Pathak, the Worker Protection Unit’s chief. 

“What's happening is affecting our work. I think there is a chilling effect,” said Pathak, who has headed the unit since it was created but was prosecuting wage-theft cases at the district attorney’s office for some time before that. 

The DA’s outreach efforts to the community are ongoing, and the office assures those victims who are undocumented that they will be shielded from immigration authorities. Nonetheless, calls to the Worker Protection Unit’s hotline are noticeably down, from a few each week to a couple a month, Pathak said. 

“So the fear is real, but we're still really busy,” she said during an interview in her office at the DA’s Hogan Place headquarters, just around the corner from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Centre Street. 

Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Rachana Pathak, who heads the DA’s Worker Protection Unit, being interviewed in her office.

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The unit has built relationships with community groups, city agencies and NGOs who bring them cases. “In terms of the fear question, we will agree to meet somebody where they feel comfortable. They don't have to come down to the courts,” Pathak said, noting that the unit has offices in Harlem and Washington Heights. And she’s gone to New Jersey to meet with victims who live in the Garden State but were deprived of their lawful wages in New York City. 

“We don't want to live in a society where exploitation is tolerated,” Pathak said. “So we really encourage people. But it's up to them. I work as a prosecutor — I need live witnesses to make cases.”

So far, Pathak and her colleagues have brought 11 prosecutions against employers. Among those, they secured guilty pleas from the owner and manager of Grimaldi’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn, who admitted to first-degree fraud charges in May 2024 in connection with the theft of more than $30,000 in wages from 18 employees. While the pair, Anthony Piscina and Frank Santora, made full restitution to the workers, other pizzeria employees are still coming forward with wage claims, Pathak said. 

“Every Manhattanite deserves to work in a safe environment with fair compensation,” Pathak’s boss, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, said in a statement. “I want New Yorkers to know that our office is here to hold accountable bad bosses who take advantage of their employees.”

Bragg, who faces two challengers in the November general election as he bids for a second term, was instrumental in getting lawmakers to pass, and Governor Hochul to sign, legislation that tweaked the state’s larceny laws to include wage theft. State statute, he said before that bill’s enactment, limited prosecutors to charging wage theft with a scheme to defraud, a low-felony crime, a notion he called “preposterous” at the time.

Although much of the Worker Protection Unit’s work involves cases of wage theft in blue-collar trades, most of them arising out of nonpayment on construction jobs, in restaurant work or in home-health care, Bragg recently charged a longtime talent agent with fraud and multiple larceny counts for bilking $1.8 million from dozens of struggling actors he and his company were representing.  

For Pathak, who has been with the Manhattan DA’s office for 21 years, the work is the reward, but it brings the most satisfaction when she can make a call and tell people they have a long-awaited and deserved paycheck coming. She hopes to do as much for the two day laborers who are owed $7,000, so far the unit’s smallest case.

“It's a small unit within a big prosecutor's office, but we're dedicated and committed to these cases,” she said of the Worker Protection Unit. “We just want to let people know we're still here. We want to work with you. If people don't come forward, the bad boss gets away with it.” 

Victims of wage theft, prevailing wage violations or dangerous work conditions are encouraged to call the Manhattan District Attorney’s Worker Protection Unit at 646-712-0298.

richardk@thechiefleader.com