New York City workers are protected against workplace exploitation by local, state, and federal laws. Too often, employers skirt those laws by exposing workers to unsafe conditions, by committing wage theft, through discrimination, or by engaging in illegal anti-union activity. The Comptroller’s Office is a municipal agency tasked with enforcing prevailing and living wage laws in New York City. The office also endeavors to protect workers’ rights through legislative, policy, procurement, and corporate shareholder engagement initiatives. Protecting workers’ rights requires strong enforcement of labor laws and a commitment to transparency so that workers, advocates, and contracting entities can hold employers accountable.
The Comptroller’s Employer Violations Dashboard is the first-ever transparency and accountability tool to track and analyze workplace violations in the five boroughs across federal, state, and city government enforcement agencies. Each section of the dashboard covers a key labor protection, providing a brief explanation of the laws and agencies involved and, most notably, highlighting the employers with the most significant violations based on metrics specific to each section.
The Office of the New York City Comptroller has created this dashboard to advance corporate accountability, protect taxpayers, empower workers, and create a level playing field for responsible employers. It is designed to be a transparent and accessible resource for the public — from everyday New Yorkers curious about the business on their block, to workers searching for their next job, to organizers shining a light on exploitative employers, to agency procurement officers seeking to avoid doing business with contractors who violate the law.
What Labor Protections are Included in this Dashboard?
Workers in New York City have some of the strongest labor protections in the country. Those protections are enforced by a network of enforcement agencies, including federal agencies, the New York State Department of Labor, the New York State Attorney General, the city’s five District Attorneys, and City agencies, including the Office of the New York City Comptroller. The worker protection laws included in this Dashboard are:
- Safe and Healthy Workplaces
- Wages for All Hours Worked
- Worker Organizing and Unionization Free from Illegal Interference
- Workplaces Free of Discrimination and Harassment
- Paid Safe and Sick Leave
- Fair Work Weeks for Fast Food, Retail, and Utility Safety Workers
- Prevailing Wages on Public Works
Notes on the Dashboard’s Parameters
A full list of violations, which includes employers not listed on the Dashboard as well as additional information for each violation, can be accessed by downloading the full dataset (See Resources). Each section includes data from 2023, the most recent full year, and data from the previous three years, 2020 – 2022.
All the violations tracked in the Employer Violations Dashboard took place within New York City and involved private sector employers (though some private employers, such as those found to have violated prevailing wage laws, performed work under public agency contracts). The data in this dashboard primarily capture violations investigated by government agencies, and therefore do not capture the full extent of all workplace violations, as many violations go unreported for a multitude of reasons, including workers’ lack of knowledge of their rights or how to report violations, fear of retaliation, and language barriers. Additionally, some violations are pursued through private litigation.