Alberto Ojeda is still waiting for more than $31,000 a Toronto employer owes him — wages the provincial Ministry of Labour ordered paid more than three years ago. Despite a clear ruling from the ministry and a detailed investigation by an employment standards officer, seen by the Star, the province has yet to recover a cent.
Ojeda’s story is one of many that show how wage theft — when employers fail to pay workers what they’re legally owed — has become widespread and systemic in Ontario, amid weak enforcement and few consequences for those responsible.
In the past decade, nearly $200 million in unpaid wages have been formally assessed as owed to workers, according to a new report from the Workers’ Action Centre, an organization advocating for workers’ rights, based on freedom-of-information data.
When employers fail to comply with a Ministry of Labour order to pay within 30 days, the case is referred to Ontario’s Ministry of Finance, which was only able to recover less than a quarter of the $102.4 million sent for collections between 2013 and 2023, leaving workers still owed $79.9 million in stolen wages, according to the government data.
In an email seen by the Star, the Finance Ministry told Ojeda that despite registering a lien, issuing a warrant of seizure and sale, and pursuing six bank garnishments against his former employer, attempts to obtain payment were unsuccessful and “there is no 100 per cent guarantee that all money will be collected.”
Since workers face significant barriers to filing complaints with the Ministry of Labour — and with proactive inspections and penalties for violators sharply declining in recent years — labour experts and employment lawyers say this amount is just a drop in the bucket of wage theft claims.
“This is a massive crisis happening in plain sight,” said Ella Bedard, a staff lawyer with the Workers’ Action Centre, who helped author the report. “The numbers in the report are staggering.”
Ojeda’s case launches a Star series examining how Ontario’s enforcement system has allowed wage theft to flourish — from employers who disappear behind shell companies to franchises that evade accountability — leaving workers, from refugees to citizens, fighting for money they may never see.
The 29-year-old came to Canada in 2020 hoping to get an education and earn money to help cover his mother’s cancer treatment in Mexico. Having studied mechatronics engineering in his home country, he found a job through Kijiji as a CNC machine programmer, producing cabinets and millwork. He was hired by a man named Marcin Kozuck and said he often worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week with no breaks.
Ojeda said his employer had verbally agreed to pay him $20 an hour, but payments started arriving late and his boss blamed client payment issues and delayed deposits. He said he wouldn’t get paid for several weeks at a time.
As the situation worsened Ojeda began pleading for partial payments from his employer just to cover food and rent.
“It’s really shocking — living in Mexico you hear in a country like … Canada, there’s no corruption there,” Ojeda said. “But living in this situation, it was like a nightmare.”
Ontario’s wage recovery flaws
Ojeda’s case highlights the limits of Ontario’s wage recovery system, which advocates say has struggled to keep pace with modern employment practices as fines, workplace inspections and enforcement have declined over the past decade.
“When there is a low likelihood of detection and the penalties for noncompliance are minimal, the incentive to commit wage theft is high,” the Wokers’ Action Centre report says.
Employer prosecutions have plummeted in recent years, according to government data.
In 2024, the Ministry of Labour initiated only 12 Part III Prosecutions — a type of penalty with the most potential to deter employers from violating employment standards because it can result in a hefty fine or even jail time — down 85 per cent from 2017 despite widespread non-compliance with orders to pay.
Meanwhile, proactive enforcement has also declined.
When Premier Doug Ford took office in 2018, the Labour Ministry instructed staff not to initiate any new proactive inspections aimed at preventing wage theft and other employment standards violations.
Employment standards inspections deal with basic workplace issues such as unpaid wages and overtime. Proactive inspections, which are initiated at the behest of the ministry, are far more effective at recovering unpaid wages, including public holiday pay and overtime, than when individual workers file complaints, according to the ministry’s own data.
Workplace inspections started to plummet before the pandemic and are 77 per cent lower than they were around seven years ago, government data shows.
