Eddy Polanco Jiménez worked for decades in the Dominican Republic building cabinets and closets—anything, he says, “involving wood.” In 2021, when he was 52, Polanco got a tip from a neighbor that a construction company in Cleveland was hiring tradesmen like him. The pay would be good: $20 an hour to start—better than at home. That September, he bought a plane ticket to New York on a tourist visa.
That is how Polanco came to meet José Miguel Melón Negrón. A contractor that remodeled and built homes under the moniker DC General Construction, Polanco said Melón seemed impressed when, touring a downtown apartment renovation in progress, Polanco stepped in to lend a hand.
“I think he realized how skillful I was,” Polanco recalled. “I remember him saying, “We’re gonna get rich, like, working together.’”
What happened instead was a headache for Polanco that would last four years. Despite days of laboring up to 13 hours at a time, and of repeated text messages, Polanco said he was never paid fully for his work over that four-year span. A recent ruling from small claims court found that Melón, as of early September, owed his former hired hand at least $5,500.
Small court claims are limited to $6,000 and below.
“In total,” Polanco said, “I’m owed almost $12,000.”
Wage theft, the act of an employer withholding pay for any reason, occurs in some form hundreds of thousands of times a year across Ohio, according to researchers. Daycare employees’ paychecks run thin. Servers’ tips go underpaid. Full-time electricians are misclassified as contractors. In Cleveland, in the first two decades of the 21st century, 161 confirmed cases of wage theft, with hundreds of violations, were reported and handled by state authorities.
But those are just confirmed cases, those that almost always begin with a complaint to the state’s Department of Commerce, which many wage theft watchdogs find to be woefully understaffed.
“I think it’s about one investigator per one million workers,” said Heather Smith, a researcher at Policy Matters Ohio who analyzes wage theft cases. “In other words, the bandwidth is limited.”
Cleveland’s had a Fair Employment Wage Board since 2001, when the Michael White administration instituted what soon sat as a passive response to wage theft claims at a city level. Critics say the board was never funded fully. It never convened on a regular schedule. For two decades, they argue, the board sat as a dormant tool at City Hall more formality than utlity.
But progress has been made.
A 2021 campaign from the Guardians for Fair Work nudged the Bibb administration and City Council into activating that seven-person board into a team geared into proactively pursuing claims against shady employers, rather than waiting until complaints land in an investigator’s inbox in the Department of Commerce.
And the person hired to spearhead that crackdown is Elfreda Chatman-Walter.
Chatman-Walter, “Alfie” to friends and colleagues, is Cleveland’s first ever wage theft czar. Chatman-Walter, a former HR director, has spent the first four months in her new job figuring out how to do the one thing the FEWB never could actualize: make it have teeth.
Cleveland had a suite of wage theft protections; but it never had one person to actually ensure they were being enforced.
“It’s what I like to call operationalizing the laws that are in place,” Chatman-Walter said recently, sitting at a table at Lekko Coffee in Ohio City in early September. (Lekko’s owner Matt Ashton is a member of the FEWB.)
“Really I’m just figuring out how to get organized. What does enforcement look like? How do we—we meaning me—work with the board most effectively?” she added. She laughed. “Um, hell, just getting all our forms in place, right?”
One of the most common avenues for employees to get what they think they’re owed is to sue their employer in small claims court. It’s what ex-vendors of Made Cleveland did to founder Ash O’Connor in Cleveland Heights court last year. And what nurses at the Northeast Ohio Neighborhood Health Services did to NEON owner Willie Austin earlier this year, alleging in Cleveland court they were collectively owed thousands in backpay.
But here’s the rub: just because you win a small claims judgment doesn’t guarantee a check will arrive in the mail. Made Cleveland artists told Scene recently that O’Connor has still not paid the thousands Cleveland Heights court declared they were owed. Same goes for some of NEON’s employees, according to those familiar with their case.
What Chatman-Walter believes she could do is preempt the state’s involvement—if it were to investigate—by requesting payroll records of Cleveland businesses she believes may be somehow stealing from or underpaying their workers. She would then get recorded testimony from, say, servers at that deli or nurses at that clinic. Then reach out to that employer to see if they might save face before an accusation ends up on a court docket.
She brought up a recent situation, keeping its details vague. A local restaurant was accused of stealing servers’ tips. Four were involved. As soon as the boss heard Chatman-Walter might be prying into his books, “all of a sudden,” she recalled, “that young woman got a new pay stub in her inbox.”
“I think sometimes just by virtue or the business knowing you’re on someone’s radar,” she said, “that’s enough right there for them to start, like, cleaning up their act.”
Which is not a typical situation.
