Recently, we’ve seen countless articles discussing Oregon’s housing and worker shortage crisis. Many focus on long-term solutions, like reforming land use policies to build more housing or increasing funding for apprenticeship programs — policy ideas aimed at boosting the supply needed to meet demand. But one crucial issue has been overlooked in this conversation: wage theft in the construction industry. If we truly want to address our housing crisis and expand the workforce, we must face the reality of wage theft head-on and acknowledge a sad reality — that many of our construction sites across the state have become crime scenes, where trafficked workers are subjected to a complex contracting chain designed to avoid accountability.
Numerous national studies have shown that the construction industry, particularly in the residential sector, is a hotspot for abuse and exploitation. Even the Oregon Center for Public Policy reports that construction has the second-highest number of wage theft claims in the state relative to its workforce. This issue is further underscored by enforcement agencies’ actions in Oregon, such as the Department of Labor recovering nearly $1 million from four Oregon contractors who failed to pay workers proper wages, benefits, and overtime on federally funded projects or the Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) settling a $193,000 wage theft case involving 26 workers in the construction industry.
These incidents aren’t isolated; they reveal a business model designed to exploit workers, relying on the fact that these schemes are constantly evolving…