Illinois fails to collect wages owed to workers in Cook County

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Some of the workers who are waiting for the state to recoup their stolen wages were day laborers doing odd jobs for employers who promised to pay but never did. Others toiled in restaurants’ kitchens or spent their days cleaning high-end stores. A few worked in offices for small companies that folded quickly and without notice.

Hundreds of workers in Cook County have spent years — and in some cases more than a decade — waiting for payday, an Injustice Watch investigation found.

No one knows exactly how much money they are collectively owed — not the state, which doesn’t keep data in a way it can be calculated, and not the workers, many of whom tried to forget the amount so the anger doesn’t eat away at them.

Across the country, only a fraction of the estimated billions of dollars in wages stolen every year are recovered. Illinois has made efforts to improve collections for workers, but Injustice Watch found the state’s laws are stripped of their power by a slow-moving process, first with the Department of Labor and later with the Attorney General’s Office, which takes the employers to court but fails to use every tool at its disposal to recover wages.

How states enforce their labor laws is increasingly important as President Donald Trump’s administration attempts to further weaken federal labor regulations and ramps up immigration enforcement. Undocumented immigrants are disproportionately impacted by wage theft and might not report violations for fear their employers might retaliate by reporting them to immigration authorities, research shows.

For some workers, the amount owed is seemingly small — as little as a few hundred dollars. But for people living paycheck to paycheck, the missed pay can have a snowball effect that starts with overdue bills and can lead to homelessness.

“My whole summer was ruined, my whole fall, my whole Christmas — years later it impacted me,” said Patrick Hutsona, a mechanic and tow-truck driver who said he had to move in with a girlfriend after his paycheck bounced in 2020 and his employers fired him. “It was just terrible for me.”

The state laws Hutsona’s employers were later accused of breaking are the most commonly used in Illinois to protect workers against wage theft — the Minimum Wage Law and the Wage Payment and Collection Act. On paper, these are strong laws, with a higher-than-average minimum wage and hefty penalties for employers who refuse to pay.

Yet every year, the Department of Labor forwards employers who have ignored its demands to pay workers to the Attorney General’s Office for further enforcement.

The attorney general, in turn, files about 100 wage theft cases each year in Cook County Circuit Court, records show. The legal battle that ensues is complex, and the state largely leaves workers in the dark about the status of their cases.

Injustice Watch analyzed more than 3,000 cases filed by the attorney general in Cook County since 1993 and found workers wait, on average, about three years for cases to be filed in court. From there, they wait two more years, on average, for the state to settle their case or decide to close it, either because it can’t find the employer or because it determines there is no money to go after. If employers break a settlement agreement or ignore the state, the cases can continue to linger in court.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul declined requests for an interview. In an emailed statement, he said his office works “diligently” to enforce labor laws.

“During my time as attorney general and even as a member of the Illinois Senate, I have actively endeavored to support workers’ rights,” Raoul said.

But the road to justice is so long that even when employers agree to pay, the state can struggle to find workers because they have moved or changed phone numbers. Some workers who have tried to keep up with their case said they found it difficult to follow all the moving pieces of the system set up to protect them.

In Hutsona’s case, it took the Department of Labor more than a year to determine his former employers had not only failed to pay him, they had also illegally deducted $500 from his wages and did not pay him properly for his overtime, court records allege. In total, the state said Hutsona was owed more than $6,000 in wages. With penalties added, he is now owed about $30,000. But his former employers — Dantea Grayson and Camara Bowden, owners of ACD Emergency Road Services LLC —  haven’t paid. Last year, the state filed two lawsuits against them — one for each law the state claimed they violated.

Grayson and Bowden denied the allegations in court records and did not respond to Injustice Watch’s request to comment.

Hutsona didn’t know all the twists and turns about his cases, which are still pending in court. All he knows, he said, is that even though the state continues to fight for him, it’s been five years since he filed a claim and he hasn’t seen a dime.

“I’m still waiting to see what the hell’s gonna happen,” he said. “I still ain’t got my money.”

Backlog at the Illinois Department of Labor

The challenge for workers starts at the very beginning of the process, when they file a claim with the Illinois Department of Labor.

Data from the department for the decade ending in 2024 shows about half of the claims were dismissed or closed because workers weren’t covered by a state law, didn’t file the claim correctly, or didn’t follow through. Those figures are not surprising to worker advocates, who say the complexity of the process prevents workers from seeking justice.

“The problem is the system itself,” said Jorge Mújica, who has advocated for workers’ rights for more than 50 years and is an organizer with Arise Chicago, a Chicago-based worker center. “The state has created a system that’s not user-friendly.”

Department of Labor officials say they have struggled to keep up with the rising number of wage theft claims filed each year. More than 7,000 claims were filed in fiscal year 2025, up from 4,400 in 2019, when Gov. JB Pritzker took office.