At the same time, the number of permanent employment standards officers has decreased. In 2023, only 115 officers were working across the province, down from 209 in 2018, even as Ontario’s workforce grew by 16 per cent since 2014.
The Ministry of Labour declined to respond to inquiries on why enforcement has eroded in recent years and what is being done to hold employers accountable and prevent increasing incidents of wage theft. Questions instead were referred to the Ministry of Finance, which did not get back to the Star before publication.
There is also a deeper structural problem contributing to rampant wage theft in the province, according to Bedard: Ontario’s labour laws have not kept pace with changing business practices and the rise of multi-party employment relationships.
Rather than the traditional direct employer-to-employee relationship, today’s companies are increasingly adopting business structures that limit their liability for the employees who make their products or provide their services, relying on strategies such as subcontracting, franchising, third-party management or misclassification of employees.
These structures can obscure who is legally liable for unpaid wages.
“Employers try to hide behind the corporate veil to avoid responsibility,” Bedard said.
Ojeda’s case shows how that ambiguity can play out when workers try to recover their wages.
The Labour Ministry’s case
The Ministry of Labour’s employment standards officer determined that a company called Pheno Design, a sole proprietorship owned by Matylda Bukaczewska, was “liable for all wages owed to” Ojeda.
The ministry’s ruling cited evidence including a text message showing a $40,000 cheque the employer had received from a client, along with a promise to pay Ojeda. The cheque was made out to Pheno Design.
Bukaczewska, using a legal representative, denied Ojeda had been employed by her company, saying he was hired by Marcin Kozuck and not Pheno Design.
But the employment standards officer noted that evidence showed emails and messages between Ojeda and Kozuck had originated from Bukaczewska’s accounts. The officer also reported that the employer’s legal representative confirmed Kozuck and Bukaczewska were spouses but reported that the representative said they did not have any part in each other’s business.
“Both these pieces of evidence directly contradict the employer’s statements,” the officer said in the report.
The employer also claimed Ojeda only worked part time and was paid for all hours worked.
Ojeda provided the ministry with a record of hours worked, text messages and emails that “showed he worked full-time hours, directly contradicting the employer’s statement,” the officer said.
In an email to the Star, responding to inquiries about Ojeda’s case and his treatment as an employee, Bukaczewska said: “We dispute the validity of the entire Ministry of Labour investigation, which is based on faulty assumptions and on ignoring facts in favour of the appellant.”
“Pheno Design had never employed (Ojeda); he was hired by Marcin,” she said. Kozuck and Bukaczewska each said they would provide documents that contradicted Ojeda’s versions of events and the ministry’s findings, but nothing had been provided to the Star by time of publication.
A decision from the Ontario Labour Relations Board, seen by the Star, showed that the employer made multiple attempts to seek reconsideration of the ruling, but failed to meet requirements to have those applications heard.
Wage theft becoming ‘normalized’
Deena Ladd, who heads the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre, said these cases have become all too frequent.
“The more this gets normalized, the more it becomes common in every workplace,” Ladd said.
In 2024, the Workers’ Action Centre conducted a survey of 513 low-wage workers — many of whom are immigrants or have precarious immigration status — and found that 60 per cent had experienced at least one pay-related violation and 62 per cent said they never received overtime pay or time off in lieu of overtime pay.
Some 28 per cent of the workers surveyed faced wage theft of less than $500, while more than 20 per cent of workers experienced wage theft of over $5,000.
The lack of enforcement sends a message to unscrupulous employers “that it’s OK to do this because you won’t get caught and you won’t be held accountable for the violations of law,” Ladd said.
At the same time workers, who face potential retaliation from employers, including the loss of their jobs, are discouraged from speaking out with no effective way to complain and declining workplace inspections.
“This sends a message to workers that they need to keep their mouths shut,” Ladd said. “Even if you say something, it’s going to be very difficult for you to get your wages back. So why bother?”
