Coakley
BOSTON (Legal Newsline) - Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley announced on Monday that a Wilmington, Mass., construction company and its owner have been ordered to pay restitution and fines for labor violations.
RPM Services Inc. and R. Humphrey, the company's owner, must pay more than $472,000 in restitution and fines for allegedly failing to pay the prevailing wage, misclassifying workers as independent contractors and numerous other wage violations.
"All workers on public construction projects in the state deserve to be paid what they are rightfully owed under the law," Coakley said. "Any employer that has a state or municipal contract must abide by the rules, which includes properly classifying their employees in their records."
Humphrey and RPM allegedly failed to pay more than $104,000 in prevailing wages to 11 employees at 16 public construction projects and failed to pay $105,000 in wages to 13 employees. RPM performs street sweeping, construction work and paving on both private and public projects.
Coakley alleges that Humphrey willfully failed to pay over $4,500 in overtime to five employees and willfully misclassified two employees as independent contractors. Humphrey and RPM have been ordered to pay more than $213,000 in restitution to the affected employees.
Humphrey also allegedly willfully failed to submit true and accurate certified payroll records to the awarding authorities, failed to submit any certified payroll records to the awarding authorities at 15 projects and failed to keep true and accurate payroll records.
Additionally, Humphrey allegedly failed to furnish certified payroll records to Coakley's office for inspection. Coakley's office has cited Humphrey and RPM a total of $257,500 in fines for the multiple alleged record keeping and wage violations.
Coakley alleges that Humphrey and RPM failed to pay the prevailing wage rate to their employees for work performed on public construction jobs from May 2007 through October 2009.
In addition, Coakley alleges that Humphrey and RPM did not pay employees for all hours worked or for overtime and did not issue pay stubs to any employees who received additional company checks for certain hours worked from October 2006 to October 2009. Coakley also alleges that Humphrey and his company committed additional record keeping violations.