- City Hall, the Manhattan DA and the Comptroller’s office have recovered millions in stolen wages since 2023, but the protections still don’t reach day laborers hired informally, off the books.
- A new data-sharing pact between Mayor Zohran Mamdani, DA Alvin Bragg and DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine is expanding enforcement even as fear of deportation pushes complaints down.
- Worker centers in Queens and Brooklyn want the City Council to fund hiring halls, require contractor licensing checks and guarantee wage recovery without immigration status becoming leverage.
NEW YORK — City Council members and worker advocates are pressing to close what they describe as a persistent gap in New York’s labor protections: legal cover for day laborers, the largely Latino and often undocumented workforce that staffs much of the city’s construction and landscaping work. Prosecutors, city agencies and neighborhood worker centers all point to the same pattern — wage-theft complaints keep surfacing from immigrant crews on job sites from Queens to the Bronx.
New York Tightens Its Wage-Theft Enforcement
City government has spent 2026 sharpening its enforcement tools. In August, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine signed a data-sharing agreement letting DCWP and the Manhattan DA’s office trade leads on cases involving stolen pay, landlord harassment and schemes that prey on immigrants’ legal status.
That pact builds on groundwork Bragg laid in February 2023, when his office opened a dedicated Worker Protection Unit, folding in an earlier construction-fraud task force. As of this summer, the unit’s tally stood at a dozen indictments and roughly $2.4 million clawed back in stolen wages, in cases ranging from garment-district sweatshops to residential construction sites.
Where the Settlement Money Has Come From
The wage cases keep piling up outside the DA’s office, too. Then-Comptroller Brad Lander’s office reached a nearly $900,000 settlement in August 2025 after finding that a contractor and subcontractor on NYPD precinct-renovation work had shortchanged mostly Spanish-speaking immigrant crews — a case that, by that Labor Day, had pushed the office’s cumulative worker settlements since 2022 past $15 million…