From construction sites to cocktail bars, wage theft in the D.C. area has allowed some employers to cut costs by up to 48 percent while workers struggle to make ends meet.
Gabriel Galvez worked as a foreman and cabinet installer for Maryland-based AMG Installation. He made $25 an hour for some jobs. For others, he and his co-workers were paid a “piece rate” for assembling cabinets: $110 to $140 per kitchen or $15 per kitchen island, according to court records.
The work included large-scale housing construction projects throughout D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, records show, including those where the billion-dollar company Whiting-Turner was the general contractor, with AMG operating as the subcontractor.
Eventually, Galvez and several of his co-workers realized that AMG was withholding hundreds of dollars, and as much as $1,000 from their biweekly paychecks, reducing their hourly rate below the legal minimum wage, according to a lawsuit filed this year. Galvez alleges that AMG withheld as much as $10,000 of his wages altogether.
But when Galvez’s attorney notified AMG that he intended to pursue legal action, the company’s owner, Fidel Antonio Zavala Navarro, threatened to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Galvez’s home. Navarro said the threat “should serve as a warning” to Galvez’s co-workers.
“Indeed, ICE agents showed up at Galvez’s house a few days later and placed him in deportation proceedings,” according to the lawsuit. Neither AMG nor Whiting-Turner responded to requests for comment. In its response in court, Whiting-Turner did not specifically address Galvez’s allegations, but denied responsibility for any wage theft allegations.
Over the past decade, litigation and enforcement actions have led to more than $2.4 million in settlements or awards for wage theft on affordable housing projects in D.C., according to a recent report by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
Persistent exploitation in affordable housing construction “perpetuates a cycle of poverty and makes real the threat of housing insecurity for those without whom there would be no affordable housing,” the report says.
Sarah Bessell, supervisory counsel for WLC, says gaps in enforcement allow unscrupulous employers to exploit their workers. “You need oversight, inspections, reporting, and due diligence. And that’s just not happening at the current moment,” she says.
Galvez and his predominantly Latino co-workers are particularly vulnerable given the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts that target job sites, hardware stores, and basically anyone with brown skin.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in April that Galvez was arrested and placed into deportation proceedings. DHS says Galvez had an outstanding warrant for drug possession and is a “validated MS-13 gang member.” But it’s unclear how the agency tied Galvez to the violent Salvadoran gang, and the ACLU has identified flaws in how the Trump administration determines a person’s gang affiliation. Galvez’s lawsuit indicates he’s currently living in El Salvador.
“The current immigration priorities of this administration, there’s a very real concern that it is going to lead to more worker exploitation and fewer workers coming forward,” Bessell says. “It’s very common to hear some employers making a threat: ‘If you don’t like it, I’m going to call immigration on you.’”
A review of dozens of lawsuits and complaints of wage theft in the D.C. area, including in the construction, restaurant, exotic dancing, and gig industries, shows that wage theft can take many forms.
Failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, worker misclassification, tip theft, denial of paid sick leave, unpaid training shifts, delayed paychecks, and off-the-clock work are common tactics.
Labor exploitation costs workers billions of dollars annually, disproportionately affecting low-wage workers, immigrants, and people of color, according to the WLC report. City Paper reviewed 25 lawsuits alleging wage theft in construction work in D.C.—the workers involved were overwhelmingly Latino.
Despite robust enforcement efforts in D.C., wage theft remains widespread, especially in the construction and restaurant industries. Since 2018, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General has secured more than $30 million in stolen wages and penalties through investigations and lawsuits against employers. That includes $20 million since Attorney General Brian Schwalb took office in 2023.
“They’re not asking for a windfall, they’re asking to be paid for the work they did, that they’re entitled to,” says local employment attorney Gregg Greenberg. “They had responsibilities to pay the bills and they worked for it. … They’re not asking for a handout. They’re asking for what’s theirs.”
Last summer, employees of popular brunch destination Urban Roast discovered their employer’s innovative scheme to recoup operating expenses: stealing employees’ tips.
Founded by brothers Kamal, Anthony, and Joseph Azzouz, the trendy Penn Quarter restaurant won the prestigious Rammy award—known as the Oscars of the D.C. restaurant scene—for best brunch in 2023. The brothers expanded in March 2024 with the opening of the upscale Wharf cocktail bar Zooz Cocktail Garden.
