Our legal team began looking into the restaurants whose employees kept turning up in our files, and what they found was a widespread, illegal practice of forcing night-shift staff to cover walkouts out of their own wages, and they began, methodically, to do something about it.

In one stretch, the team recovered more than twelve thousand dollars in stolen wages from four downtown restaurant groups, money taken unlawfully from workers and now returned to them.

Those recoveries mattered to me in a way that went beyond the dollar amounts, which were, in the scheme of my mother’s estate, not large.

They mattered because of what they represented, which was the reversal of the exact dynamic that had defined my working life.

For years, the arrow had pointed only one direction: from the powerless to the powerful, from the server’s envelope to the manager’s convenience, wages flowing quietly and illegally upward while the people it was taken from swallowed it because fighting back was more than they could afford.