New York state Senate Democrats are advancing legislation that aims to enhance workplace protections and combat wage theft, they revealed Tuesday.

The package of legislation includes measures that would:

• prohibit employers from delivering coercive severance ultimatums to employees and former employees reviewing severance agreements, and provides employees ample time to review such agreements
• amend the Workers’ Compensation Law (WCL) to increase short-term disability benefits provided in the form of Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) weekly cash benefits, and expands disability and paid family leave coverage
• create grounds to allow wage theft victims to seek attachment of employers’ assets during court action pendency, and amends the business corporation law and the limited liability company law to streamline procedures allowing employees to hold shareholders and owners personally liable for wage theft
• require employers of domestic workers to provide annual paid sick leave to such workers
• expand protections for employee payroll funds by establishing the crime of the misappropriation of payroll funds
• bolster employee protections against wage theft by clarifying that all bonuses and other forms of employment remuneration that are not purely discretionary count as wages
• authorize the state commissioner of labor to issue a stop-work order for employers that have misclassified their employees or that have misrepresented to insurance companies their employee count

“New York’s workforce is the engine that drives our economy, and they deserve fair wages, safe working conditions, and strong protections. This legislative package cracks down on bad actors who take advantage of workers with little consequence, marking another step forward in the fight against wage theft and workplace exploitation,” state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said.

The state Department of Labor reported in a budget hearing last week that the state wage theft causes workers to lose $3 billion combined each year, said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, chair of the Senate Labor Committee.

“That is missing from our streets, that is money missing from our local economy," Ramos said.