Crime Bosses: Here are the 10 Worst Employers in NYC
Yup, Amazon made NYC Comptroller Brad Lander’s “Wall of Shame.”
By Steve Wishnia
Most of the city’s ten worst labor-law violators listed by Comptroller Brad Lander’s office Sept. 3 come from typical categories of low-wage employers: tech giants Amazon and DoorDash, nonunion construction contractors, and home health-care agencies and nursing homes.
The anti-awards were given for “egregious violations in ten categories including wrongful termination, prevailing wage violations, wage theft, and willful violations of workplace safety laws,” the comptroller’s office said. They were based on information compiled by its Bureau of Labor Law and Workers Rights.
Amazon made the list for having 180 open unfair-labor-practice complaints against it with the National Labor Relations Board, far more than any other employer in the city from 2020 to 2024. The complaints involved illegal interference in union organizing, discrimination against employees for engaging in union activities, and bad-faith bargaining. About two-thirds were filed by the Amazon Labor Union and the Teamsters, which the ALU is affiliated with.
Amazon has refused to reach a contract with ALU Local 1 since 2022, when workers at the company’s JFK8 warehouse and shipping center on Staten Island voted to join the union. The NLRB is currently crippled by Donald Trump having defied federal law by firing one of its five members, leaving the agency without a quorum to make decisions in disputed cases.
The food-delivery app company DoorDash made the list for failing to pay workers every week, as required by a 2022 city law covering food-delivery workers classified as independent contractors. From 2023 to the end of 2024, it settled 17 such cases with the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and agreed to pay more than $24,000 in restitution.
Two Brooklyn-based home health-care agencies, Edison Home Health Care and Preferred Home Healthcare, made the list jointly for failing to pay more than 25,000 workers legally required benefits. According to state Attorney General Letitia James’ office, they siphoned off Medicaid funds earmarked for benefits to buy a type of business insurance that paid them and their owners millions of dollars in dividends. In a September 2024 settlement, they agreed to pay $7.5 million in back wages to the workers and $9.75 million to the state and federal Medicaid programs.
Another Brooklyn-based home-care agency, Four Seasons, was cited for discrimination for taking black and Latina aides off jobs where the patient had demanded a caretaker of a different race.
The Crown Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation nursing home in Brooklyn owed workers more unpaid wages than any other in the city in 2024, according to the state Department of Labor. It agreed to pay back $468,000. In 2021, it settled a suit filed by a nurse who charged that she’d been cheated out of almost $200,000 because it refused to pay extra for overtime.
Three construction contractors made the list. NY Developers & Management was the only contractor to receive the city Department of Buildings’ most severe sanction, “Aggravated II” penalties, in both 2023 and 2024. It was fined $50,000 for failing to institute safety measures after two workers were injured on a Brooklyn job site. There have been numerous other injuries on its jobs over the past five years, according to department records.
Zito Roofing, a Brooklyn-based company, was cited by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in February 2024 for willfully failing to give workers protection such as harnesses and guardrails on a job where they were 30 feet above the sidewalk. In September 2024, it reached an informal settlement with OSHA that lowered its fines from $37,000 to $26,000.
Montis Construction, a carpentry subcontractor on a Bronx bus depot, was barred from bidding on city contracts for five years in March 2024 for falsifying payroll records: It had claimed it was paying the required prevailing wage of $25.38 an hour, when it was actually paying $15 in cash with no benefits.
All three are nonunion, except possibly for Montis on some jobs, according to the comptroller’s office.
CAVA, a national Mediterranean-food chain with more than a dozen locations in the city, made the list for violating “all aspects” of the city’s 2017 Fair Workweek law, including irregular scheduling and firing workers or cutting their hours without just cause. It was required to pay over $1.4 million in restitution and civil penalties to 1,168 workers last year.
Alpha Wave Global was the highest-end employer on the list. The global investment company agreed to pay $85,000 to a worker who was fired after complaining about racial and sexual-orientation discrimination—the largest settlement the city Human Rights Commission reached last year.
These ten represent only employers who got caught. “Far too often unscrupulous employers get away with violating labor laws and the rights of their employees, who are just trying to make ends meet and support their families. Many times, even if they are fined, there is no public record of these transgressions,” Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, said in a statement released by the comptroller’s office.