Employers owed Oklahoma workers at least $9.7 million in unpaid wages and penalties over the past four and a half years, according to an analysis of state and federal data by The Frontier.

The Oklahoma Department of Labor ordered companies to pay nearly $6.9 million in unpaid wages and penalties between January 2020 and September 2024, while the U.S. Department of Labor found companies in Oklahoma were on the hook for $2.8 million in back wages and penalties during that same period. The federal agency also recently announced that it is searching for more than 1,600 workers in Oklahoma who might not be aware they are owed a combined $1.3 million collected by the department from employers for wage violations.

The Oklahoma Department of Labor typically handles cases where an employer failed to pay promised wages to a worker, while the U.S. Department of Labor has jurisdiction over violations of minimum wage and overtime pay laws.

“The economic impact of wages being paid cannot be understated,” said David Bryan, assistant general counsel and director of the Oklahoma Department of Labor’s employment standards division. “Workers receiving their wages allow them to pay for rent and utilities, feed their children and provide for their families. This circulation of income further strengthens and grows our state’s economy. Wages paid to workers benefit all Oklahomans.”

The Oklahoma Department of Labor has substantiated about a third of the 2,474 wage cases since 2020 and the employer was ordered to pay the back wages.

India Palace, an Indian restaurant in Tulsa, owed the most wages to Oklahoma workers, according to the data. The U.S. Department of Labor in April 2023 ordered the restaurant to pay $510,897 to 23 workers for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as penalties.

Guldeep Singh, owner of India Palace, told The Frontier that an expensive paperwork issue was the problem. Singh said an outside bookkeeper for the restaurant lumped restaurant servers’ base pay with tips from customers in one of the business’s quarterly federal tax records. The document spurred the U.S. Department of Labor to open an inquiry when it appeared that servers were not receiving their tips. The agency later determined that the restaurant would have to pay workers the tips they would have been owed. Singh said the money had already been paid to workers and had been reported as part of their base pay.

Singh said he had to take out a business loan to pay workers. Though Singh said he wishes there was an avenue with the Department of Labor to fix errors in business tax documents after an investigation has been opened, he decided to let the issue go since it was his employees who got the money.

“As long as my employees get it, I’m still happy,” Singh said. “If the government was taking it, I would go ahead and do something.”

The issue has since been resolved, Singh said.

But other workers for different employers filed claims after their employers abruptly stopped paying them.

Shelby Weston, a former employee for Hometown Lenders, Inc., said he and other workers at one of the Oklahoma branches of the company suddenly found themselves not being paid for their work and customer mortgage applications nearly fell through.

Hometown Lenders, a now-defunct Alabama-based mortgage lender with branches across the country, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year, after several lawsuits from creditors. The bankruptcy case is ongoing. Weston said downturns in the housing market contributed to the company’s sudden collapse.

Hometown Lenders owed the second largest amount of  unpaid wages in Oklahoma since 2020.The Oklahoma Department of Labor found in October 2023 that the company owed nine employees $507,377 in unpaid wages.

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“It was a bad situation,” Weston said. “‘Hey, you’re not getting paid. See you later.’ As soon as that happened, as the branch manager, I had to make a move to a different bank to get my people taken care of.”

Weston said his team was able to reroute mortgage applicants who had already been approved for a mortgage from Hometown Lenders to other banks, but it was no easy feat.

“I had so many loans in the pipelines,” Weston said. “I don’t think I ate for two weeks. We got them all closed in 7-10 days.”

Weston said he and many other Hometown Lender employees are still waiting to be made whole, but the company’s bankruptcy case has stalled the process.

“They owed us a lot of money, still owe us a lot of money. They owe so many people, they let it get way too bad. It was a bad deal. We all lost a lot of money,” Weston said. “There was nothing you could do. When companies go bankrupt, there’s not a lot you can do. It’s sad. You’ve got to live and learn.”

An attorney representing Hometown Lenders in its Alabama bankruptcy case did not return a phone message from The Frontier.

In other wage cases, an employer may renege on a deal to pay employees extra for work performed.

The Oklahoma Department of Labor issued a judgement in October 2023 against McAlester-based home health agency Traditions Homecare on a claim from an employee who said he was owed $160,000 after the company’s co-owner promised him a bonus to help wind down the business. The company’s other co-owner disagreed with that decision and the employee, David Pratt, filed a claim with the state Department of Labor.

