Dive Brief:

• In New York’s latest bout with wage theft in the construction industry, the state attorney general has charged a restoration company with failing to pay 21 laborers at various times over 15 months, sometimes withholding compensation for weeks at a time.

• The owners of Stonehenge Restoration owe those employees $76,429 for the work they performed between January 2014 and March 2015, and have agreed to pay two of them $6,000 apiece and the others between $2,500 and $4,000. The company will file compliance reports to the office of the attorney general and will be monitored.

• Under New York law, employers must pay their workers weekly. Payment must be made no later than seven calendar days after the end of work week, according to The New York Daily News.

Dive Insight:

Robert Bonanza, business manager for Mason Tenders District Council of Greater New York, a laborers’ union, called wage theft "a crime that is running rampant throughout the construction industry" and the contractors who engage in it "criminal(s)."

 In April, the attorney general's office arrested five public works contractors for underpayment of workers.

And in May, a University of Massachusetts Amherst labor professor published a report calling wage theft "the new model" in the construction industry. "The assumption (in the industry) is that the great majority of subcontractors is going to use undocumented workers and is going to cheat them out of wages," he said.