with proactive inspections and penalties<\/a> for violators sharply declining in recent years\u00a0\u2014 labour experts and employment lawyers say this amount is just a drop in the bucket of wage theft claims.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is a massive crisis happening in plain sight,\u201d said Ella Bedard, a staff lawyer with the Workers\u2019 Action Centre, who helped author the report. \u201cThe numbers in the report are staggering.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ojeda\u2019s case launches a Star series examining how Ontario\u2019s enforcement system has allowed wage theft to flourish\u00a0\u2014 from employers who disappear behind shell companies to franchises that evade accountability\u00a0\u2014 leaving workers, from refugees to citizens, fighting for money they may never see.<\/p>\n
The 29-year-old came to Canada in 2020 hoping to get an education and earn money to help cover his mother\u2019s cancer treatment in Mexico. Having studied mechatronics engineering in his home country, he found a job through Kijiji as a CNC machine programmer, producing cabinets and millwork.\u00a0He was hired by a man named Marcin Kozuck and said he often worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week with no breaks.<\/p>\n
Ojeda said his employer had verbally agreed to pay him $20 an hour, but payments started arriving late and his boss blamed client payment issues and delayed deposits. He said he wouldn\u2019t get paid for several weeks at a time.<\/p>\n
As the situation worsened Ojeda began pleading for partial payments from his employer just to cover food and rent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really shocking\u00a0\u2014 living in Mexico you hear in a country like … Canada, there\u2019s no corruption there,\u201d Ojeda said. \u201cBut living in this situation, it was like a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ojeda](\"data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAQAAAADCAQAAAAe\/WZNAAAAEElEQVR42mM8U88ABowYDABAxQPltt5zqAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==\")
<\/p>\n
Alberto Ojeda said that as the wage situation worsened he began pleading for partial payments from his employer just to cover food and rent.<\/p>\n
Richard Lautens\/Toronto Star<\/p>\n
Ontario\u2019s wage recovery flaws<\/p>\n
Ojeda\u2019s case highlights the limits of Ontario\u2019s wage recovery system, which advocates say has struggled to keep pace with modern employment practices as fines, workplace inspections and enforcement have declined over the past decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen there is a low likelihood of detection and the penalties for noncompliance are minimal, the incentive to commit wage theft is high,\u201d the Wokers\u2019 Action Centre report says.<\/p>\n
Employer prosecutions have plummeted in recent years, according to government data.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the Ministry of Labour initiated only 12 Part III Prosecutions\u00a0\u2014 a type of penalty with the most potential to deter employers from violating employment standards because it can result in a hefty fine or even jail time\u00a0\u2014\u00a0down 85 per cent from 2017 despite widespread non-compliance with orders to pay.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, proactive enforcement has also declined.<\/p>\n
Employment standards inspections deal with basic workplace issues such as unpaid wages and overtime. Proactive inspections, which are initiated at the behest of the ministry, are far more effective at recovering unpaid wages, including public holiday pay and overtime, than when individual workers file complaints, according to the ministry\u2019s own data.<\/p>\n
Workplace inspections started to plummet before the pandemic and are 77 per cent lower than they were around seven years ago, government data shows. \u00a0<\/p>\n
At the same time, the number of permanent employment standards officers has decreased. In 2023, only 115 officers were working across the province, down from 209 in 2018, even as Ontario\u2019s workforce grew by 16 per cent since 2014.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Labour declined to respond to inquiries on why enforcement has eroded in recent years and what is being done to hold employers accountable and prevent increasing incidents of wage theft. Questions instead were referred to the Ministry of Finance,\u00a0which did not get back to the Star before publication.<\/p>\n
There is also a deeper structural problem contributing to rampant wage theft in the province, according to Bedard: Ontario\u2019s labour laws have not kept pace with changing business practices and the rise of multi-party employment relationships.<\/p>\n
Rather than the traditional direct employer-to-employee relationship, today\u2019s companies are increasingly adopting business structures that limit their liability for the employees who make their products or provide their services, relying on strategies such as subcontracting, franchising, third-party management or misclassification of employees.<\/p>\n
