California Labor Activists Celebrate Wage Theft Bill and Vote to Hike Minimum Wage in Los Angeles County
California’s labor movement notched two significant wins within days of each other this month — a new state law targeting employers who steal wages from workers, and a Los Angeles County vote setting the region’s minimum wage on a path to $15 an hour.
Going After “Deadbeat Employers”
The state legislature approved SB 588, described by advocates as the most comprehensive wage theft legislation California has ever passed, giving the state Labor Commissioner considerably more tools to actually collect wages employers have been ordered to pay but haven’t. The bill, sponsored by Senate leader Kevin de León, directly addresses a problem labor researchers have documented as strikingly severe: a 2013 study by the UCLA Labor Center and the National Employment Law Project found that only 17 percent of workers who won judgments against their employers in wage theft cases ever actually collected any of the money they were owed.
That gap between winning a legal case and getting paid is precisely what SB 588 targets. The new law expands the Labor Commissioner’s enforcement authority to place liens on employer property, pursue judgments more aggressively, and go after what advocates have taken to calling “deadbeat employers” — companies that treat wage theft judgments as a cost of doing business rather than a legal obligation they’re required to actually satisfy. The scale of the problem the bill responds to is substantial: EPI’s research found California workers lost nearly $2 billion in a single year just from being paid below minimum wage, with advocates estimating that Los Angeles County alone sees $26 to $28 million stolen from workers’ paychecks every week.
Labor organizers have long described Los Angeles specifically as ground zero for the problem. “There’s lots of victims in wage theft,” said David Huerta, president of SEIU United Service Workers West, describing wage theft as intertwined with the broader fights over immigrant and economic rights playing out in the same low-wage industries — garment work, restaurants, domestic work, construction, and car washes — where wage theft complaints cluster most heavily, disproportionately affecting immigrant workers, women, and workers of color.
The County Follows the City’s Lead
Days after the wage theft bill’s passage, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to give preliminary approval to an ordinance raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 for businesses in the county’s unincorporated areas — following a nearly identical measure the Los Angeles City Council had already approved in a 14-1 vote back in May. Supervisors Sheila Kuehl, Mark Ridley-Thomas, and Hilda Solis voted in favor; Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe voted against, arguing the wage increase would burden businesses still recovering from the recession.
The county’s ordinance phases in gradually, starting at $10.50 an hour in July 2016 and climbing in annual steps — $12.00, then $13.25, then $14.25 — before reaching $15 in 2020, with businesses of 25 employees or fewer given an additional year to comply. Supervisor Kuehl framed the stakes in blunt terms at the packed meeting: “Many county residents, despite working full time, earn too little in wages to cover even the bare necessities, such as safe housing, healthy food, adequate clothing and basic medical care.”
A Patchwork That Frustrates Even Supporters
The county’s action, welcome as it was to labor organizers, also exposed a genuinely confusing wrinkle in how minimum wage law actually works across greater Los Angeles: because the county’s ordinance applies only to unincorporated areas — pockets of land not governed by any of the county’s 88 individual incorporated cities — a worker’s minimum wage can differ literally block by block, depending on which side of an invisible municipal boundary their workplace happens to sit on. Businesses straddling those lines, and workers moving between job sites in different jurisdictions, have had to navigate a wage landscape that varies not just by city, but sometimes by which specific parcel of land they’re standing on.
Building Toward a Statewide Standard
Both victories landed against the backdrop of a larger fight already underway: negotiations toward a statewide $15 minimum wage, which state senator Mark Leno and labor unions would announce a tentative agreement on the following spring — ultimately signed into law in April 2016, phasing in a $15 statewide minimum by 2022. For labor organizers celebrating this September’s twin wins, the city and county votes functioned as proof of concept, building the political momentum that made the eventual statewide agreement possible, while the wage theft bill ensured that whatever wage floor California ultimately settled on would come with real enforcement teeth behind it.
For related coverage of labor rights organizing in California, see our piece on farmworker overtime pay reaching parity with other industries, or browse our full Labor & Economy archive.