Last December, 39-year-old Elyse Robinson, a nursing assistant, had a lawyer at Legal Aid, Nicholas Kerr, mail a letter to O’Neill Healthcare in Fairview Park, where Robinson claims she was not paid at least $2,000 for work last July for a mandatory orientation on July 16 and for tuberculosis test she was promised would be covered. Through Kerr, Robinson threatened to take owner David O’Neill to small claims in Rocky River Municipal Court.
There was an “unusual” gap between orientation and Robinson’s first shift, Kerr claimed. Robinson got a handwritten schedule, not an electronic one. In emails to O’Neill, Kerr seemed disappointed Robinson’s past employer was not sending over every single document—the payroll, her personnel file—it was supposed to be keeping.
“While you were firm in your original position that Ms. Robinson is not owed any wages,” Kerr wrote an HR director at O’Neill on December 15, 2025, “the records we received show that that is not true.”
Robinson ended up not taking O’Neill to court. Text messages show Robinson chalked up her lack of pay to mis-scheduling on the hospital’s system and what came down to a breakdown of communication between her and her manager. (O’Neill did not respond to a request by Scene over email for comment.)
“They do owe me the money, I have plenty of documentation that they do,” she told Scene in a phone call.
She seemed skeptical of relying on small claims, or any typical state involvement, of trying to force O’Neill to pay her what she feels she’s owed. “Just because someone puts a lien against someone’s property doesn’t mean that they’re going to get paid either,” she said.
All the more reason Cleveland needs to step in, Grace Heffernan said, to put pressure on the accused outside of the typical system that’s supposed to be resolving it.
Heffernan, a project manager at the Northeast Ohio Worker Center, was instrumental in the Fair Work campaign in 2021 that nudged City Hall to fund Chatman-Walter’s position as wage theft czar. And also urging it to fully enforce its Living Wage Law, that forces employers with city contracts to pay at least $16.26 to their workers; and the Pay Transparency Law, which requires all job postings in Cleveland to be clear what prospective employees are to be paid.
That 2021 campaign opened up Heffernan’s eyes to the state politics she feels have put a stopgap on truly holding bad businesses to account.
“Our system works exactly the way it’s supposed to,” Heffernan said. “Which is to say that workers must be exploited in order for our economy to run.”
“It’s just not a priority” for them, she added. Cleveland therefore needs someone like Chatman-Walter to “step up and fill the gap,” she said.
But will Chatman-Walter’s crackdown, and her plan to soon advertise it to Cleveland’s workers, be enough to scare employers? She said a public dashboard of some sort, designed to name local businesses proven to have kept pay from their employees, is part of her agenda.
And if public outing doesn’t nudge them?
“We take them to court,” she said. “Simple as that.”
The legal distinctions are confusing to both Chatman-Walter and Heffernan. Say you were to steal $2,000 worth of clothing from a store. You would likely be arrested, arraigned in county court, charged with felony theft and, if convicted, spend some time in prison or face other repurcussions.
A fact of reality that irks Heather Smith, the policy analyst. To her, relying on small claims or a strong-armed phone call is too little of a punishment for businesses that, in many cases, may be stealing wages from more than just one employee. The median number of wage violations for the 20 Cleveland companies with the most infractions? About 100.
“We need to have a mechanism in place, when employers steal from workers, it’s treated as criminal,” she said. Instead “we’re letting employers just treat wage theft as the cost of doing business.”
A view of his case Eddy Polanco Jiménez isn’t okay entertaining.
Lately, at a diner downtown, Polanco detailed his small claims win against DC Construction as bittersweet. Sure, a court sided with him, but it has not yet, as of early October, moved Melón into paying in full what that court ordered to be paid. Polanco is still owed roughly $4,900.
Though Polanco has a new job, the rift that began in December 2021 still seems to enrage him.
In a phone call with Scene, Melón said he had no grievances with Polanco, and said he lauded him as a worker and as a person. He denied that he ever offered to sponsor a work visa, and continually restated his efforts to repay through Cleveland’s court system.
“My plan is maybe in two months, full pay complete,” Melón said. “Honestly, it’s good. It’s no problem.”
Polanco can’t let bygones be bygones.
“He exploited me; I mean, he took advantage of me,” Polanco said, wearing a sun hat and a neon vest speckled with paint. “I pushed back. I didn’t want to work Saturdays. He says yes. Then, he says we’re falling behind. He says no, then stops paying me.”
“I stayed because of a promise he made to me,” he added. “Because he was helping me get documentation through his company. I stayed for that reason.”
“And you know what?” he said. “Everything fell through, because it was a lie.”
Cleveland-area employees can file a claim of wage theft on the website of the Fair Employment Wage Board.
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