BOSTON- Senator Sal DiDomenico recently testified before the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development in support of his legislation to prevent the illegal practice of wage theft and promote employer accountability. The bill, S.999, gives the state greater power to go after corrupt employers and provides additional tools for the Attorney General’s Office to hold violators fully accountable.

“The practice of wage theft comes in many different forms, but they all have the common denominator of hurting workers, their families, and our communities,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico (D-Everett) in his testimony before the committee. “This legislation takes crucial steps to protect workers from this illicit practice and holds employers accountable for their actions. I respectfully ask for the Committee’s favorable report, and I urge my colleagues in the Legislature to take action and pass this critical bill during this legislative session to end this growing epidemic of wage theft.” 

Wage theft- the illegal practice of not paying employees for all of their work through means such as violating minimum wage laws, not paying overtime, or forcing workers to work off the clock- has become a pervasive problem throughout the Massachusetts economy. The number of wage theft violations has especially grown as more companies move towards using independent contractors rather than full-time employees, overwhelming the capacity of our existing labor laws and enforcement mechanisms. 

According to Community Labor United, approximately $700 million is stolen by bad employers from 350,000 workers in Massachusetts each year. The Attorney General’s Office, which is tasked with protecting workers in this state, successfully recovers $5.2 million annually.

Immigrants are particularly vulnerable to wage theft due to a reluctance to speak out against employers. As a result, these workers can sometimes go weeks without pay, and when they do get paid, it can be less than originally promised.

Wage theft also hurts legitimate businesses by putting law-abiding companies at a competitive disadvantage when they lose contracts to companies that charge less for their work by cheating their workers out of their pay. These bad actors also avoid paying taxes and into critical safety nets for workers, putting an unfair burden on Massachusetts taxpayers and the Commonwealth when employees have a legitimate right to utilize these programs.

To increase accountability in labor contracting and subcontracting, the bill holds lead contractors accountable for the wage theft violations of their subcontractors if there is a significant connection to their business activities or operations and enhances the enforcement power of the Attorney General’s Office by allowing it to bring wage theft cases directly to civil court. The Attorney General would also gain the ability to issue a stop work order in response to a wage theft violation.

To protect employees affected by a stop work order, the bill requires that employees be paid for the period that the stop work order is in effect or the first 10 days the employee was scheduled to work had the stop order not been issued.

The Massachusetts Senate passed Senator DiDomenico’s wage theft bill last session with nearly unanimous and bipartisan support. Coming off of last year’s victory in the Senate, the bill has strong momentum and supporters are hopeful that the legislation will clear both chambers of the Legislature and receive the Governor’s signature.

An Act to prevent wage theft and promote employer accountability is currently pending before the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce development where is awaits a favorable report.

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BOSTON- Last week, Senator Sal DiDomenico traveled back to Washington D.C. to serve as a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) Student Centered Learning Commission. The Senator was appointed to the Commission by Senate President Stan Rosenberg for his leadership on education policy and the Senate Kids First initiative, a multi-year initiative led by DiDomenico to identify and support innovative strategies for investing in Massachusetts’ children.

Senator DiDomenico was joined by a bipartisan group of state legislators from across the country to identify legislative policy options, obstacles, and recommendations to help commission members and other legislators move forward with systems that support student-centered learning opportunities.

“It was a pleasure to travel back to our nation’s capital and participate in the NCSL’s Student Centered Learning Commission,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico. “This forum provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas for developing schools systems with innovative and holistic approaches to educating our children, and I was proud to share the important recommendations in our Kids First blueprint with legislators from across the country. I look forward to working with my fellow commission members in the future and sharing our findings with my colleagues in the Massachusetts Legislature.” 

The National Conference of State Legislatures has been the voice of state legislatures in Washington, D.C. and has provided support to state legislatures since 1975.  The Student-Centered Learning Commission is a new working group created by the NCSL to help states integrate student-centered learning techniques into their current school systems. “Student-centered learning” refers to a variety of educational programs, learning experiences, approaches, and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the unique learning needs, interests, and/or cultural backgrounds of individual students. 

This forum in Washington D.C. was the first meeting for the commission members. DiDomenico will also participate in two upcoming webinars to discuss legislative activity in the states and address key concepts in student-centered learning. He will also participate in a Legislative Summit in Boston where commission members will reflect on their work and make recommendations for next steps.

This was the second time this year that Senator DiDomenico traveled to Washington D.C. to represent Massachusetts. In April, DiDomenico led a group of his Senate colleagues to D.C. to gather information on the future of the federal budget and to advocate against potential spending cuts that will have a negative impact on the Commonwealth. 

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BOSTON- Senator Sal DiDomenico, Senate President Stan Rosenberg, and members of the Senate Kids First working group recently released Kids First: A Vision for a Stronger Commonwealth, a strategic blueprint for investing in children and their families to build pathways to successful, productive, and healthy adulthood. While this initiative is broad in scope, the focus and content of this Senate vision statement is on the critical years of birth through age 9.

“Building strong and resilient children should be our Commonwealth’s number one priority, and achieving this goal requires our dedication to this commitment at every step of a child’s educational, social, and economic upbringing,” said Senator DiDomenico, chair of the Kids First working group. “I am proud of the strategic vision and values laid out by the Senate in Kids First, and I am confident that this document will provide our Commonwealth with a critical road map of steps we must take to make serious, significant, and sustained investments in our children’s futures.” 

Senate President Rosenberg created the Kids First initiative to propose a series of recommendations that seek to build strong and resilient kids in the Commonwealth, and appointed Senator DiDomenico as chair. Together, Senate President Rosenberg and Senator DiDomenico convened a cross-jurisdictional working group of senators to look comprehensively at a wide array of policy areas that relate to supporting children.

After collecting extensive input from experts in diverse fields, a vision statement of strategic priorities was crafted to re-orient Massachusetts towards a twenty-first-century education system and to begin prioritizing long-term, smart, and strategic investments in children and their families that will provide a pathway to healthy, productive adulthood. To achieve this objective, Kids First proposes the goal of reducing by at least half the number of third-graders who are not reading proficiently by 2027.

To dramatically increase third grade reading proficiency rates and support the whole child, the Senate Kids First initiative has established four broad areas within which to focus specific strategies: Access, Quality, Readiness, and Integration.  These four pillars provide the foundation on which all policy recommendations in Kids First are centered.

At the release of Kids First, Senator DiDomenico was also joined by former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian, Senate colleagues and stakeholders from across the Commonwealth who came out in support of the Senate blueprint.

The plan laid out in Kids First is not meant as a blueprint for omnibus legislation or any piece of legislation in particular. Rather, it is offered as a statement of the Senate’s vision for children and a statement of budgetary priorities in the years to come.  The Kids First blueprint can be found online at https://malegislature.gov/cc/reports/kidsfirstblueprint.pdf.

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