As Wage Theft Hounds Western Mass Workers, Some Fight Back
Union carpenters and labor organizers helped pass a wage theft ordinance in Easthampton. Submitted photo to The Shoestring
by Brian Zayatz
Via the state attorney general’s office and preventive city ordinances, local workers are fighting to get their full paychecks.
The following article appeared in the Shoestring on August 12, 2025. It was reposted for syndicated distribution on Masswire August 14, 2025.
This article originated as a project by Karen Galvan, Lucia Qin, and Phatamarha Noel — Smith College students in a data journalism course taught by Naila Moreira and Ben Baumer.
In 2023, Massachusetts reached what was, at the time, its largest settlement in recent memory for a problem that plagues workers nationwide: wage theft.
The employer under scrutiny was one of western Massachusetts’ largest, the MGM Springfield casino. In a settlement agreement, the company admitted no culpability for alleged stolen wages, but agreed to pay $461,587 in restitution to employees identified by the attorney general’s office and another $6.4 million in penalties to the state.
That sum, while significant — it is still the third largest in the last ten years, behind recent fines against Uber and Lyft — pales in comparison to the money the casino makes. According to state data, MGM Springfield raked in over $25 million in taxable revenue this May alone.
Over 16,000 workers across Massachusetts have filed labor law complaints since 2023, resulting in 1,951 enforcement fines and settlements from the state Attorney General’s Office, according to a Shoestring review of state data. Of those enforcement actions, 264 of them were against companies based in Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin, and Berkshire counties.
Wage theft is a crime concentrated in the lowest paying industries, and for many workers who experience it, even one missed payment could mean choosing between expenses like rent, groceries, or childcare.
Last year, for example, the UMass Donahue Institute’s Economic & Public Policy Research Group found that 66% of workers at MGM Springfield earned less than a living wage in 2022 and less than 1% received a promotion that year. The casino did not respond to a request for comment, and no representative or member of the casino’s union could be reached for comment for this story.
The problem is hardly unique to Massachusetts: a landmark 2014 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in any given week, two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago experienced at least one incident of wage theft, a rate that they found could end up costing these workers an average of 10% of their take-home pay. Extrapolating these figures and comparing them to wages recovered by workers who took action against their employers in 2012, the study’s authors reported that wage theft could be costing American workers as much as $50 billion a year, dwarfing all other types of theft.
Enforcement of alleged labor law violations, including everything from wage theft to child labor and failure to offer mandated breaks and sick leave, has increased during the tenure of current Attorney General Andrea Campbell. The nearly 2,000 fines and settlements issued by her office since 2023 average to 780 per year, compared to an average of 596 per year under former Attorney General Maura Healey, who is now the governor. Complaint data, which goes back to 2020, shows those numbers also increasing over that period, from a low of 5,071 in 2021 to 7,193 last year.
The attorney general’s office declined to make a staff member available to speak on the record for this story.
The Shoestring compiled a list of the largest enforcement actions taken by the attorney general’s Fair Labor Division in western Mass since July 2021. Some of the largest fines and settlements include those against a Hampden County Dunkin Donuts franchise, totaling $1.6 million; Theory Wellness, a cannabis company with a location in Chicopee that has since become a worker-owned coop; KleenRite, a Ludlow-based cleaning service; and the owners of Tellus & the Satellite Bar in Northampton.
Indy editor’s note: a searchable database for wage theft enforcement actions 2021-2025 in Western Massachusetts can be found in the original article or here for all fair labor enforcement actions for the entire state.
No representatives from any of these companies agreed to speak with The Shoestring for this story. John Salema, the owner of Agawam Donuts, could not be reached.
Brian Zayatz is the managing editor of The Shoestring. Since moving to Western Mass from Cape Cod in 2014, Brian has been The Shoestring’s Northampton city council beat reporter, co-founded Amherst Cinema Workers United, and been named one of Tomorrow’s News Trailblazers by Editor & Publisher magazine. Find Brian’s additional writing at Teen Vogue, DigBoston, Popula, Shadowproof and the Montague Reporter, or reach out at bzayatz@theshoestring.org.
Indy editor’s note: Since Amherst passed a Wage and Tip Theft Bylaw in November of 2020, there have been five enforcement actions against Amherst businesses: four against Fresh Side and one against the Center for Extended Care at Amherst.
Read more:
Town Council Adopts Wage Theft Bylaw (Amherst Indy)
Opinion: Amherst Needs to Protect Workers from Wage Theft by Tom Juravich (Amherst Indy)
Exploitation Of Undocumented Workers In Residential Construction Costs Massachusetts Taxpayers As Much As $82M Annually, UMass Study Finds (Amherst Indy)