The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are hoping a newly formed partnership between them will provide protections for the working class against white collar criminal behavior.
On Aug. 20, they announced a memorandum of understanding [MOU] to pool information and data towards both worker and consumer protection investigations. This agreement arises as blue collar workers feel the squeeze, both during deposit and withdrawal of their funds.
“The top-line message is that if you are experiencing an issue, just report it to government and we will get it to the right place,” said Bragg in a phone interview. “If it’s an administrative matter or a civil matter, we will send it to DCWP and if it’s something that warrants criminal inquiry, they will send it to us. So we want to take the onus off the public.”
Investigations into consumer and worker affairs often happen in silos. Levine, who previously served in FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it is a frequent issue plaguing all levels of government, and the public suffers as a result.
The MOU cuts through this siloed approach and allows confidential information about predatory white-collar practices to move between city enforcement and prosecutors, not unlike how the NYPD works with district attorneys’ offices. Bragg and Levine believe the partnership will create “one door” to the proper agency and prevent New Yorkers from getting the runaround when seeking support regarding wage theft or fraud.
The DCWP, formerly the Department of Consumer Affairs, is often the first point of contact for worker and consumer complaints. The agency has crusaded against “junk fees” since Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Levine this year, as well as bolster delivery worker protections. While the mayor’s focus on affordability largely centers around how much people are paying, there is also the matter of people getting paid. Levine pointed specifically to how aggressive federal immigration enforcement enables some employers to silence non-citizen employees from speaking out against labor violations.
“People in New York work famously hard,” said Levine. “They deserve to get paid for it. Both the D.A. and I observed when we were talking in the context of signing this MOU is how many immigrant workers we’ve heard from were literally told by their bosses ‘if you don’t like how we’re treating you, you can report it, but then I’m going to report you to ICE.’ There’s this real sense of chill, especially among immigrant workers.”
Under Bragg, the Manhattan D.A. renewed crackdowns against white collar crime in New York County, the world’s financial nexus. He created the office’s Housing & Tenant Protection Unit in his first year in office and its Worker Protection Unit a few months later. Bragg says historically, the office maintains a “very significant footprint” in the construction industry but is now making headway into protections for retail employees, garment workers and even actors. “I don’t think that any industry is immune from this based upon the observations in our docket,” said Bragg. “I think we’re mostly talking about blue collar work, but [it’s] spanning lots of different industries.”
For now, Levine says, the partnership is still shaping up and the public will not see much initially as work gets done behind closed doors. He also expressed hope for future partnerships with the city’s other four district attorneys’ offices and said working with Bragg will provide better insight into what worker and consumer issues New Yorkers face.
“Manhattan does not have a monopoly on wage theft [or] white collar crime,” said Levine. “We would welcome partnerships with the other D.A.s We bring cases in every borough…this partnership [is] going to give us more visibility into the type of wage theft we’re seeing. I really think that there’s a whole dimension to our economy that doesn’t show up when you look at the stock market. It doesn’t show up when you look at GDP figures and that’s the day-to-day experience of workers, especially immigrant workers, on the job.”
