Private Enforcement of the Kansas Wage Payment Act

We are practitioners, and in our practice we meet with many prospective clients who have worked, for a wage, but have not been paid by their employers. Unfortunately, there is nothing we as private lawyers can do for a majority of these people. The problem is not that the law provides no relief. Kansas, in fact, has a set of statutes on the books that makes it illegal for employers to fail to pay their wage-earning employees and penalizes violators. These laws, known as the Kansas Wage Payment Act (KWPA or Act), however, are not adequately enforced. For this reason, we argue here, the law should incentivize private enforcement. The most effective means of doing so is to amend the KWPA to include an attorney fee shift that favors prevailing plaintiffs, i.e., prevailing employees. In the status quo, the KWPA provides for two mechanisms of enforcement. First, the state of Kansas, through the Kansas Department of Labor (KDOL), is authorized to investigate and adjudicate employee wage complaints administratively. Second, the KWPA provides a private cause action for individual employees who are aggrieved under the Act. Even together these enforcement mechanisms have proved unable to vindicate a substantial number of Kansas employees victimized by wage theft. The