New Provisions Give City Agency More Crime-Fighting Power And& A Wider Scope

“As through this world I travel,

I meet lots of funny men.

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen”

– Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”

On Aug. 12, the LA City Council passed what may be the most significant anti-crime legislation in recent history — provided that enforcement is adequately funded. The crime involved is wage theft, and LA is is the wage theft capital of the country, with low-income workers, who can least afford it, the hardest hit. But justice for the least of these would benefit us all.

“Every year, more than $1.4 billion in wages are stolen from working Angelenos,” said Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, who co-sponsored the new legislation, along with Councilman Tim McOsker. “It’s $1.4 billion, and 88% of those low-wage workers in LA experience some sort of wage theft, and they lose an average of 12% of their annual income due to wage theft.”

Over a decade after Los Angeles first established its Office of Wage Standards to enforce wage and hour violations, the new measure finally gives it a much-needed boost in its enforcement powers. It prioritizes workers earning two-thirds or less of the median household income, and gives OWS the authority to investigate and enforce violations of overtime, meal and rest breaks, and late pay. It also initiates the process for developing targeted enforcement to focus on the worst offenders, which in turn has the potential to change illegal practices more broadly.

With these new powers, McOsker said, “We’ll be stepping in where the state has failed us.”

That failure — with enforcement delayed for years — was made vividly clear in public comments.

“I represent thousands of home care and domestic workers at the Filipino Worker Center,” said Vanessa Melendrez. “They’re waiting years at the state level to get wages that they’re owed, that’s how much of a backlog they have. The city needs to step in,” she said. “We have workers that literally pass away before getting the hundreds of thousands they’re owed.”

“As of 2024, the California Labor Commissioner’s office takes an average of 1,123 days to process claims,” said Bet Tzedek Legal Services attorney Kathy Amiliategu. “This motion does not create a new law, it does not impose new obligations on employers,” she explained. “This motion gives OWS the tools to do its job, nothing more.”

While most people have little awareness of wage theft, both councilmen have been well aware of it for years before taking office, and they’ve worked almost three years to get these changes passed, with strong support from organizations representing the workers involved.

Coming from a labor family, “I have been aware of workers’ struggles and rights since my earliest memory,” McOsker told Random Lengths. “While in law school, my first clerk job was with a labor law firm, and my primary assignment was to research and file claims on mispayments of benefits for union trust funds.”

“While running for council, combating wage theft was a significant issue on the campaign trail,” he said. “Having been aware of wage theft for decades, I wanted to bring that experience to the City Council. That’s why I co-introduced a motion to strengthen wage-theft enforcement across Los Angeles.”

For Soto-Martinez, “Working at a nonunion hotel in college really opened my eyes to how pervasive wage theft can be,” he said. “When you first hear ‘wage theft,’ you might think about someone being paid below the minimum wage. But a lot of the violations are much more subtle and much more widespread — workers being denied legally required meal and rest breaks, not being paid overtime or sick leave, or having hours they worked go unpaid.”

He became a long-time organizer with UNITE HERE! Local 11 prior to his 2022 election. “Over time, I’ve come to understand that wage theft isn’t just a handful of bad employers breaking the rules,” he said. “It’s a systemic problem that affects workers across industries and throughout Los Angeles.”

Random Lengths first covered wage theft as one facet of how port truckers were exploited around 2006. Then, in 2009, the report, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers” from the National Employment Law Project revealed the full scope of the problem in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, America’s three largest cities. Researchers from the UCLA Labor Center contributed to that report, which found that “The framework of worker protections that was established over the last 75 years is not working,” and specifically documented the scope of the problem, noting for example that a quarter of low-wage workers it sampled were paid less than the minimum wage, and that 76% of those who worked over 40 hours weren’t paid overtime.

McOsker reflected on what came into focus as a result. “Wage theft is especially common among low-wage and immigrant workers and in industries where employment is subcontracted, temporary, informal, or difficult to monitor,” McOsker specified. “That includes garment workers, car wash workers, restaurant and hospitality workers, construction and day laborers, and many more.”

“The way wage theft happens varies a lot from sector to sector, but the common thread is that employers take advantage of workers who often have the least power to push back,” said Soto-Martinez. “In fast food, for example, more than 90% of workers in Los Angeles don’t know all of the rights and protections they’re entitled to, which makes it much easier for employers to exploit them,” he said.

“In home care,” he noted problems: “Many workers are immigrants who can be particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they may fear retaliation or deportation.” And, as Random Lengths has long covered, “In the port trucking industry, a major issue is misclassification — workers being treated as independent contractors when they’re actually employees, and being paid per job rather than receiving the wages and protections they’re entitled to.”

“So the details vary,” he summed up, “But the underlying dynamic is the same: employers are exploiting an imbalance of power, and workers are paying the price.”

Workers’ centers organized by industry or ethnicity have played a key role in organizing against wage theft, the varied details Soto-Martinez described and more. Together they’ve created the Workers Center Network.

Their work has been invaluable, McCosker noted.

“Workers themselves deserve the greatest credit,” he said. “Labor unions, worker centers, legal-aid organizations, researchers, and immigrant-rights groups helped turn individual cases into real action by government,” he explained. “Locally, that includes organizations such as the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, Garment Worker Center, Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance [KIWA], UCLA Labor Center, and many more.”

Looking forward, he said, “We’ll need these relationships to strengthen our enforcement. Government cannot identify every workplace violation. Trusted organizations can educate workers, identify patterns within an industry, and connect workers with investigators.”