But as business was booming, employees saw their tips drastically reduced—a result of an update to the establishment’s tip policy.
“Starting 8/26, a new policy will be in place where 32% of your tips will be allocated to cover a glass breakage fee and to support the addition of new staff members for the upcoming busy season,” Joseph Azzouz wrote in an August 2024 email. “Please know that this adjustment is necessary to maintain the quality of our service and to ensure we are fully equipped to handle the increased customer volume during this period,” he added.
But the brothers had been stealing tips long before the new policy, according to a lawsuit filed in May by bartender Nathan Nseka. The complaint alleges Nseka’s tips had been reduced by 28 percent more than three years before he filed the lawsuit earlier this year.
Nseka also alleges that he had received no wages at all while working at Zooz Cocktail Garden, and just a portion of tips he says he earned. Employees allegedly were not paid for working overtime or were not paid the required minimum wage, the lawsuit says.
Kamal Azzouz acknowledges that Urban Roast initially deducted 28 percent of tips to cover operating costs, and then increased that percentage to 32 for just a week. But now, employees receive 100 percent of their tips, he tells City Paper.
Azzouz says that the company started paying bussers $20 an hour, which is above D.C.’s minimum wage, during the pandemic to ensure livable wages when tip income was low. He says that while prioritizing higher hourly rates for bussers and barbacks, the restaurant took a percentage of servers’ tips to offset some operational costs.
“Every single person got paid overtime,” he says. “We’re a family-owned business, and we will never hurt anyone.” The lawsuit has been a learning experience, he says, acknowledging, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
The restaurant industry accounts for the largest percentage of OAG settlements (55.9 percent), according to its 2025 Labor Day report. Restaurant workers are uniquely vulnerable to wage theft, Greenberg says. Employers often exploit them by extending work hours without paying overtime, or by withholding portions of their tips. Sometimes, the theft escalates to “truly malicious conduct,” such as refusing to provide employees their final paychecks, he says.
“These folks are working long hours,” Greenberg says. “A lot of the time, I’ll see them being paid on a flat daily or weekly rate, but they’re working 50, 60, 70, hours, and they’re not getting overtime. That’s fairly prevalent in the restaurant industry.”
The U.S. Department of Labor has consistently targeted the restaurant industry for wage theft enforcement actions; they accounted for more than half of all D.C. OAG wage theft recoveries last year. That includes more than $350,000 in back wages for 560 District restaurant workers between Labor Day 2024 and 2025 alone, according to the OAG.
Over at Union Kitchen, a local food accelerator, an eagle-eyed employee noticed a discrepancy in her paycheck that later led to workers to file a collective lawsuit alleging their employer withheld their tips. Union Kitchen then retaliated against them by removing the option for customers to tip when they complained, the lawsuit claims.
Before the lawsuit, Union Kitchen customers could leave tips in a tip jar or via the cashless payment processing system, which were then pooled and distributed among employees. But some were withheld, according to the lawsuit.
Union Kitchen employees had access to sales reports on the Square system, including a breakdown of the tips coming in. They could also view their wages and the amount they were paid in tips in Union Kitchen’s payroll system.
In July 2021, Gabriel Wittes’ co-worker noticed some discrepancies. The system showed she was paid $343.57, but Square indicated she should have received $681.48, according to the lawsuit.
She raised the issue with Union Kitchen’s then-vice president, and months later employees received “bonuses,” but were given no explanation for how they were calculated or if the payments adequately compensated them for their missing tips, the lawsuit says. Union Kitchen CEO Cullen Gilchrist admitted that “mistakes happen, small and large, and we acknowledge them, do our best to fix them,” the employees’ lawsuit says.
But soon after the bonus payments were handed out, employees’ access to Union Kitchen’s sales reports was suddenly revoked, the complaint alleges.
Wittes asked Gilchrist why access was removed on the same day the employees met with him to discuss the payment discrepancies. “I don’t know, coincidence I guess,” Gilchrist said, according to the lawsuit.
Union Kitchen settled the lawsuit for $200,000 earlier this year, which included payments to the employees who joined the case. But according to the workers’ union, at least some of the settlement checks bounced. A representative for Union Kitchen says in an email that’s not true.