These structures can obscure who is legally liable for unpaid wages.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmployers try to hide behind the corporate veil to avoid responsibility,\u201d Bedard said.<\/p>\n
Ojeda\u2019s case shows how that ambiguity can play out when workers try to recover their wages.<\/p>\n
The Labour Ministry\u2019s case<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Labour\u2019s employment standards officer determined that a company called Pheno Design, a sole proprietorship owned by Matylda Bukaczewska, was \u201cliable for all wages owed to\u201d Ojeda.<\/p>\n
The ministry\u2019s ruling cited evidence including a text message showing a $40,000 cheque the employer had received from a client, along with a promise to pay Ojeda. The cheque was made out to Pheno Design.<\/p>\n
Bukaczewska, using a legal representative, denied Ojeda had been employed by her company, saying he was hired by Marcin Kozuck and not Pheno Design.<\/p>\n
But the employment standards officer noted that evidence showed emails and messages between Ojeda and Kozuck had originated from Bukaczewska\u2019s accounts. The officer also reported that the employer\u2019s legal representative confirmed\u00a0Kozuck and\u00a0Bukaczewska were spouses but reported that the representative said they did not have any part in each other\u2019s business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth these pieces of evidence directly contradict the employer\u2019s statements,\u201d the officer said in the report.<\/p>\n
The employer also claimed Ojeda only worked part time and was paid for all hours worked.<\/p>\n
Ojeda provided the ministry with a record of hours worked, text messages and emails that \u201cshowed he worked full-time hours, directly contradicting the employer\u2019s statement,\u201d the officer said.<\/p>\n
In an email to the Star, responding to inquiries about Ojeda\u2019s case and his treatment as an employee, Bukaczewska said: \u201cWe dispute the validity of the entire Ministry of Labour investigation, which is based on faulty assumptions and on ignoring facts in favour of the appellant.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c<\/strong>Pheno Design had never employed (Ojeda); he was hired by Marcin,\u201d she said. Kozuck and Bukaczewska each said they would provide documents that contradicted Ojeda\u2019s versions of events and the ministry\u2019s findings, but nothing had been provided to the Star by time of publication.<\/p>\nA decision from the Ontario Labour Relations Board, seen by the Star, showed that the employer made multiple attempts to seek reconsideration of the ruling, but failed to meet requirements to have those applications heard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wage theft becoming \u2018normalized\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\nDeena Ladd, who heads the Toronto-based Workers\u2019 Action Centre, said these cases have become all too frequent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more this gets normalized, the more it becomes common in every workplace,\u201d Ladd said.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the Workers\u2019 Action Centre conducted a survey of 513 low-wage workers\u00a0\u2014\u00a0many of whom are immigrants or have precarious immigration status \u2014\u00a0and found that 60 per cent had experienced at least one pay-related violation and 62 per cent said they never received overtime pay or time off in lieu of overtime pay.<\/p>\n
Some 28 per cent of the workers surveyed\u00a0faced wage theft of less than $500, while more than 20 per cent of workers experienced wage theft of over $5,000.<\/p>\n
The lack of enforcement sends a message to unscrupulous employers \u201cthat it\u2019s OK to do this because you won\u2019t get caught and you won\u2019t be held accountable for the violations of law,\u201d Ladd said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the same time workers, who face potential retaliation from employers, including the loss of their jobs, are discouraged from speaking out with no effective way to complain and declining workplace inspections.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis sends a message to workers that they need to keep their mouths shut,\u201d Ladd said. \u201cEven if you say something, it\u2019s going to be very difficult for you to get your wages back. So why bother?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alberto Ojeda is still waiting for more than $31,000 a Toronto employer owes him \u2014 wages the provincial…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":313869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,420,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-314568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115397721031969331","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}