Steal a $200 television from a Minneapolis store and you will be arrested, booked, and prosecuted, probably within the month. Steal $2,000 from the paycheck of the man who stocked that television, and the realistic worst case is that you eventually pay it back.
That is not a metaphor. It is the documented state of Minnesota law enforcement, and the numbers behind it are worse than most people assume.
The scale
The Economic Policy Institute studied a single, narrow form of wage theft — employers paying less than the legal minimum wage — in the ten most populous states. It found 2.4 million workers underpaid, losing an average of $64 a week, about a quarter of their earnings. Extrapolated nationally, minimum-wage violations alone come to more than $15 billion a year.
Then EPI put that number where it belongs, and I'd ask you to sit with the comparison: "this number, $15 billion, exceeds the value of property crimes committed in the United States each year: according to the FBI, the total value of all robberies, burglaries, larceny, and motor vehicle theft in the United States in 2015 was $12.7 billion."
That is EPI's own comparison, and the years line up: an estimated $15 billion in stolen wages against $12.7 billion in reported property-crime losses. On those numbers, more money is taken from American workers by their employers than by every robber, burglar, and car thief in the country combined — and the wage figure counts only minimum-wage violations. Not unpaid overtime. Not off-the-clock work. Not illegal deductions. Not misclassification.
Minnesota has its own number. Researchers at Rutgers' Workplace Justice Lab analyzed a decade of federal survey data for the Minneapolis–St. Paul metro and found minimum-wage violations cost workers nearly $90 million a year on average — about 32,000 low-wage workers, each losing roughly $2,700 annually. In 2021 the total hit $144.5 million. The authors describe their method as producing conservative underestimates.
For perspective on the enforcement side, the same report noted that the City of Minneapolis had three investigators covering a labor law that reaches nearly 250,000 workers.
Minnesota wrote a strong law. Then left it in the drawer.
Here is what makes this a Minnesota story rather than a national one.
In 2019, our Legislature passed what was widely described as one of the most stringent wage theft laws in the country. It did the thing worker advocates in other states are still begging for: it made wage theft a form of criminal theft, graduated by amount, with felony exposure over $1,000 and up to twenty years at the top tier — the same structure that applies to stealing anything else. It added earnings-statement and written-notice requirements, anti-retaliation protections, and enforcement authority at the Department of Labor and Industry.
Then, according to reporting by the Minnesota Reformer: since 2019, prosecutors in Minnesota charged felony wage theft twice. The lone "conviction" on the books for years appeared to be a data-entry error — the defendant had actually been charged with shoplifting electronics from a Walmart.
The first real conviction under the law came in April 2025 — nearly six years after it took effect.
The case that finally worked, and how long it took
Frederick Leon Newell ran a painting company. It held more than $320,000 in work on a development that received public financing, which obligated him to pay prevailing wages — about $36 an hour for painters. He paid $15 to $25 an hour and submitted falsified payroll records to hide it, taking more than $35,000 from five workers; one man was underpaid nearly $14,000 in three months.
Follow the path it took to a courtroom, because the path is the point. The workers complained to the City of Minneapolis Civil Rights Division with help from their painters' union. The city investigated and issued a violation letter in June 2021; Newell signed a settlement agreeing to pay $43,166 in restitution — and never paid it. The general contractor voluntarily made the workers whole. The city referred the case to the county attorney, who charged it in 2022. A bench trial was held in January 2025; prosecutors called twelve witnesses and put in sixty exhibits, and the defense called none. He was convicted in April 2025 of wage theft and theft by swindle, and sentenced in June to three years' probation, 200 hours of community service, more than $42,000, and a bar on bidding new public contracts.
As the Reformer noted, the conviction came "five years after the crime occurred, illustrating the low priority wage theft cases have in finding time on court schedules packed with murders, assaults, burglaries and rapes."
The prosecutor who won it, then-Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, said the quiet part: "We are trying to figure out how to make these cases go a little faster… It's hard to hold people accountable when they know they're not actually going to see a judge." Her proposed fix was refreshingly concrete — ask the court to set aside a judge to handle wage theft cases.
The civil side works better. It is still glacial.
Minnesota's largest-ever administrative wage case tells the same story from another angle. In December 2023 the Department of Labor and Industry sought $2.4 million for 25 construction workers on nineteen apartment projects, including the Viking Lakes development in Eagan, alleging workers were paid in cash, denied overtime, and pressured over immigration documents. The Attorney General's office had to separately sue one of the contractors in 2022 for obstructing the investigation — for refusing to produce records and instructing workers to lie to investigators.
It settled in April 2026 for $1.28 million to 26 workers: the largest wage recovery in the agency's history. And the honest accounting, which the state itself did not dodge — the violations dated to 2019. Seven years from theft to payment, with inflation eroding the real value of every dollar, and the state waiving virtually all of the $1.2 million in damages it had originally sought. No developer bore liability for its subcontractors.
That last point has since changed: a 2023 law, Minn. Stat. § 181.165, makes general contractors liable for wage theft by their subcontractors — the single most useful structural fix Minnesota has adopted here, because it puts the incentive on the party that actually picks the subcontractor.
The auditor already told us why this fails
In March 2024, the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor examined how Minnesota handles worker misclassification — the practice of calling an employee a contractor to avoid wages, overtime, and insurance. Its verdict on the state's approach: "neither adequate nor coordinated."
