Twenty-six laborers who were underpaid for work they performed at subway stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn will be receiving more than $800,000 in lost wages, the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, said yesterday.

Their employer, Florence XVI Century Marble Incorporated, recently pleaded guilty to false filing, in connection with its failure to pay the workers at the required rate.

“That’s money that I worked for,” a tile-setter and one of three aggrieved laborers who appeared at the Hynes press conference, Newton Nairne, said.

Many of the underpaid workers are not members of the union that represented workers for the job, Tile Marble & Terrazzo 7 Local of New York and New Jersey, but all subcontractors on government projects are required to pay the so-called prevailing wage. “Companies which do not pay the prevailing wages steal from their workers and also get an unfair advantage over honest, competing businesses,” Mr. Hynes said.

The prevailing wage for city construction work was set last year at $52.83 an hour, and $69.62 an hour for overtime.

“The investigation found that between January 1, 2001, through December 31, 2004, Florence failed to pay 21 of 26 workers for a total of $878,015.51 on multiple Transit Authority projects. It’s the largest amount of money we’ve uncovered on prevailing-wage investigations,” Mr. Hynes said.

Since 1997, the Brooklyn district attorney and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s inspector general’s office have disposed of cases against 24 corporations, with 14 felony convictions. They have collected more than $4.5 million for underpaid workers as well as a 10% civil penalty for the city, according to Mr. Hynes’s office.

The district attorney said the failure to pay the prevailing wage has long been an “ideal scam for unscrupulous and greedy contractors,” because it helps them “drastically underbid honest contractors” and make windfall profits on city contracts.

While the work at the subway stations was being performed, Florence XVI Century Marble falsified the certified payroll reports its chief executive, Maria Baretta, submitted to the New York City Transit Authority. In these reports she said the laborers were being paid the prevailing wage plus benefits, when in fact many laborers were paid far less – between $160 and $218 for a day’s work – and received no benefits, according to Mr. Hynes.

The deception was discovered by the office of the inspector general, Matthew Sansverie, during the initial phases of a routine audit that included Florence XVI Century Marble. The MTA commissioned five primary contractors to upgrade several subway stations, and those companies subcontracted parts of the job to the Florence firm. The laborers hired by Florence did tile and masonry work at the Port Authority Terminal at West 42nd Street, the DeKalb Avenue station, the Delancey station, and the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station. Because Florence is now out of business, Mr. Hynes said, the money would be claimed from the five primary contractors.