Long Beach is getting an infusion of cash to go after employers stealing from workers

Months after a searing state audit found unused cash and thousands of backlogged cases, California’s Department of Industrial Relations hopes a jolt of new money will revive the government’s ability to combat wage theft in Long Beach and other nearby cities.

The program, titled the Workers’ Rights Enforcement Grant Program, awarded $8.5 million among 17 local prosecutor offices in 12 municipalities across California, including a $414,000 grant to the Long Beach City Prosecutor’s office and $733,351 for the Los Angeles County District Attorney.

The money is intended to invigorate local agencies to meet with community stakeholders, investigate more claims, prosecute culpable employers and help recover unpaid earnings.

Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert said he will use the money to start an anti-wage theft program — a first for his office. The next four months will be spent as a planning phase, to learn “where enforcement is most needed and where violations are most egregious,” Haubert said.

Workers’ advocates say the task at hand is immense.

Wage theft has burdened vulnerable populations for decades, occurring most often when employers fail to pay wages or provide required benefits or breaks. This includes unpaid overtime, erasure of hours worked, nonpayment for work performed. Victims are typically low-wage workers, often immigrants, who work desperately hard for rock-bottom pay in restaurant, retail and construction businesses.

Clytie Causing, director of community action with the Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles, said workers rarely seek recourse from law enforcement officials or the courts, either because they are ignorant of their rights or they fear retaliation.

Those who do try to collect their debt enter an onerous system where claims are difficult to file and even harder to keep track of once they’re processed. Armando Gudiño, the executive director of the Los Angeles Worker Center, said it’s typical for a worker to go to two to four different agencies to file claims, as different forms require different offices.

“It’s a bureaucratic nightmare,” Gudiño said.

Some, even after state regulators rule in their favor, never receive the wages employers are ordered to pay. Among those who do receive back wages, only 12% are awarded the full amount, according to state data.

An example is a 2022 wage theft case in Long Beach, in which the state labor commission levied $5 million in back wages against Adat Shalom Residential Care for the Elderly after it was discovered that 148 workers — many of whom are Filipino — worked 24-hour shifts for as little as $2.40 per hour with no overtime or benefits.

“And that’s only the negotiated amount,” Causing said. “The original amount that was owed to workers was $8 million.”

Even after wage theft was proven, she added, it was difficult to encourage reticent workers to come forward.

“If you file a case, it will take years for it to be heard, so they just say, ‘I don’t want to waste my time, I’ll just move on,’” Causing said.

The system is especially bogged in California. The state’s Department of Industrial Relations, which includes the Labor Commissioner’s Office, set aside the grant funding in May, shortly before the searing state audit found the office has failed in its enforcement against wage theft amid staffing shortages — 35% vacancy rate across Los Angeles and Long Beach as of last June — that resulted in a backlog of 47,000 claims that, on average, take six times longer to resolve than the four months allotted by state law.

The largest backlog of cases and slowest turnaround of investigations were found to be in the state field offices of Los Angeles, Oakland and Long Beach.

As of this month, the Pilipino Worker Center has about 30 pending cases that date back to 2022.

Los Angeles County “is a beast,” where lost wages total more than $28 million a week and funding often doesn’t translate into results, Gudiño said. But Long Beach “has a unique opportunity” to make a lasting impact, he continued, “to build a system that really truly looks at supporting its low-wage worker industry.”

He recommended the city use its grant to fund a “one-stop shop” where workers can quickly file all their complaints and receive a follow-up with community-based organizations “deputized” by local agencies to do preliminary assessments.

“Sometimes it’s a lot easier to have a community-based organization talk to a worker than it is a city agency that, for a variety of reasons, could have issues of mistrust,” Gudiño said.

The city prosecutor’s office is considering something similar to that, Haubert said. It would be an online portal whereby residents can report wage theft, in a similar vein to what’s been created locally for price gouging cases during the pandemic, for fireworks violations and for suspected acts of housing discrimination .

The state has signaled more money may be on the horizon, but what happens if grant funding dries up is unclear.

“We all know there are widespread problems, but we are not going to end it in one year,” Haubert said.

What Long Beach shouldn’t do, Gudiño said, is return to “standard operating procedure,” especially as the greater region prepares for several international events in the coming years. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl LXI in 2027 and the 2028 Summer Olympics will bring the glitz of international tourism and star athletes, but Gudiño sees something different: an estimated shortage of workers amid a multi-billion dollar influx, that could require existing employees to be pushed harder and work longer to meet the demands of the moment.

“Ripe conditions created for wage theft,” Gudiño said.

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