In an emailed statement, the Union Kitchen rep, who did not sign their name to the email, declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit because the settlement included a mutual non-disparagement agreement. The representative asserts that the employees’ allegations “were not found to be true,” and admonished City Paper for reporting them.
“Given the settlement, dismissal with prejudice, and non-disparagement commitment binding on the parties, it would be inappropriate to publish an article repeating allegations that were resolved and not sustained,” the email says. “I strongly recommend that Washington City Paper not move forward on this basis.”
But according to the settlement agreement, though the workers agreed to release their claims, “no determination has been made on the merits of the Lawsuit or on any of Settling Plaintiff’s claims.” It also says Union Kitchen denies the allegations and admits no liability.
For D.C.’s approximately 12,200 tipped workers, wage theft can exacerbate poverty. Tipped workers in D.C. receive a subminimum wage of $10 per hour plus tips, which collectively must meet the regular minimum wage of $17.95 per hour. Employers are obligated to cover the difference if an employee doesn’t make enough in tips to reach the legal minimum.
But even at $17.95, these employees would earn slightly more than $37,000 a year if they work 40-hours a week—well below what is considered a living wage in D.C. for a single person. And according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, tipped workers face significantly higher poverty rates than non-tipped workers—7.7 percent vs 2.6 percent.
The tipped minimum wage has been a point of contention for years. Initiative 82 (and Initiative 77 before it) aimed to gradually phase out the tipped minimum wage by 2027. But the D.C. Council significantly watered down the voter-approved law this summer, leaving the tipped wage at $10 through July 2026; the rate will increase every two years until it hits 75 percent of the regular minimum wage in 2034.
Stolen tips were just one of the claims against Antonio Cavasilios’ downtown gentleman’s club, the Cloakroom.
According to the OAG’s March lawsuit, Cavasilios allegedly stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from his women employees, including strippers, servers, bartenders, hosts, and cleaning staff. The complaint also describes a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation.”
Cavasilios is “notorious among Club employees for harassing, groping, and forcibly kissing entertainers,” and promoted a coercive workplace where a manager implemented a quid pro quo system of sexual favors in exchange for sick leave and time off, the OAG alleged.
Cloakroom dancers were forced to forfeit 10 to 20 percent of their tips to other staff under threat of retaliation, the OAG’s lawsuit says. The club also encouraged patrons to use the establishment’s fake currency “Cloakbucks” for tips and then retained 10 percent when dancers and bartenders converted them to cash. The scheme went on for three years.
Another lawsuit filed in 2022 alleges that Cavasilios stole tips from a host making $11 an hour, claiming a portion belonged to the “house.”
Cloakroom attorney Douglas Gansler denies claims of wage theft and dismisses allegations of sexual exploitation, telling City Paper that “those allegations were put into the complaint merely for theatrics.” He asserts there is “literally no evidence to support those allegations,” adding that if they were true, “there would be evidence to support those allegations because there’s cameras strewn throughout the entire establishment.”
Gansler argues that “Cloakbucks” have no inherent value and served as extra money for entertainers, not wages, therefore no wage theft occurred.
“There’s no money that’s being forfeited,” he says. “There’s no retaliation that’s occurring, and there’s no deception that’s occurring.”
Wage theft lawsuits from exotic dancers are the “canary in the coal mine,” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign law professor Michael LeRoy tells the New York Times. They’ve provided a clear and early warning about the widespread problem of worker misclassification for gig workers.
A form of payroll fraud, employee misclassification is when an employer labels a worker as an independent contractor even though the employer controls all aspects of their work.
“If they’re misclassified as contractors, no one has paid into Social Security and all the different benefits that they’d be entitled to if they lost their job, like unemployment,” Greenberg says.
As exotic dancers consistently win wage theft cases, Greenberg says he’s seen some clubs make changes in how they classify workers. Others take a different approach by adding arbitration agreements to their workers’ contracts to prevent collective lawsuits.
“It’s more profitable to continue to break the law,” Greenberg says. “They don’t fix it. They just make it harder for classes of individuals to get redress.”
