Temp work runs through layers. A staffing agency hires the worker, a client company gets the labor, and the person actually doing the job can end up with two businesses above them and no clear answer about which one owes what. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell announced citations on August 5 against four staffing agencies and a client company, and the individual cases underneath that announcement have almost nothing in common except that structure.
Preferred Staffing and The Staffing Group: $575,578 between them
The largest single line in the enforcement action covers two agencies together. Brockton-based Preferred Staffing, Inc. and Andover-based The Staffing Group, Inc. will pay a total of $575,578, according to the Attorney General’s announcement.
The office framed the whole set of citations as a failure “to comply with various state employment laws pertaining to minimum wage, overtime, sick leave, and employee classification.” Those four categories are worth separating in your head, because they fail in different ways on a pay stub. Minimum wage and overtime show up as a rate that is too low. Sick leave shows up as time you earned and were not allowed to use. Classification shows up as a status line that decides whether the first three protections apply to you at all.
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The 134 workers All Star Hospitality treated as contractors
Peabody-based All Star Hospitality, LLC will pay $40,200 in penalties. The finding behind that figure is the one worth reading twice: All Star had misclassified approximately 134 workers as independent contractors.
Misclassification is the quietest of the four violations because nothing on the check looks obviously wrong. The number is simply lower than it should be, and the reasons are buried in what an independent contractor does not get. In Massachusetts, all workers are presumed to be employees, and almost all workers must be paid at least the minimum wage. A label typed onto a payroll record does not by itself move a person out of that presumption.
A fourth agency, Pennsylvania-based SCSS, Inc, has been cited $108,000 in penalties. Its citation is penalties only, with no restitution figure attached in the announcement.
Front desk and maintenance staff paid under $15 an hour in Newton
The client company in this group is Four Points by Sheraton Boston Newton, doing business as Gulph Creek Hotels, Inc., along with its president, Amy Gancasz. Gulph Creek agreed to pay $155,456 in restitution and penalties.
The conduct is stated plainly: Gulph Creek failed to pay its front desk and maintenance staff the state minimum wage of $15 per hour. Not a complicated overtime formula, not a disputed classification test. The floor, and staff paid under it.
That the hotel appears here as a client company rather than as a staffing agency is the point of the whole announcement. A business that brings in workers through an agency is not automatically insulated from wage-and-hour liability for the people working on its premises.
Restitution, penalties, and roughly 421 affected workers
The Attorney General’s office put the combined figure at $875,234, and described the settlements as including restitution for approximately 421 affected workers along with penalties. Both words matter. Restitution is money that goes back to workers. Penalties are money the Commonwealth collects. The announcement does not publish a breakdown of how much of the total falls into each bucket, and it does not publish a per-worker amount, so no individual figure can be derived from what is public.
It also helps to know what a citation is, because the word sounds smaller than it is. When the Attorney General’s office investigates a wage complaint, one of the outcomes available to it is a civil citation that may require an employer to pay unpaid wages plus a penalty. That is an administrative action by the state, not a private lawsuit brought by the workers and not a criminal case, though the office can pursue criminal charges separately in some situations. The citations announced on August 5 sit in that administrative lane.
What an affected worker should take from this is procedural rather than arithmetic: if you worked for one of these employers during the relevant period, the restitution process runs through the Attorney General’s office, not through anything you calculate yourself.
The five things your Massachusetts pay stub is required to show
You do not need an investigation to run the same checks the Fair Labor Division ran. Under state law, an employer must give you a statement with your pay listing the name of the employer and the worker, the date of payment, the number of hours worked during the pay period, the hourly rate, and all deductions and increases made during that period. Employers may not charge you for a pay stub.
Read those five fields against three numbers. Most employees must be paid at least $15.00 per hour. Most employees who work more than 40 hours in a week must be paid at least 1.5 times the regular rate for every hour past 40. And employers must keep payroll records for three years, which you have the right to see at reasonable times. If the hours field on your stub does not match the hours you worked, that gap is the whole case in miniature.
Complaints go to the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division. The online form’s “Non-Payment of Wage” option is the right choice for most situations, including being paid less than minimum wage, unpaid hours, missing overtime, earned sick time violations and being misclassified as an independent contractor. The Fair Labor Hotline is (617) 727-3465, Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can file the complaint anonymously, and you can file even if you agreed to work for less than the law requires, because that agreement does not bind the Commonwealth’s enforcement of the $15 floor that Gulph Creek’s front desk staff were paid under.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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