According to a new study by Rutgers University’s Workplace Justice Lab@RU in partnership with the Workers Defense Project, Torres is among the 3 million Texas workers that have been paid less than the stagnant $7.25 an hour minimum wage between 2009 and 2022. Some of them have outstanding wages ordered from the TWC that have not been collected from employers.

While nearly $99 million in wages were ordered across more than 57,000 cases from 2010 to 2020, according to the report, 80% of those payments have yet to be received by workers.

Wage theft is persistent across Texas, costing individual workers nearly $4,000 a year on average in minimum wage violations, and over $12 billion as a group over the last 14 years.

“Unfortunately, our findings demonstrate that the Texas Workforce Commission has failed to recover tens of millions of dollars, allowing non-compliant employers to violate workers’ rights with impunity,” said Jenn Round, director of the labor standards enforcement program for the Workplace Justice Lab@RU. “This inaction leaves low-wage workers vulnerable to exploitation and puts compliant employers at a disadvantage.”