Housing Projects No Home for Fraud
As any project manager knows, a project is never really yours and yours alone. Its success depends on the decisions of all the people you work with. A manager’s personal integrity doesn’t really mean anything to the worker denied of his or her rights by a subcontractor.
Consider your own practice and think about whose needs you are most in touch with on a daily basis. Is pressure to save money that is making supervisors make dubious choices? Has a desire for profit encouraged you to trust some decisions to someone you don’t really trust to be equitable to others?
Time to reflect on the policies of one’s workplace is a difficult thing to pencil into your schedule, but– oh!– what losses await for you, if you don’t make the time!
The U.S. Department of Labor has found another violator of labor regulations. The Department taken legal action to seek debarment of Lettire Construction Corp., a New York City general contractor, and Nicholas Lettire, president of the company, from working on future federally funded contracts for a period of three years.
The company and its officials willfully violated wage, benefit, certified payroll and other requirements while working on the federally funded Ciena Project on East 100th Street, as well as the Hobbs Court Project on 102nd Street, both in Manhattan. Both projects are part of the Metro North Rehabilitation Redevelopment Program and are funded in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The investigation found that Lettire Construction had failed to adequately monitor its lower tier subcontractors to ensure their compliance with prevailing wage and overtime requirements. Following an investigation of 23 of the company’s subcontractors, the Wage and Hour Division determined that 16 were in violation of either prevailing wage or overtime laws, or both. The investigation also found “under-bidding” by at least one second-tier subcontractor and that Lettire Construction failed to post required wage decisions at the worksite for employees to view. As a result of these violations, approximately 290 employees of these subcontractors were found to be due a total of about $1.4 million in back wages.
Many staffing and recruitment firms use subcontractors to outsource certain sourcing functions and to supplement their pool of temporary workers. It is important to understand that you can be held responsible for the actions of subcontractors. Selecting subcontracts for staffing projects should be a well thought decision.