November 20, 2024
We recently said thank you and farewell to attorney David Rodwin. We are grateful for Dave’s advocacy in the PJC’s Workplace Justice Project and wish him well in his new endeavors.
Dave dedicated nine years to fighting wage theft, particularly misclassification, in low-wage, high-violation industries where Black and immigrant workers predominate such as home care, cleaning, transportation, construction, and food service. His successful advocacy to expand workers’ rights and build worker power with the Workplace Justice Project team included:
- Launching the PJC’s Home Care Worker Initiative in 2015 to enforce a then-new federal regulation and ensure that home care workers are afforded basic wage protections, including overtime and paid travel between jobs.
- Opposing proposed regulations issues by the Maryland Department of Labor in 2017 that would have made it easier for businesses to deny unemployment insurance by claiming a worker is exempt as an independent contractor.
- Beating back attempts to weaken the Healthy Working Families Act, Maryland’s earned sick and safe leave bill.
- Representing workers in federal and state courts, enabling them to stand up to wage theft, recover their unpaid wages, and send a message that bedrock wage laws cannot be violated with impunity. For example, he represented 29 home care workers who provided home care services to Medicaid recipients in and around Baltimore City – and regularly worked more than 40 hours per week without being paid the required overtime rate by their employer. The 2019 settlement of the case recovered more than $365,000 from Trulife Health Services, LLC and one of its owners.
- Testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee in September 2019 to educate lawmakers about the continued importance of the bedrock wage protections for employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the need to prevent erosion of those protections – leveraging expertise gained from the PJC’s litigation against numerous companies for wage theft and misclassification of employees as independent contractors.
- Pushing a bill in the 2021 state legislative session that created a guidance document to educate home care agencies about their legal responsibility to properly classify their employees. Agency owners will be required to read and sign the guidance document every three years as well as indicate every three years whether any of their home care workers are classified as independent contractors.
- Litigating to correct alleged systemic failures and federal violations in Maryland’s unemployment insurance program. The 2022 settlement makes critical reforms to address delays and interruptions in benefits payments and ensure fair process related to overpayments.
- Securing one of only six grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau in 2022 to undertake projects to assist marginalized and underserved women workers in understanding and accessing their employment rights, public services, and benefits. As a result, the PJC formed new partnerships for know-your-rights trainings with organizations around the state, connected workers with screenings for 22 public benefits programs, and expanded workers’ access to know-your-rights resources in Spanish.
- Passing a law in the 2024 legislative session that creates Maryland’s first-ever legally enforceable requirement for employers to include hours worked, pay rates, pay period dates, deductions, and other basic information on employees’ paystubs, which will make it harder for employers to hide wage theft in inscrutable paystubs.
PJC Legal Director Debra Gardner shared: ”Dave is a dogged and brilliant advocate, strategist, litigator, and colleague, and we’ll miss having him in the PJC family. Allies from around the state tell me regularly how compassionate, egoless, and genuinely interested in their work and our clients’ lives he is, and how much that informs his advocacy and provides a model for theirs. He hasn’t been away long, but his legacy of advances in workers’ rights already inspires the rest of our Workplace Justice Project to the highest ideals and goals. I learned a great deal from working with Dave and look forward to continuing to do so in future collaborations.”
