Reclamo.AI, a free workplace-rights chatbot developed by New York nonprofit Scale Justice, is slated for a national expansion after the organization received a $5 million grant. The tool has helped more than 5,000 people and supported over $1.5 million in lost-wage claims in the past year and a half, according to amNewYork's reporting.
The $5 million grant will support the team behind Reclamo.AI, which amNewYork describes as a legal AI tool that connects workers with legal resources. The chatbot answers questions about workplace rights in English and Spanish and can direct users to attorneys when needed. The outlet reports that Reclamo draws exclusively on material from legal assistance groups and that more than 5,000 people have used it in the past 18 months. Read amNewYork’s report.
The grant comes from the Workplace Innovation Now Challenge, a $60 million competition run by the Aspen Institute that drew nearly 900 applications from organizations across the country and U.S. territories, according to a PR Newswire announcement. The challenge organizes its 18 awardees, announced in October 2026 with grants of either $2.5 million or $5 million, around three pillars: Culture & Practices, AI, and Narrative, the Aspen Institute notes.
A Long-Running Project, With a Larger Reach in View
Scale Justice plans to use the award to expand Reclamo beyond its New York City base, with workers in fields such as retail, food service and home hospitality among the intended users, amNewYork reports. The plans include hiring staff and increasing outreach. The expanded service is intended to help users document workplace problems and prepare information for their cases, according to the outlet.
The plans described by amNewYork also include helping workers navigate claims to agencies such as the Department of Labor and the Human Rights Commission. The tool could offer information on workers’ rights struggles and support people seeking to organize coworkers, in addition to answering questions and helping users assemble evidence, the report says.
Where New York Wage Complaints Go
For New York workers, the agency responsible for a complaint can depend on the issue. The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection directs minimum-wage, overtime and other wage-theft complaints to the New York State Department of Labor, distinguishing those claims from local laws handled through the city’s own complaint portal, according to the city’s filing guidance.
Scale Justice’s Rodrigo Camarena, who previously worked at Mixteca, developed Reclamo after seeing workers struggle to obtain legal help, according to amNewYork. Camarena said the funding would expand the tool’s impact and help it reach thousands more workers. The project is designed to serve women, immigrant workers and people who do not speak English—groups the outlet describes as especially vulnerable to workplace exploitation and wage theft and less likely to have access to an attorney or legal advocate.
Connecting Workers to Legal Help
The New York Legal Assistance Group partners with Scale Justice on Reclamo. Mel González, NYLAG’s Employment Law Project director, said the tool should do more than inform workers of their rights, amNewYork reports. The organizations plan to strengthen links between users and legal advocacy networks as the service expands. Scale Justice has framed Reclamo as a way to connect workers with lawyers, not replace them.
Reclamo isn't a brand-new idea — it became publicly available as an AI-powered tool more than a year before this latest grant was announced, per amNewYork's reporting. Earlier project documentation, including from the Access to Justice Lab, traces the chatbot's roots to a 2022 launch that helped New York City workers and non-lawyers navigate city, state and federal wage-and-hour laws. That earlier version was also built to connect users with legal aid lawyers and workplace advocates, and the lab reports that as of December 2025, Reclamo was already available in more than 50 languages across all employment-law areas.
Privacy Promises and the Scale of Wage Theft
Developer documentation from Justicia Lab, which launched an earlier beta of the tool, states that Reclamo strips personally identifiable information from user data, anonymizes it, and deletes it from the system every 48 hours, and that the tool does not use or share user data to retrain its AI. A separate page from LawHelpNY adds that users do not need to share their name or immigration status to use the free, 24/7 chatbot, which is accessible on its website and through WhatsApp.
The stakes behind the project are large. A 2024 Economic Policy Institute report cited by the Access to Justice Lab found more than $1.5 billion in stolen wages recovered for workers nationally between 2021 and 2023 through federal, state and local efforts. Separately, Next City reports that U.S. workers lose an estimated $50 billion to wage theft every year, with an estimated 2.1 million New Yorkers cheated out of $3.2 billion in total.
Next City's earlier reporting also traces the chatbot's origins to a tool called ¡Reclamo!, which was co-designed with Make the Road New York before four more New York organizations joined the development process. That early version, optimized for construction workers though usable by others, emerged from a three-year design process and an eight-month pilot; within six months of informal testing, participating organizations filed more than $1 million in wage-theft claims with the state Department of Labor. Justicia Lab said at the time it hoped to eventually make the tool available nationally — a goal now echoed in Scale Justice's expansion plans backed by the new $5 million grant.