The specifics are worse than the summary. The Labor Department's Construction Misclassification Unit "did not identify any instances of misclassification in the construction industry as a result of their recent investigations" — not few, any — in an industry where 22 percent of employers audited by unemployment insurance had misclassified at least one worker. Of 28 investigations opened in 2021, 18 were still open two years later, with case records untouched for a year or more.
The Legislature responded in 2024 with a stronger misclassification law and a new enforcement partnership across agencies. Its total appropriation for that work: roughly $248,000 for the biennium. For context, that is less than a fifth of what one settlement returned to twenty-six workers on a single set of apartment projects.
One more line from that case deserves attention. The Labor Commissioner said the 2026 federal immigration enforcement surge made it harder to keep contact with exploited workers: "Our ability to successfully enforce Minnesota laws relies on workers who come forward to share their experiences and assert their rights." Whatever else enforcement operations accomplish, they make wage thieves harder to catch — because the witness stops answering the door.
What works — and the irony at the center of it
In February 2023, the Manhattan District Attorney created a Worker Protection Unit dedicated to prosecuting wage theft, paired it with a first-of-its-kind Stolen Wage Fund so victims could be made whole even when a defendant is judgment-proof, and then went to Albany to ask the legislature for a new tool: the power to charge wage theft as larceny.
Read that again. New York's most prominent prosecutor had to lobby for the authority Minnesota has had since 2019 and has used twice.
And then compare the output. In budget testimony this March, the Manhattan District Attorney's office reported returning roughly $600,000 to 22 workers from its 2025 indictments alone. Minnesota's entire criminal wage-theft record over the same span: one conviction, about $42,000. They built the unit and asked for our law. We have the law and haven't built the unit.
The New York City Comptroller put the principle better than I can: "while someone can get arrested for stealing your $200 TV, there are often no criminal consequences to stealing $2,000 of your wages."
What we can do
Build the unit. Wage theft is white-collar crime, and it dies in offices with no one assigned to it. Every large county attorney's office in Minnesota — and the Attorney General's office — should have prosecutors and investigators whose actual job this is. Hennepin proved a case can be won; the lesson is that it took a union, a city agency, a general contractor, and six years.
Take Moriarty's suggestion. A designated calendar for wage cases costs nothing and fixes the "they'll never see a judge" problem directly.
Fund the investigators. Three investigators for 250,000 workers is not enforcement, it's a suggestion box.
Copy the Stolen Wage Fund. A judgment a worker cannot collect is a piece of paper. Minnesota already built a Consumer Fraud Restitution Fund that took in $4.6 million in its first year — the model exists, in this state, right now.
And use § 181.165. General-contractor liability makes the party with money and leverage responsible for who they hire. That is how you change behavior without a single new prosecutor.
A state that writes one of the toughest wage theft laws in America and charges it twice in six years hasn't made a policy choice. It's made a promise it didn't keep — to the painter on a publicly funded job, to the dairy worker, to the drywall crew paid in cash. Minnesota already has the law. What it needs is somebody willing to pick it up.
That's the whole job. It always was.
Sources
Cooper & Kroeger, Employers steal billions from workers' paychecks each year, Economic Policy Institute (2017) — minimum-wage violation totals, the $64/week figure, and the verbatim comparison to FBI property-crime values for 2015. Barnes, Galvin, Round & Fine, Minimum Wage Non-Compliance in Minneapolis, Workplace Justice Lab@RU, Rutgers University (Nov. 2023) — the ~$90 million annual metro estimate, 32,000 workers, ~$2,700 per worker, the 2021 peak of $144.5 million, the conservative-estimate caveat, and the investigator-to-worker ratio; the study covers minimum-wage violations only and excludes the Wisconsin portion of the metro. Minnesota's 2019 wage theft law and related provisions verified at revisor.mn.gov (criminal theft grading; Minn. Stat. §§ 181.03, 181.032, 177.27, 181.171, and § 181.165 general-contractor liability, enacted 2023). Enforcement record and the Newell prosecution: Minnesota Reformer reporting by Max Nesterak (Nov. 13, 2024; Feb. 4, 2025; Apr. 10, 2025; June 2025 sentencing coverage), including the court's findings in Hennepin County District Court No. 27-CR-23-445 and quotations from then-County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Viking Lakes / Property Maintenance and Construction and Advantage Construction: Minnesota Reformer (Dec. 19, 2023 filing; Apr. 27, 2026 settlement), consent orders as posted, and the Labor Commissioner's statements, including on enforcement and the 2026 immigration surge; one contractor denied violations and said it settled to avoid further litigation. Manhattan District Attorney's Office press release creating the Worker Protection Unit and Stolen Wage Fund (Feb. 16, 2023), including the request for authority to charge wage theft as larceny and the quoted statement of the New York City Comptroller; the office's written testimony to the New York City Council Public Safety Committee (Mar. 18, 2026) for the 2025 indictment results. Office of the Legislative Auditor, evaluation of worker misclassification (Mar. 14, 2024) — the "neither adequate nor coordinated" finding, the Construction Misclassification Unit results, the 22 percent audit figure, and the open-investigation backlog; 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 127, art. 10, for the misclassification law and its appropriation. Minnesota Consumer Fraud Restitution Fund first-year figure per MN House Session Daily (2026).
Where two sources gave slightly different restitution totals in the Newell case ($35,000 at conviction, $37,000 at sentencing), the article uses the conviction figure and says so. A dedicated "Worker Protection Unit" in Hennepin County could not be verified and is not claimed. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.