Three carpenters who worked on the rebuild of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School in East Baltimore have settled a federal wage lawsuit for $150,000, resolving claims that they were paid at a construction laborer’s rate instead of the higher wage owed to skilled carpenters on the taxpayer-funded project.
Arnulfo Cabrera, Elmer Callejas and Yovani Gutierrez filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Maryland against Tobar Construction, DC Construction and general contractor CAM Construction, alleging they were shortchanged on prevailing wages required for the $66 million school project, according to WBFF Fox45 Baltimore. A March 2026 memorandum opinion detailed the scale of the alleged shortfall: carpenters on the project were entitled to a prevailing wage of $33.21 per hour plus $14.03 in fringe benefits, for a total of $47.24 an hour, but plaintiffs said they were mostly paid at the common laborer rate of $20.81 per hour plus $6.39 in benefits, or $27.20 total, according to court records. That gap works out to just over $20 an hour.
A Single Week’s Pay Stub Tells the Story
Court filings offered a concrete example of how the alleged misclassification played out on paper. Plaintiff Elmer Callejas provided payroll stubs showing he worked 47 hours in a single week in July 2025 but was paid at the carpenter rate for only two of those hours, with the remaining 45 hours compensated at the lower common laborer rate, per the same court records.
Under a 2018 amendment to the Maryland Wage Payment and Collection Law, general contractors on construction projects can be held jointly and severally liable for wage nonpayment committed by subcontractors, even without a direct contractual relationship with the affected workers, according to attorneys at BTLG Attorneys At Law. That statute helps explain why CAM Construction, the project’s general contractor, was named as a co-defendant alongside subcontractors Tobar Construction and DC Construction.
Lawsuit Grew Well Beyond the Original Three Plaintiffs
The case did not stay limited to its original three named plaintiffs. Following the January 2026 filing, eight additional workers submitted consent notices in federal court to join the lawsuit as opt-in plaintiffs by June 2026, expanding the group of workers alleging underpayment on the project…