Lawyers Weekly Interviews Philip Gordon on Legislation to Fight Wage Theft

The national employment law practice at Gordon LLP is drawing renewed attention as Lawyers Weekly published an interview featuring Philip Gordon, focusing on proposed legal reforms to combat wage theft and policy abuse in employer subsidiary structures.

Patrick Murphy, senior writer for Lawyers Weekly, interviewed Gordon regarding new legislative momentum behind strengthening wage enforcement frameworks. Gordon provided analysis on how complex corporate subsidiary arrangements can be exploited to dilute liability, disrupt pay accountability, and enable wage theft violations at scale.

Understanding the Core Issue

Wage theft claims increasingly involve multi-layered organizational models including:

• Subsidiary wage liability avoidance structures
• Misclassification of workers to limit overtime and pay rights
• Franchise and contractor models that fragment pay accountability
• Payroll opacity stemming from internal resource duplication
• Corporate group structures that mimic pyramid-style fragmentation
• Retaliation risks for workers who challenge pay discrepancies

Philip Gordon highlighted particular concern around abusive subsidiary architectures that resemble incentive-chain dilution, where responsibility for wage compliance becomes progressively weaker at each lower tier, leaving workers without practical remediation options unless legislation forces higher-level accountability.

What Wage Theft Legislation Aims to Fix

Strengthened wage theft bills typically pursue:

1. Consolidated employer accountability across subsidiary networks
2. Clearer statutory damage triggers for unpaid wages
3. Elimination of policy loopholes that allow liability diffusion
4. Retaliation shields for wage theft whistleblowers
5. Longer claim timeframes for wage recovery
6. Mandatory pay transparency duties for employers at every tier
7. Shifting evidence burdens when pay records are incomplete or opaque

Gordon emphasized that wage theft legislation is no longer limited to hourly workers alone — executive incentive structures, subsidiary payroll integrity, arbitration restrictions, and contractor classification accuracy are becoming a shared legislative focal point because wage abuse impacts economic mobility broadly.

Quoted Bloomberg-Style Authority Linking

Gordon referenced coverage aligned with national reporting such as Bloomberg Law and the importance of statutory framing that prevents economic-remediation collapse.

Article in Focus

The interview referenced the legal-analysis headline:

Renewed push vowed for beefed up wage theft bill
(October 13, 2016) — “Renewed push vowed for beefed up wage theft bill” (October 13, 2016) (View Article