Headaches ahead for many LI employers

Many employers on Long Island and across the state may wake up to a big headache New Year's Day, and it will have nothing to do with having too much bubbly New Year's Eve.

A new state law takes effect Jan. 1 -- the Wage Theft Protection Act -- that requires employers to provide employees, annually, with notification stating their rate of pay, including overtime; whether they are paid hourly, by shift, by the day or the week, monthly or by commission; the date of their regular payday; their employer's official name and any name it uses in business; the employer's address and phone number, and any deductions such as for tips, meals and lodging.

In addition, the law requires the notices to be in English, Chinese, Haitian-Creole, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish, depending on the primary language of the employee. The notices must be issued between Jan. 1 and Feb 1.

There are fines and penalties for not complying. Employers must keep records, which can be audited by the state. The law is intended to provide employees with greater protection from violations of overtime pay and minimum-wage rules, said state labor department spokesman Leo Rosales.

The law took effect April 9. Rosales said the state has used the time since then to conduct seminars about the act.

One key problem: Many employers say they are vaguely aware or completely unaware of the law, said Robert Lipman, of the Lipman & Plesur law firm in Jericho, which has studied the legislation. "Some of them are just realizing what a pain this is going to be," he said.

Attorney Allison Plesur said the law could lead to discrimination suits by employees who will be singled out and identified in the disclosure forms as belonging to a particular ethnic background. Lipman said a company of his, HRTrain, also in Jericho, has come up with a software program to collect and distribute the required information.

The requirement "came as a shock" to clients when they received alerts, said Fredric C. Leffler, senior counsel at Manhattan-based Proskauer, a global law firm.

Bill Crawbuck, president of Geomaps, a mapping company in Bethpage, said he was entirely unaware of the law. The company has seven employees.

Kurt Kubik, owner of Island Pro Digital, printers in Islandia with 14 employees, said he was "somewhat familiar" with the law. "It's more paperwork," Kubik said.

Jim D'Addario, chief executive of Farmingdale-based guitar-string maker D'Addario & Co., called the law "onerous," and said: "With 800 employees [at the company] that means lots of trees to cut down and lots of storage space for redundant information that is already available to each employee each week."

More information about the law is available at labor.ny.gov.