Prevailing Wage Lawyer

Shapiro Haber & Urmy LLP is interested in hearing from employees who believe that their employer is violating the prevailing wage laws.  A “prevailing wage” is an hourly rate of pay that a government requires an employer to pay employees performing certain kinds of work.  Typically, the employer is a government contractor and the employee is doing a particular kind of work for a state or municipal government.  That is not always the case.  When admitting certain workers on visas to the United States, the federal government sometimes requires an employer to pay a certain minimum hourly wage so that the presence of the foreign worker does not depress wages for United States employees.  The firm has handled both types of prevailing wage cases.

Typical Prevailing Wage Law Violations

For example, the firm handled a prevailing wage case brought on behalf of garbage truck drivers (and their helpers) who performed municipal trash removal services for various Massachusetts municipalities.  The employer, Waste Management of Massachusetts, Inc., had claimed it was legal to pay the employees their hourly prevailing wage rate even for overtime work hours.  However, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts disagreed and ruled that the employees were entitled to receive overtime pay at time-and-one-half their hourly prevailing wage rate when working overtime hours. 

Other types of prevailing wage violations that are common include: classifying a particular employee in some general category of work, such as “laborer,” when in fact the employee performs more specialized work that requires payment at a higher prevailing wage rate; or, paying the employees at a prevailing wage rate established in a previous year that is out of date and the current prevailing wage rate is higher.

Shapiro Haber & Urmy LLP Has Achieved Notable Success in Prevailing Wage Cases

The truck driver case against Waste Management of Massachusetts ultimately settled for $7 million dollars.  At the court hearing to address whether to approve the settlement, the lawyer for Waste Management noted that Shapiro Haber & Urmy LLP had proven to be an unusually effective adversary, noting that his firm defends “more than 300 active class action cases” at any given time and “the quality of the lawyering by [Shapiro Haber & Urmy LLP] and the result they got is very much on the high end of the spectrum.” 

If you are looking for a prevailing wage attorney, we encourage you to contact Attorney Ian J. McLoughlin or Thomas V. Urmy, Jr., or to call us at (617) 439-3939.

Alternately, you may Click here to contact us through our website.