Yet tip theft and misclassification continue to plague gig workers. In its largest wage theft settlement to date, in February the OAG settled a lawsuit with Amazon for almost $4 million over allegations that the online retail giant stole tips from delivery drivers. Although Amazon had previously made restitution to the drivers, Schwalb notes that “it’s not sufficient, after being caught, to simply give back the ill-gotten gains. Rather, there must be meaningful consequences to deter misconduct from happening in the first place.”
Wage theft has allowed District construction contractors to cut labor costs by between 16 and 48 percent, according to a 2019 study from the OAG.
“There’s not really a single affordable housing project in D.C. that, if you go onto that site, there’s no wage theft happening,” says Greg Akerman, president of the Baltimore/DC-Metro Building Trades Council. “It’s a part of the business model. And it goes up to the developer.”
The report from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee highlights more than 30 wage theft cases between 2013 and 2024 across 21 affordable housing projects in D.C. Wage theft and instances of worker misclassification were widespread, the report found, annually costing workers an average of $15,779.
In 75 percent of the cases, contractors settled with their workers, a figure that suggests fending off enforcement is often seen as a “cost of doing business” for some repeat offenders, according to the WLC report.
Four companies listed in the report—Whiting-Turner Contracting Company, Hamel Builders, CBG Building Company, and Gilbane—have faced three or more lawsuits for some form of wage theft.
Whiting-Turner, the general contractor in Galvez’s case, has been sued for wage theft at the sprawling City Ridge complex in Upper Northwest. In 2024, the OAG sued the company, its subcontractor W.G./Welch Mechanical Contractors, and Welch’s labor broker subcontractors for allegedly misclassifying HVAC, plumbing, and sheet metal installers as independent contractors.
The use of labor brokers—third-party intermediaries who supply workers for construction projects with multiple layers of subcontractors—is often an indicator of wage theft, Akerman says.
General contractors such as Whiting-Turner have tried to shift blame for alleged wage theft on their construction projects onto their subcontractors, according to their responses to various legal complaints. But as the overseers of a given project, they share responsibility for protecting workers, according to the WLC report.
A contract between Whiting-Turner and a subcontractor at City Ridge, for example, lays out extensive reporting requirements, including daily work and payroll records. But the responsibility to pay overtime is borne by the subcontractor, according to the contract, potentially contributing to the alleged misclassification of employees as independent contractors in order to avoid paying overtime.
In another wage theft lawsuit filed this year against Whiting-Turner and its subcontractor Krick Plumbing and Heating, HVAC installers and plumbers allege they were compelled to work more than 40 hours per week without overtime pay while working on the EucKal, a publicly funded affordable housing project in Adams Morgan, costing $1.3 million per unit.
In its request for funding, the developer Jubilee Housing assured the DC Housing Finance Agency that its contract for the EucKal project included enough extra funds to cover unexpected construction costs.
But HVAC technicians, whose required wage rates were $44.37 per hour plus $21.33 per hour in benefits, were either paid significantly below the mandated rates, or received no pay at all, according to the lawsuit. Plumbers on the project were similarly entitled to $48.00 per hour plus $20.75 per hour in benefits, but also received lower wages than legally required, the lawsuit says.
“The Project was designed ‘to invest in initiatives that provide access to prosperity for residents with fewer financial resources,’” according to the HVAC installers’ complaint. “Ironically, the companies Plaintiffs worked for cheated them out of their wages due under DC law, which exacerbated Plaintiffs’ own financial situations while they built affordable housing for others.”
The case was settled this summer.
Mark Hanna, a labor and employment lawyer, says that contractors on affordable housing projects often fail to pay workers the required “prevailing wage,” which is the minimum hourly wage that a contractor must pay workers on a publicly funded construction project. “These are life altering amounts of money that they’re not being paid,” he says.
The WLC report urges stronger enforcement, prosecution, and penalties to combat wage theft. It also calls for an independent audit of D.C.’s Housing Production Trust Fund, the District’s primary source of money for affordable housing construction, as well as a prohibition on repeat wage theft offenders from working on affordable housing projects.
“The psychological impacts of wage theft and worker exploitation just compound over the years,” Bessell says. “Wage theft just really leads to precarity in life and the inability to pay bills, the inability to pay rent.”