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- An undocumented construction worker was paralyzed after falling through a roof in Madison in 2023 while working for contractors that lacked Wisconsin worker’s compensation insurance. He waited for months in a hospital while attorneys and state investigators determined who would be held responsible — a common consequence of informal employment arrangements.
- Wisconsin’s Uninsured Employers Fund ultimately covered the worker’s nearly $1 million claim, including medical care, disability compensation and transportation back to Nicaragua. The fund exists for crises like his, but it does not solve the underlying problem.
- Construction companies account for a disproportionate share of uninsured employer cases, and many businesses dissolve or disappear before regulators can recover costs. Undocumented workers paid in cash often struggle to prove they were employed, making it difficult to access benefits after serious injuries.
- The worker’s injury was never investigated by OSHA. State worker’s compensation systems and federal workplace safety investigators rarely coordinate. Advocates say limited reporting requirements, staffing shortages and poor coordination allow many serious workplace injuries to escape regulatory scrutiny.
Juan can no longer walk. A fall through a Madison auto repair shop roof in 2023 paralyzed him from the neck down.
Juan spent two lonely years in Wisconsin health care facilities while his attorneys and state regulators worked out how to cover his medical bills and compensate him for the abrupt end of his working life.
Like many undocumented immigrants working in construction, Juan found the job repairing a sheet-metal roof in Madison through a blurry relationship between a labor recruiter and a general contractor. Neither had the worker’s compensation insurance state law requires.
The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) investigates thousands of employers each year for potentially violating those requirements. In 2024 alone, investigators issued more than 4,400 penalties totaling $8.7 million against employers for operating without insurance. The penalties flow into Wisconsin’s Uninsured Employers Fund, which compensates injured workers while the state attempts to recoup costs from their employer.
But even identifying his employer after his injury proved difficult, Juan said. Wisconsin Watch is using only part of his name to protect his identity.
While he eventually received compensation, Juan considers his lengthy hospitalization a cautionary tale both for regulators and for fellow immigrants afraid to ask who cuts their checks for fear of losing work. “Sometimes people just work and work without asking questions,” he said, “and that’s what happened to me.”
Meanwhile, disconnects between worker’s compensation systems and federal workplace safety investigators can shield dangerous conditions from scrutiny, leaving more workers at risk of life-altering injuries.
A job with no clear employer
Juan, 40, was one of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who immigrated to the U.S. between 2020 and 2025.
Many fled after police responded violently to widespread protests against President Daniel Ortega’s totalitarian regime. Juan said he headed north to support his family back home.
He waded across the Rio Grande to Eagle Pass, Texas, on an early morning in December 2022.
After a brief encounter with U.S. Border Patrol officers, Juan joined a nephew in Florida. Eager to work and constrained by his lack of work authorization, Juan fit the target demographic for labor recruiters connecting employers in agriculture, construction and food processing with Florida’s then-booming population of newly arrived undocumented immigrants.
A recruiter named Angel connected Juan with his first gig: renovating his nephew’s apartment complex. One job led to another, and he soon found himself crisscrossing the Midwest as an itinerant construction worker.
“One week we’d go to one place in Wisconsin; the next week we’d be in another,” he said.
The work itself was a blur. “Sometimes we’d work up to 13 hours,” he recalled — usually at an unrelenting pace. Wary of asking questions that could cost him a job, Juan said he never fully knew who called the shots. “That’s the problem,” he said. “You start working and you don’t investigate who owns the company…. Sometimes they don’t think it’s good to investigate.”
Juan still didn’t know his employer’s identity when he climbed onto the auto repair shop’s roof on a cloudy Friday in August. The site supervisor hadn’t provided him with a safety harness, he added, so nothing broke his fall when he accidentally stepped through a sheet of insulation.
He fractured his spine upon impact with the concrete floor below.
Juan struggled to remain conscious as the site supervisor debated whether to call an ambulance. “It seemed like he was scared,” he recalled. “Afraid they would cause trouble for him because I had fallen. I kept telling him, ‘Call someone! Call someone! I’m dying!’”
