I’ve spent most of my career sitting across the table from workers who got cheated out of money they earned.
Custodians whose jobs were unjustly outsourced. A crew of 11,000 hospital and clinic workers whose employer sat on their wages instead of paying them our. Cops who spent years underpaid because the city they served knew it would take a lawsuit to make them pay up. I’ve represented all of them, and I’ve won for all of them — $15 million recovered for those hospital and clinic workers, $1.7 million in back pay for custodians who got shorted, the largest collectively bargained wage increase in Iowa history for the Carter Lake police department.
Here’s what almost twenty years of that work has taught me: for every worker who has a lawyer willing to fight for them, there are a lot more who don’t – not to mention the teams of lawyers management and big corporations have at their disposal. They don’t know their rights. They can’t afford to take on a big corporation alone. And right now, the office that’s supposed to have their back, the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, isn’t making it a priority.
That’s what I’m running to change.
Every year, $900 million is stolen out of Iowa workers’ paychecks.
It happens through unpaid overtime. Through tips that get skimmed off the top before they ever reach the person who earned them. Through workers forced to clock in early, stay late, or work through lunch off the clock — illegally. Through paychecks docked without a worker ever agreeing to it.
None of that is a mistake. For the greedy corporations who do it, it’s a business decision. It’s a bet that no one’s going to make them pay it back.
Iowa’s attorney general is supposed to have their back. Right now, Brenna Bird is failing to make this a priority. It’s time for the Attorney General’s Office to fight for Iowans, not the special interests and political insiders taking advantage of them.
Here’s what I’ll do:
Stand up a dedicated Wage Theft Recovery Unit. This would be the first unit of its kind inside the Iowa Attorney General’s Office with dedicated staff whose only job is investigating employers who repeatedly ignore labor laws: stealing wages, misclassifying workers, and more. It uses enforcement tools that already exist under Iowa law, which means it doesn’t have to wait around for the legislature.
Give workers a direct way to report violations. Right now, if your employer stiffs you on wages, your options are hire a lawyer you probably can’t afford, or eat the loss. Under this plan, Iowa workers would finally have a partner in these disputes, and we would create a hotline or online form that routes straight to an attorney or investigator.
Investigate bad actors thoroughly. In my experience, chronic and intentional wage theft is rarely an isolated mistake. Employers who shortchange workers are often cutting corners elsewhere too. That could mean failing to follow the law on taxes, abusing employee retirement accounts, or ignoring unemployment insurance requirements. This unit would treat repeat wage theft as a signal to look harder at a company’s broader practices, not a one-off violation to settle and move past.
Go after the violations Iowa workers actually report most. Skimmed tips. Misclassification that denies workers what they’re owed. Off-the-clock work. Paychecks illegally docked without consent. This unit is built around the patterns we see over and over to put an end to these practices.
Crack down on repeat offenders. Enforcement would focus on corporations that intentionally break the rules or ignore repeated warnings, with a system for cataloging violations and working across state government to monitor the worst actors. And I’ll work with prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against bad actors, not just civil penalties. Wage theft is a crime, and it’s time Iowa treated it like one.
Partner with the people already doing this work. Iowa’s unions, legal aid organizations, and private attorneys are already fighting these cases every day. This unit works with them instead of starting from scratch, so the office can reach more workers faster.
This is personal for me, and it should be personal for the next attorney general too.
The Attorney General’s Office is the largest law firm in the state of Iowa, and it’s the only one that’s supposed to work for regular Iowans. We should use every tool at our disposal to make sure Iowa workers are receiving the pay and benefits they’ve earned.
I believe in this because I spent years watching hardworking Iowans get cheated by greedy corporations that counted on them not having the resources to fight back. Every one of those cases was somebody’s rent, somebody’s groceries, somebody’s kid’s school clothes.
Iowa already has good wage laws on the books. What we don’t have is an attorney general willing to use them and willing to take action. That’s the job I’m asking you to hire me for.