April 19, 2010. The Palm Beach Post.
WEST PALM BEACH — Attorney Jill Hanson hears the same complaint from workers at Jupiter’s El Sol Resource Center three times a month.
Despite their hours of hard work, the worker’s bosses have disappeared without paying their wages.
The workers have come to Hanson, a volunteer at the center, looking for help. Some have been cheated out of thousands of dollars. Others are out less than a hundred.
But to many of the workers at El Sol, a $100 can mean the difference of feeding their families and paying their rent, Hanson said.
“That is 30 cases a year just from the town of Jupiter,” Hanson told members of the of the church-based group People Engaged in Active Community Efforts on Monday.
Wage theft has become such a large problem in Palm Beach County that the group, known as P.E.A.C.E., has made it one of their top legislative priorities this year.
More than 1,500 members packed the gymnasium at Palm Beach Lakes High School to call on county officials to fix it. The group wants county commissioners to create a new law that would allow the county’s Office of Equal Opportunity to investigate employers who don’t pay their workers.
Father John D’Mello, of St. Ann Catholic Church in downtown West Palm Beach, said that no local agency currently has the authority to enforce wage laws here. All complaints are send to the state’s Department of Labor, he said.
“This is not just a problem for immigrants,” D’Mello said. “It affects a very board category of workers.”
Waiters, waitresses, hotel workers, day labors can all be victims of wage theft, he said.
A majority of county commissioners said during Monday night’s meeting that they would direct county attorney’s to work on law changes that would help ease the problem. That direction, they said, would come next month.
“We live in a county of laws, and if they are not being followed … it is our obligation to find ways to enforce them, said Commissioner Jess Santamaria, who attended the meeting with Commissioners Jeff Koons, Shelley Vana and Priscilla Taylor.
The P.E.A.C.E. group also called on commissioners to to use money dedicated for affordable housing for residents earning less than 60 percent of the area’s median income find homes. And they asked West Palm Beach leaders to create a Neighborhood Accountability Board to help ease youth crime.