The department is dealing with a backlog of cases that dates back to Bruce Rauner’s administration, when its staff was slashed. While the department has added positions under Pritzker, there are still fewer than a dozen people tasked with vetting the thousands of wage theft claims.

“The pace of stolen wages is greater than what we can keep up with,” acknowledged Jason Keller, the department’s assistant director.

Jenn Round, a labor law and policy expert at the Workplace Justice Lab at Northwestern University, said lack of proper staffing is one of the reasons many states, including Illinois, are not using the full extent of their powers to enforce labor laws. For example, some employers hide under layers of limited liability corporations, and though states might have the laws to pierce through all those layers and hold business owners accountable, they might not have the time or staff resources to use them.

“If you don’t have the resources to do this work really well, and do it in a way that’s impactful and meaningful, then the promise of these laws is going to go unfulfilled, especially for those workers who need it the most,” Round said.

After the department determines a complaint has merit, most wage-theft cases then move to a hearing before an administrative law judge, a department employee who reviews the evidence and issues a decision. To deal with the backlog, the Department of Labor has been increasing the number of cases sent to hearings every year. This year, it’s on pace to send more than 2,000 — nearly triple the number of cases sent to hearings in 2019.

Some employers pay at this point, but the department said its data isn’t granular enough to say exactly when in the process it receives payments. Overall, the department said it has collected an average of $3.1 million per year since fiscal year 2019 and has stepped up efforts to recover wages early in the process. Last year it launched the Informal Resolution and Mediation Unit, through which the department mediates conversations between workers and their employers to quickly resolve claims of $500 or less. The state said the unit recovered nearly $50,000 and closed more than 460 wage claims in its first year.

Cases languish in court

Cases can continue to languish even after the Department of Labor determines that an employer broke the law.

For a 64-year-old immigrant worker who cleaned high-end clothing stores downtown, the ordeal started when her employer stopped paying her in 2017, court records claim. She said she tried to talk to her boss, at first demanding and, later, begging to get paid. Eventually, she and some of her co-workers quit. Without her income, she and her husband fell behind on bills. Asked for specifics, she burst into tears.

“This is the saddest part about being an immigrant — that one strives to do the best job you can … and then we don’t get paid,” the worker said in between sobs.

Injustice Watch is not naming her because she said she is afraid of being targeted by federal authorities for speaking out.

In 2020, the Department of Labor determined she was owed nearly $1,500 in wages and an additional $1,000 in penalties. She thought she would finally receive the money at that point, she said, but a check never came. Until a reporter contacted her earlier this year, she didn’t even know the attorney general had finally taken her former employer to court in March.

Penalties have continued to pile up, and she is now owed more than $25,000, according to court documents. But she likely will never get paid. The attorney general quit its court fight in August. By then, the company she had worked for no longer existed, one of the owners had died, and the attorney general couldn’t locate the second owner, according to records reviewed by Injustice Watch.

“I feel defeated,” she said.

The county’s court data analyzed by Injustice Watch doesn’t distinguish between dismissals, such as in her case, and settlements, but we found at least half of the cases end with one of those two outcomes.

Unlike dismissals, settlements should lead to workers getting paid. But employers do not always follow through. Injustice Watch found more than a dozen cases in which the state brought employers back to court because they had stopped making payments. In one case, the attorney general waited a decade after the employer stopped paying before taking the employer back to court.

After all this, how many workers actually get paid? It’s unclear.

Annual reports show the attorney general recovers more than $500,000 on average in owed wages and penalties statewide. But the reports do not spell out the number of workers or the amount they were paid.

Cases that aren’t dismissed or settled often secure a judgment — a court order spelling out the amount of wages and penalties the employer owes the worker. The judgment essentially affirms the finding of the Department of Labor and finalizes how much the employer owes.

Getting there can take years.

Delays can happen because employers can’t be found, but also because of mistakes from state attorneys. Injustice Watch observed attorneys who showed up to court hearings unprepared and found more than 300 cases were dismissed because no one from the Attorney General’s Office showed up at all. Even when those cases are eventually reinstated, which many are, the state’s missteps mean cases are kicked down the road for weeks or months.

Raoul said the source of some of the delays, such as employers not showing up in court, were outside his office’s control. The biggest challenge for the attorneys in his office is finding the employer’s assets, he said in an email.

A law enacted this summer with the support of the attorney general and the Department of Labor is expected to speed up the process. The law makes the decisions of administrative judges at the Department of Labor final and enforceable, meaning the attorney general no longer needs a judgment in most cases to take the battle straight into the next courtroom — 1401, the final stop for wage theft cases in Cook County.

