Wage theft is any failure to pay you what the law or your agreement requires—unpaid overtime, off-the-clock work, misclassification, withheld commissions, illegal deductions, tip violations, or a final paycheck that never arrives. Most people underestimate these claims twice: they assume the amounts are too small to pursue, and they assume complaining is risky. The law was written to flip both assumptions. Heavy penalties exist to punish wage theft, attorney’s fees can be recovered, and employers face additional liability if they retaliate against someone who complains about missing wages. Bass PLLC represents employees across Colorado, New York, D.C., New Mexico, and Wyoming in recovering the pay that they earned.

Wage Claims Are Usually Bigger Than They Look

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allows liquidated damages that can double a back-pay award, state and local laws add their own multipliers and penalties—Denver, for example, allows employees to recover up to three times the amount of unpaid wages, and Washington D.C. permits recovery up to four times the amount of unpaid wages. Attorney’s fees are commonly recoverable on top. That fee-shifting matters as much as the damages, because it means a lawyer can take a case that would never justify hourly billing measured against the amount in dispute. A few hundred dollars of unpaid overtime a month, extended across a two- or three-year limitations period and augmented by penalties, is not a small claim. The math also compounds in ways people do not expect, since unpaid time affects the regular rate, which affects every overtime hour, which in turn affects the penalties calculated on top of both.

A Salary Doesn't Mean You're Ineligible For Overtime

Exemption from overtime depends on your earnings and actual duties, tested against legal definitions—not on being paid a salary and not on your title. ‘Manager,’ ‘coordinator,’ and ‘analyst’ prove nothing if your real work doesn’t satisfy the legal test for exemption, and neither does a job description written by someone who has never watched you work. Exemptions from overtime pay generally requires both a minimum salary and a specific set of duties. People who spent years assuming they were exempt are often the ones with the strongest claims, precisely because the unpaid overtime accumulated the whole time. If you regularly work more than forty hours a week and have never once been paid extra for it, it’s worth a conversation to see if you’re being underpaid.

A Contractor Label Doesn’t Make You One

Being called an independent contractor—even in an agreement you signed—might not make you one if the company controls how, when, and where you work. Courts and agencies apply their own tests, and several states use standards considerably harder for a company to satisfy than the federal one. Misclassified workers can be owed overtime, minimum wage protections, reimbursement of business expenses, and benefits they were told they did not qualify for, and the tax consequences frequently run in your favor as well. The practical signals that you are an employee and not a contractor are familiar ones: set hours, required equipment or uniforms, supervision and training, an exclusive relationship, and work that is central to what the company actually sells. If you work like an employee, the law may already treat you as one, regardless of what the paperwork says.

Earned Commissions And Bonuses Are Often Protected Wages

Once the work that earned a commission or bonus is done, many states treat the promised amount as a wage the employer cannot rewrite or withhold—and wage statutes carry penalties and fee awards that breach of contract claims do not. A commission plan ‘clarified’ after the sale closed, or a bonus that evaporates just before payout, is frequently a statutory violation rather than merely bad management. The most common mechanism is the forfeiture clause: a provision requiring that you still be employed on the payment date, applied to money you earned months earlier, which several states will not enforce as to compensation already earned. Final paychecks are their own category, with state-specific deadlines and penalties that begin to accrue when an employer misses them. And stay-or-pay signing bonuses have recently been challenged as unlawful noncompetes. Save the plan documents, the quotas, and the emails confirming what you closed, because these disputes are won on the paper that existed before anyone got upset.

Complaining About Pay Is Legally Protected—But The Clock Is Running

Retaliation for a good-faith wage complaint—firing, cut hours, a suddenly worse schedule—is independently illegal and often a stronger claim than the underlying dispute. In many circumstances the protection covers internal complaints and not just agency filings, and it can cover you even if you turn out to be wrong about the underlying pay question, so long as the complaint was made in good faith. At the same time, limitations periods quietly shrink what you can recover: each pay period that ages past the cutoff drops out of the claim , which makes waiting expensive. Bass PLLC reviews your records, reconstructs hours where the employer's records are thin, and pursues the demand, agency filing, or lawsuit that fits. An early conversation costs nothing and helps preserve your rights.