My spouse works for a small clothing company. She and 2 of her coworkers are immigrants on OTP visas so they do not have many options for jobs. Their boss, the owner/manager of the clothing company has already done some blatantly illegal things such as make jokes about jews (my spouse is jewish and the owner is german soo uhh yikes there), asking personal details about employees' personal lives, telling an employee not to share her salary, stating out loud that she will not hire men to work for her, and installing cameras with sound recording. This is on top of being verbally abusive towards the employees causing most of the americans employed to quit.
The workspace is in the basement of building and on Thursday the basement caught on fire (thankfully no one was there). The basement is full of cardboard boxes and materials for making the clothing. On Friday the boss informed the workers about the friday but that everything was fine and that they should still come into work. Everyone (5 employees) refused and she relented. Now she is withholding people's paychecks and won't pay for any of the time everyone is missing due to the fire.
No one has a written down contract and they are all paid via venmo so my spouse and her coworkers believe they have no recourse to obtain the lost wages due to the fire.
I'm hoping someone may have some advice for them. This job is in NYC by the way.