NY Manual Worker Pay-Delay Suits Spike After a Century on Books

For nearly 130 years, New York courts rarely saw litigation over a state law outlining how often employers should pay manual laborers. Then an appellate panel told workers they can sue and the floodgates opened.

New York requires employers to pay people who perform such labor weekly, instead of using the two-week pay period common for many jobs. But it wasn’t until an intermediate-level appellate court decision in Vega v. CM & Associates Construction Management LLC, released just over four years ago, that workers realized they had the right to enforce the law themselves rather than rely on the ...