Wage theft often goes unpunished despite state systems meant to combat it

In this story, I sent FOIA requests to nearly every state labor department, asking for internal data from the departments' wage theft enforcement programs. I gathered over 650,000 individual wage-theft complaints spanning more than a decade, which I then cleaned, standardized, and merged into a unified national database using Python — consolidating key fields like claimed, assessed, and recovered amounts, as well as case outcomes.

I flagged which cases were ruled in workers’ favor and calculated recovery rates and median case durations (often six months to over a year). We interviewed affected workers, nonprofit advocates, and labor officials across multiple states and at the federal level. The combination of quantitative metrics with on-the-ground narratives revealed systemic failures in enforcement, long delays, and poor recovery outcomes for many victims.