City council to consider beefed-up wage theft penalties

The city of El Paso is continuing to crack down on employers who don’t pay employees what they’re owed by possibly putting new, tougher penalties in place. An expanded ordinance presented Tuesday would keep businesses from getting permits inside the city limits.

Proponents like city Rep. Lily Limon have said the parts of the ordinance coming up would give the the real force or “bite” they’ve been asking for, possibly impacting the ability of an employer found guilty of wage theft to do business in El Paso in general.

After weeks of review by city staff and legal counsel, the city-issued permits and licenses that could be included are licenses for food and food-handling businesses, laundries, secondhand goods stores, vendors and solicitors, flea markets and contractors.

But what will actually be put into place is still up for debate.

“There’s some big problems with those,” said city Rep. Michiel Noe. “I have some serious concerns on whether or not the city can legally or even ethically do anything like that. And so, you know, we sent it back to legal to look at if there are any permits we really can’t do that with.”

The discussion and possible action for the expanded penalties is scheduled for the next City Council meeting on July 28.

As ABC-7 first reported last month, El Paso was one of the first cities in the country to have an ordinance addressing wage theft, or when an employer doesn’t pay its employees. The current ordinance creates a database that will track information about businesses with judgments against them for wage theft in the city. The ordinance also allows the city to terminate contracts and block new city contracts with the employer for five years after such a ruling.

“Too many companies think they can just forget about paying them and nobody’s going to do anything about it,” said city Rep. Larry Romero when the original ordinance was passed in June. “Well this is a way for us to sit there and say ‘No, if you want to do business with the city, if you want to get permits and licenses with the city, you better make sure that nobody’s come after you for not paying what you should be paying.'”