The New York City comptroller’s office has launched a useful new tool for the public: a database detailing the city’s worst bosses and their various labor abuses, along with an accompanying “Employer Wall of Shame.”
An Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York, photographed in August 2024. (Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
During the golden age of the Village Voice, New York’s genre-defining alt-weekly, journalists Jack Newfield and Tom Robbins compiled annual lists of the city’s worst landlords to run in the paper. The feature’s popularity led Newfield to add a spin-off: New York’s worst judges, featuring mug shots shaming these crooked perverters of justice. The worst judges landed Newfield in legal trouble himself. As Martin Garbus, the paper’s lawyer, told Newfield after publication, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is the bar association is starting an investigation because of your article. The bad news is they are investigating you, not the judges.”
The spirit of that list lives on in New York City today. The city’s public advocate’s office compiles a worst landlords list annually. And we now have a new worst-of list, courtesy of the city’s comptroller’s office: New York’s worst employers.
In addition to the Employer Wall of Shame (inspired by similar tools in New Jersey and Suffolk County, New York), the comptroller’s office debuted a comprehensive labor-violations dashboard. Accessible online, the tool tracks businesses’ violations of a range of workers’ rights and protections, including workplace health and safety violations, wage theft, prevailing wage violations, illegal union busting, discrimination, and harassment.
Screenshot of the Employer Wall of Shame, published by the New York City comptroller’s office.
“When companies steal their workers wages, commit unfair labor practices, or put workers’ lives at risk, the public should be able to clearly see it,” Comptroller Brad Lander said of the new resource. “By launching this dashboard, my office is making it possible to identify bad actors across multiple violations of workplace laws. This tool can serve as a resource for workers, customers, neighbors, and other businesses as they are looking to work with employers who respect workers’ rights.”
Lander is running for mayor, and in addition to evincing a basic commitment to ensuring workers’ legal rights are respected, this is also campaigning. It’s a good sign that he thinks amping up pressure on particularly abusive employers will help him.
Chipotle and Amazon top the inaugural Employer Wall of Shame. As I’ve written time and again, Chipotle is one of the nation’s worst offenders when it comes to treating workers with even a modicum of respect and dignity: in just the past few years, the burrito chain has been fined more than $1 million for illegally using child labor, busting union drives, and seemingly ignoring New York’s new suite of protections for fast-food workers — the Fair Workweek and Paid Safe and Sick Leave laws. (By the way, it is concerning that Starbucks, home to one of the highest-profile union drives in years, just replaced its former CEO with Brian Niccol, who was Chipotle’s CEO, to lead the coffee chain.)
So it’s no surprise the comptroller’s office’s resources, which draw on data from 2020 to 2023, list Chipotle as one of the city’s worst offenders. The company committed the highest number of unfair labor practices (ULPs) in New York City in 2023, with seven violations primarily involving coercion and retaliation against workers trying to unionize. Chipotle also paid over $350,000 to more than nine thousand workers as a result of New York State Department of Labor wage-theft investigations and over $22 million in settlements with the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protections for its failure to adhere to the Fair Workweek and Paid Safe and Sick Leave laws.
A screenshot from the NYC labor-violations dashboard, displaying employers guilty of wage theft.
About Amazon, little needs to be said after years of union busting and misclassifying its vast delivery workforce as independent contractors to evade the costs and risk that comes with employer status (including the risk that your employees will unionize, as Amazon delivery drivers have begun to do). The comptroller’s office finds the company has 153 alleged ULP violations, including the highest number of open and ongoing charges. UPS has the next-highest number of ULPs, but its twenty-two look minuscule by comparison. The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection also investigated Amazon for local labor-law violations and entered into a $222,454 settlement for Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law violations.
Other companies whose lawbreaking has been egregious enough to land them on the list include Uber and Lyft (largest wage-and-hour legal settlements with a prosecutorial agency in 2023, paying $290 million and $38 million respectively, cases that together represent the largest wage-and-hour settlement that the Office of the General Attorney has ever secured), Gucci (largest settlement with the New York City Commision on Human Rights of active companies in 2023, paying $330,000 for a sexual-harassment case concerning a worker who faced nearly five years of physical and verbal harassment from a manager), and Panda Express (agreed to a gigantic settlement with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection last year, paying out $3.45 million in restitution and civil penalties, which impacted over 1,400 workers).
The inaugural wall of shame includes other, less well-known offenders. Planned Companies, which provides building services across multiple states, had the highest number of ULPs in New York City in closed cases from 2020 to 2022, with twenty violations related to interference in union organizing and bad-faith bargaining. The company was also cited for Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations related to a fatal accident, and in 2020, it settled with the Comptroller’s Office for $450,000 for failing to pay prevailing wages to building service employees. Timeless Roofing, a construction company, also makes the cut after receiving back-to-back willful OSHA violations in 2022 and 2023 for failing to provide fall protection at residential construction sites in Queens.
A screenshot from the NYC labor-violations dashboard, displaying companies with workplace-safety violations.
And there are three home health care services, a notoriously underregulated industry, rounding out the list. Fadmo Home Health Care Services Agency, based in Staten Island, was the largest wage-theft offender investigated by the US Department of Labor in New York City in 2023, owing over $1.45 million to twenty-two workers. American Business Institute (ABI), a Queens-based home health care agency, was the largest wage-theft offender across all New York State Department of Labor cases from 2020 to 2022. ABI owed over $14.3 million to 175 workers for failing to pay minimum wage across three investigations. Finally, Smile Home Care Agency Inc (Smile Care), a Brooklyn-based home health care agency, was the largest wage theft offender investigated by the US Department of Labor in 2023, owing over $427,000 to 246 workers.
“This data will be instrumental in union organizing drives, procurement of public goods, and potential impact litigation,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said of the labor-violations dashboard. “It will also be useful to everyday New Yorkers who can now look up companies that they are interested in working with to see if that employer is fair to their employees before accepting a job offer.”
A screenshot of the employer search function of the NYC labor-violations dashboard.
Let’s hope. Appelbaum is but one of many labor leaders and labor-friendly local elected officials praising the new tool. If nothing else, the dashboard and the Employer Hall of Shame are more tools for New York’s working class, which is facing a host of enemies — not only employers, but landlords and yes, judges too. Maybe the comptroller’s office will start wheatpasting faux–mug shots of these executives soon. If not, some enterprising workers could always take the initiative.