As 2015 draws to a close, here is a look at some of the emerging employment law issues on the horizon in 2016 affecting Philadelphians. Without further ado, here is the list.

WAGE THEFT

This column has written about wage theft in the past and it appears to be a problem that is not going away. According to the website for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, wage theft is the practice of underpaying or failing to pay workers money that they are legally owed. Wage theft comes in many forms—some employers misclassify their workers and fail to pay them overtime, others pay at rates below the minimum or promised wage, and other employers simply fail to pay their workers for all of their hours. In Philadelphia alone it has been reported that in any given work week there are as many as 93,000 instances of wage theft, including overtime violations, shorting hours, and minimum wage violations. Victims of wage theft are estimated to lose 15 percent or more of their paychecks. Throughout the state, employees lose anywhere from $19 million to $32 million each week due to wage theft. (See June report titled “Shortchanged: How Wage Theft Harms Pennsylvania’s Workers and Economy,” prepared by the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law).

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