The Department of Labor sided with Pratt and added a $160,000 penalty on top of the $160,000 in unpaid wages after finding the violation was wilful. Traditions Homecare has filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Department of Labor to overturn that decision. The lawsuit is ongoing. 

An attorney representing Traditions Homecare in its lawsuit seeking to overturn the Department of Labor’s determination did not return a phone message from The Frontier, but in court filings the company states the co-owner who told Pratt he would get a percentage of the money from selling the business was not authorized to do so.

Pratt said he decided to first file a wage claim with the Oklahoma Department of Labor, rather than hiring an attorney to file a lawsuit, in hopes of avoiding an expensive legal case.

“The companies have plenty of recourse to fight it if they want to” Pratt said. “At the same time, I haven’t had to spend one legal dime on it because the Department of Labor will defend their decision.”

Though filing a claim with the labor department rather than filing suit may be the least expensive way for an employee to get their owed wages, it’s not always the right decision, and depends heavily on what type of wage claim is being filed, said Steven Hickman, a Tulsa attorney who has worked in labor and employment law for more than 40 years.

Hickman said his office usually recommends that workers who have not been paid their regular wages file a claim with the state department of labor before filing a lawsuit. But workers who are owed unpaid overtime wages should probably file a lawsuit, he said.

For overtime violations with the U.S. Department of Labor, the employee can only go back two years and in some cases three, for owed wages. An employer can essentially run out the clock on those claims if it can delay the case. But when a lawsuit is filed, it stops that clock, Hickman said.

“If you hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit, the time on the statute of limitations stops running the day you file your lawsuit,” Hickman said.

Yet, even in state-level wage claim cases, the worker may eventually need an attorney to collect what is owed to them.

A dozen workers at the Oklahoma-based manufacturer American Foundry Group, filed claims for unpaid wages with the Oklahoma Department of Labor in March 2023. Workers at the company’s Muskogee plant began having their paychecks bounce in 2022, according to a report in the Muskogee Phoenix. Some filed only wage claims, while others also joined together to file a lawsuit. A phone message from The Frontier to the company’s attorney in the case was not returned, but in court filings, the company denies the worker’s allegations. A trial in the case is scheduled for March 3.

One American Foundry worker, who asked not to be named since they still work there, said the lack of pay caused financial hardships for many of the workers, and the financial strain the company was going through manifested not only with bouncing paychecks, but vendors who had not been paid. The company’s Muskogee site was also closed shortly after the paychecks began bouncing.

The worker said the American Foundry owners “are not bad people. They were in a bad spot and made some really bad choices,” the worker said. 

The worker has since been made whole by the company, but others who were not paid have not.

“It’s very stressful,” the worker said. “Nobody is out there working for fun, let’s be honest. Anytime someone goes without wage while they’re doing the work, it’s going to be a process you have to work through and decide personally what you can accept and what you can’t. It was ‘when am I going to run out of money and say I can’t do this anymore?’ My personal breaking point turned out to be four months.”

The biggest surprise in the wage claim process, the worker said, came after the Department of Labor determined that back wages were owed — at that point, it is up to the worker to actually collect the money.

“There’s not a guarantee that you’re going to get any kind of payment. All they’re doing is saying ‘yes, the company owes you X amount of money,’” the American Foundry worker said. “I was really caught off guard when they said ‘Ok, here’s the letter verifying what the company owes you. Now it’s up to you to go and get it.’”

Workers still sometimes need an attorney to collect wages even after a favorable decision from the Oklahoma Department of Labor, said Hickman, who is representing many of the employees who filed a lawsuit against American Foundry.

“Working at collecting it sometimes is a hard thing, because sometimes these companies are out of business, or you’ve got to determine how to garnish their money,” Hickman said.

In some cases, unpaid wages have already been collected from employers, but the workers may have moved to another job and not know they have money waiting for them, said Michael Speer, director for the U.S. Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division in Oklahoma.

“What has happened is we've completed some investigations, the employer has paid in the money to us, and there are some employees on some of those investigations that we were unable to locate,” Speer said. “They moved away, or we've lost contact with them, and we got bad telephone numbers, bad addresses.”

Speer said workers who believe they may be owed money can go to the department’s online Workers Owed Wages site, which is available in both English and Spanish. Workers can enter their identifying information on the website to see if the department is holding money owed to them.