Sen. Mike Halpin, a Democrat from western Illinois and the lead sponsor of the bill, has said the change is one solution to the “extreme delays” in recovering workers’ stolen wages.

Keller, the department’s assistant director, said the legislation was important to “shorten the time period for workers to get justice.”

Courtroom 1401: The last stop for wage theft cases

Courtroom 1401 in the Richard J. Daley Center is officially known as the Post-Judgment and Miscellaneous Remedies Section, where people who are owed money can ask a judge to use an array of tools to compel someone to pay up by forcing them to uncover hidden assets, garnishing their wages or by putting a lien on their property.

Associate Judge Maryam Ahmad presides over this highly technical courtroom, where even seasoned attorneys can be observed fumbling their way through proceedings. She has taken it upon herself to educate litigants, especially those who show up without attorneys, by creating videos, with the help of artificial intelligence.  

In court, Ahmad is precise with her words, but kind in her delivery. 

“The reason you are before this court is because the Attorney General’s Office received a judgment against you from another court,” she explained to an employer at a recent hearing.

In wage theft cases, the state’s role in Ahmad’s courtroom is no different from that of credit card companies seeking to collect debt racked up by consumers. But the attorney general’s approach is far gentler than that of creditors.

The state can force employers to answer questions under oath about their finances and to produce records showing their assets. If employers don’t comply, the state can ask for a warrant for the employer’s arrest. But Injustice Watch found the attorney general rarely uses that tool, even when employers evade questions for years.

The effect of this policy? Cases can linger for years in Ahmad’s courtroom and pass through a revolving door of early-career attorneys who at times struggle to figure out the status of a case or how to move it forward.

In his email, Raoul said that when he took over the Attorney General’s Office in 2019, it had the “highest attorney attrition rate” in the country. Since then, he said, “recruiting, and retaining, skilled attorneys has been a priority for me.”

“Our attrition rate relative to other state attorneys general has improved, but there is still work to do,” he added.

Still, he said, the dozens of cases the office receives annually are handled by “expert attorneys.” 

But the lax enforcement from the attorney general in these wage theft cases is a stark contrast to how the office handles cases from its Workplace Rights Bureau, an elite unit launched in 2015.

The bureau partners with other state entities and uses an array of laws — beyond just those designed to battle wage theft — to go after employers. Last year, it used consumer protection laws to secure an $11.25 million settlement from DoorDash for allegedly tricking customers into thinking tips would boost drivers’ pay. The money from the settlement was set aside to pay restitution to nearly 80,000 workers, according to the state.

Since 2019, the unit has reached 35 settlements with employers worth about $30 million, including penalties, records show.

But for the thousands of individual workers who are owed amounts that don’t make for splashy press releases, a payday is far from guaranteed.

Consider the case against Cary Pearlman and his long-defunct eClick Pro Marketing Inc. It’s been 14 years since the Department of Labor found Pearlman had stiffed two workers more than $4,000 each, according to court records.

The attorney general filed a case against Pearlman in 2016. About 2½ years later, the state threatened several times to ask for a warrant for Pearlman’s arrest for his failure to appear in court and provide documents. But again and again, it backed off, court records show. The case went dormant until last year, when the state tried again. With penalties, the state claims Pearlman now owes more than $17,000, according to court records.

Earlier this year, Pearlman showed up to court but still didn’t release any documents. In June, the state again threatened to ask for a warrant. But nothing came of it.

In an email, Pearlman said he paid the employees in full and was a “supportive employer who invested heavily in [his] team.” He said the case has been an ordeal for him and it stems from an “incredibly difficult period” in his life as he was closing his business and laying off employees. Pearlman said he has not been given the opportunity to properly defend himself and is working to resolve the matter.

In court, Pearlman offered to settle the case for $5,000. But he told Injustice Watch the state didn’t accept the offer.

“I made that offer not as an admission of guilt but because representing myself has been exhausting, and hiring a qualified attorney would cost about the same,” Pearlman wrote. “My goal has always been to bring closure and peace of mind.”

So much time has passed that Erin Hitchins, one of the workers, had trouble recalling the details about what happened. She said she was in her 20s when she was hired as director of operations — an impressive-sounding title she said she got to pick for herself because it was a small company. She remembers that after being laid off, she tried to hide from her parents that she was unemployed and was owed wages. Because she was young and had roommates, she said, she was able to stay afloat by picking up shifts as a waitress before eventually finding temp work and, later, landing a new job.

After learning from a reporter where the case stood, Hitchins said she appreciated that the state is still fighting on her behalf but was disappointed because she had wanted justice 15 years ago and never found it.

“It’s not a happy thing,” she said. “You just put it out of your head and move on.”

Hannah Cushman Garland and Monkruman St. Jules from DataMade contributed to this story.