Who pays when a worker is hurt?
Confined to a trauma unit bed at University Hospital in Madison, Juan was in a bind.
Among other looming questions, “there was some doubt about who was going to cover the medical bills,” said Gabriel Manzano, an attorney who represented Juan.
Aaron Halstead, also on Juan’s legal team, estimates that roughly three-quarters of Uninsured Employers Fund claims he pursued over his three-decade career involved undocumented workers. Spanish-speaking worker’s compensation attorneys are few and far between in Wisconsin, and undocumented workers are overrepresented in injury-prone trades.
The types of opaque employment arrangements that left Juan in limbo are especially common among undocumented immigrants, Halstead said.
“They get paid in cash by some guy they may or may not know,” he added, and when disaster strikes, they’re left without an easy way to prove the identity of their employer.
The state denies a claim if a worker or attorneys cannot gather sufficient evidence to identify an employer, said Jim O’Malley, who directs the legal services for DWD’s worker’s compensation division.
“They need to be able to give us something that establishes a relationship (with an employer),” added Aaron Galarowicz, chief of DWD’s uninsured employers fund unit. “Pay stubs are easy,” he said, “but when they’re paid in cash… that’s a little bit more difficult.”
Tracking down the responsible employer requires a degree of “amateur detective” work, he added. Text messages, worksite photos and cellphone location history can all help solve the mystery, Halstead said — or at least create a clear enough picture to bring a claim to DWD.
Leads in Juan’s case pointed to two possible employers: Luis Villafuerte, the subcontractor who brought Juan to Madison, and RestoreMasters, a then-Florida-based contractor in charge of the roof repair.
Neither had worker’s compensation insurance in Wisconsin. Employers sometimes forgo insurance to cut costs, Halstead said. “Some percentage of them end up with injured workers,” he added, “and they hope that no one’s going to do anything about it.”
RestoreMasters, which did not respond to requests for comment, carried insurance elsewhere but failed to get a Wisconsin endorsement on its policy before taking the Madison job, Halstead said.
Not all states offer a fallback. Had he been injured while working for an uninsured contractor while living in Florida, for example, Juan’s only path to compensation would require filing a lawsuit against his employer.
In Wisconsin, however, DWD’s Uninsured Employers Fund could step into the gap as investigators sorted out which contractor to hold accountable.
A million-dollar claim
Passing interactions with fellow Spanish-speaking patients provided Juan moments of comfort during his initial hospital stay. Those connections dried up once he transferred to a medical rehabilitation facility. He had no family or close friends in the area. “I felt alone,” he recalled. “I felt devastated … to not be able to see anyone.”
State investigators reached a decision in February 2024. RestoreMasters was his employer at the time of his injury, DWD determined, so it bore responsibility for failing to secure a worker’s compensation insurance policy in Wisconsin.
By the time the state secured an agreement with RestoreMasters to cover his ballooning medical bills, Juan had another request: a flight back to Nicaragua. With nobody in the U.S. to care for him, returning was his only viable option.
The final payout, including all medical costs, compensation for Juan’s injuries and a chartered flight to Managua, reached nearly $1 million. Only one other uninsured employer — a now-dissolved trucking company in Oshkosh — paid a larger sum to the Uninsured Employers Fund in the past two decades.
Construction dominates uninsured employer cases
Construction firms like RestoreMasters made up a disproportionate share of the uninsured employers that settled with DWD. Roughly one in four businesses that settled with the Uninsured Employers Fund between 2013 and 2023 offered construction or remodeling services. By comparison, the construction industry accounted for one in 14 worker’s compensation claims filed in Wisconsin during the same period, according to DWD data.
But RestoreMasters, a business with a portfolio spanning half the country, wasn’t a typical uninsured employer. “Employers with Uninsured Employers Fund claims tend to be less established than other businesses,” DWD spokesperson Haley McCoy wrote — and difficult to track.