By way of illustration, KIWA produced a study in February, “Overworked And Under Pressure,” together with the UCLA Labor Center and AAPI Data. It’s a study of Koreatown grocery workers in LA and Orange County, and while wage theft is just one facet of the study, it’s precisely the intertwined nature of the difficulties workers face that makes it both compelling on its own and relevant to the wage theft struggle in particular.

“Workers in our study are vulnerable in several ways,” said Labor Center Research Director Lucero Herrera. “Most are earning low wages and are immigrants. Many have little control over their schedules and their working conditions. They also work in an industry with high turnover, limited worker protections, and few opportunities to advance.”

Underlying all of this is a condition of relative powerlessness, so from one perspective, just fixing the wage theft problem wouldn’t change that. But seen another way, it could be a step toward that end, which is how organizers see it.

“When we compare these workers to the broader workforce in the region, the differences are considerable,” Herrera went on to say. “About 66-68% of supermarket workers earn low wages, compared to about one-third of all workers. While about 34-38% of supermarket workers are immigrants, 94% of the workers in our survey were foreign born.”

“Working conditions also contribute to that vulnerability,” she said. “Workers described long hours, having difficulty taking breaks, and working in conditions that were sometimes unsafe. Nearly one in four workers in our survey said they had felt pressure to work faster than they felt was safe. About one in five experienced verbal abuse by managers, customers, or coworkers.”

On top of that, “Workers in our study also described fear of retaliation and the lack of other opportunities as another factor to consider in terms of vulnerability,” Herrera said. “One of the cashiers we interviewed put it best when they say: ‘Out of necessity, one endures everything — even abuse.’ Some shared that the fear of losing their job keeps them from speaking up.”

Workers in isolation may come to accept things like this as normal, but that need not be, as one young worker described in her public comment.

“I started my first job as a cashier when I was 17, about five years ago,” said Alejandra Roma with the LA Workers Center Network. “There I experienced being paid less than minimum wage, having my tips kept by the employer, working without breaks and not receiving overtime pay. At first I thought I was just unlucky, but after moving to other jobs, I saw that this was a recurring issue, and I saw it again and again.” She saw it as a commonplace harm, “attacking the basic stability and quality of life for the workers and those that depend on them.”

It’s not just individual violations of law and human dignity that organizers are fighting against, it’s this pervasive culture.

“Wage theft is one of the key pieces driving precarity in the sector, along with low wages, unsafe working conditions, lack of benefits, discrimination and harassment, and the low rates of unionization,” said Herrara. “And these conditions can reinforce one another. When workers are already earning low wages, having wages stolen through unpaid overtime, missed breaks, or other forms of wage theft has a significant impact. And when workers are afraid of retaliation, they are less likely to speak up when workplace issues arise, which enables employers to perpetuate wage theft and other labor violations.”

The details may vary in other sectors, as Soto-Martinez says, but the overall dynamic and culture of exploitation is the same. There’s also a culture of impunity among employers, and a culture of minimization or neglect in the media and elite political discourse. All of these cultures need to change.

“Right now, some employers believe the likelihood of being caught is low, that an investigation will take years, or that the eventual penalty will be less than the money they saved by violating the law,” McOsker said. “As long as that calculation remains true, wage theft will continue to be treated as a cost of doing business.”

McOsker is hopeful about what robust enforcement can do. First, he notes, “We should also recognize that most employers want to follow the law. And, a responsible business should not be placed at a disadvantage because another company reduces costs by stealing from its workers.”

“The action we adopted is focused principally on strengthening administrative and civil enforcement, recovering money for workers, and improving our ability to collect judgments.” There’s also help at the state level, he added. “Senate Bill 261 also provides an important new civil tool by allowing penalties of up to three times an unpaid final judgment after 180 days.”

But that’s not all.

“At the same time, we directed our Chief Legislative Analyst to consult with the City Attorney, LAPD, and other departments and report on additional enforcement mechanisms. That gives us an opportunity to examine what further consequences may be appropriate for intentional, repeated, or organized violations.”

Soto-Martinez agreed.

“When employers repeatedly violate the law, there needs to be meaningful accountability,” he said. “Corporations have shown time and again that they won’t change their behavior unless there are real consequences.”

So that kind of enforcement is clearly needed. But, again, the background culture needs to change as well.

“Culturally, we absolutely need to change how we think about wage theft,” Soto-Martinez said. “Petty crimes like shoplifting and vandalism routinely make the nightly news, but wage theft can have an even greater impact on someone’s life. The difference is that it often happens quietly, and the people being harmed are the workers with the least power to fight back.”

This last point is crucial.

“When someone steals from a worker, that can mean missing rent, falling behind on bills, or not being able to feed their family,” he said. The compounding harms can be devastating, and are rarely considered, much less calculated in determining policy, as things stand culturally today.

A key part of changing things culturally is recognizing how we’re all connected, and how wage theft hurts us all.

“The immediate victim is the worker who cannot pay rent, buy groceries, cover a utility bill, or provide for a family because money they earned was withheld,” McOsker said. “But the consequences spread throughout the community. It also harms responsible businesses by allowing competitors to gain an unfair advantage through illegal labor practices.” And beyond that, “It weakens neighborhood economies because workers have less money to spend at local stores and restaurants,” he said. “When we recover wages, that money goes back to workers and families who will generally spend it in their communities.”

In short, an injury to one is an injury to all. And justice for all is the remedy.

Editor’s note: Councilmen McOsker and Soto-Martinez responded to Random Lengths’ questions at length as did UCLA Labor Center researcher Lucero Herrera. Their full interviews are available on our website, along with a collection of extended comments from worker advocates.