A quarter of the roughly 150 employers that faced Uninsured Employers Fund claims between 2020 and 2025 have since dissolved, Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions records show. Some may have reincorporated under a different name. State records list another 20% as “delinquent,” having failed to file required reports or pay state taxes.
Less than half of employers still incorporated in Wisconsin with names matching Uninsured Employers Fund records have obtained worker’s compensation policies since encountering DWD.
Of the more than two dozen businesses Wisconsin Watch contacted about their experiences navigating Uninsured Employers Fund claims, only one responded: a used car dealership on Milwaukee’s South Side owned by former Greenfield alderwoman Linda Lubotsky.
Her business is among those that have not obtained insurance policies; Lubotsky told Wisconsin Watch that she now runs a one-person operation that isn’t subject to Wisconsin’s worker’s compensation insurance requirement.
Lubotsky called her business’s run-in with DWD as a “witch hunt,” accusing the former employee who filed a worker’s compensation claim in 2024 of fraud and the agency of failing to act as a neutral arbiter. “I spent $15,000 on attorney fees,” she said, “and I’m currently in the appeal process.”
Employers and employees appealing Uninsured Employers Fund decisions first make their case to an administrative law judge. They can then appeal to Wisconsin’s Labor and Industry Review Commission before taking a case to court.
When serious injury escapes OSHA scrutiny
Even as the state investigated and settled with RestoreMasters, the company faced no scrutiny from federal workplace safety regulators after Juan’s fall.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) serious injury records from 2023 contain no mention of the incident, and the agency’s enforcement data shows no penalties against RestoreMasters for workplace safety rule violations.
Federal rules require employers to report workplace accidents resulting in deaths, overnight hospitalizations or the loss of a body part, and employers that fail to report injuries can face financial penalties.
“OSHA can barely enforce those penalties,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and a former Obama administration senior policy adviser for OSHA.
OSHA has six months to fine employers for failing to report serious workplace injuries, Berkowitz said. That deadline, coupled with overwhelming caseloads and a shrinking corps of investigators, allows many cases to fall through the cracks.
Others aware of Juan’s fall could have reported the incident to OSHA. But Wisconsin DWD has “no established reporting process” for sharing information about Uninsured Employers Fund payouts with the federal agency, McCoy wrote.
That disconnect goes both ways. “OSHA doesn’t double-check worker’s (compensation) records,” said Eric Frumin, health and safety director for the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of national labor unions. The agency’s investigations aren’t primarily driven by workplace injuries, he added, so worker’s compensation data would be “a bit out of their wheelhouse.”
Even in states that enforce workplace safety laws through OSHA-approved programs, including Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, regulators do not use worker’s compensation records, Frumin said.
But properly reporting injuries to OSHA doesn’t guarantee follow-up investigations, Berkowitz noted. In 2021, for instance, OSHA compliance officers investigated less than 40% of reports of severe workplace injuries.
A long road back
Juan boarded a chartered flight to Managua last fall. The final leg of his return — an eight-hour drive from the capital to his rural hometown — sapped what remained of his energy.
“I arrived home in terrible shape,” he said. “But I made it back.”
He’ll spend the rest of his life in a house he built with the payout from RestoreMasters. “Nothing fancy,” he said — but with a floor plan he can navigate in a wheelchair.
Know your rights
How to research your employer
What is the legal name of the business you work for? Who owns it? Where is it based?
Search Wisconsin’s corporate records here.
How to check whether your employer has worker’s compensation insurance
Wisconsin requires coverage for employers with three or more employees or those that pay $500 or more in wages during a calendar quarter. The same requirements apply to out-of-state employers.
Click here to check whether your employer has a worker’s compensation insurance policy.
What to do if you’re injured at work
Report the injury or suspected work-related illness to your supervisor, human resources department or other designated employer representative.
Get medical treatment as soon as possible. You have the right to choose your own doctor. Get a doctor’s note detailing your work restrictions and give it to your employer.
Click here for more information from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development about worker’s compensation benefits and filing a claim.
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