With millions lost to wage theft, Mahmood pledges action

Carpenters want to build homes, and aspiring politicians want their support.

But Bilal Mahmood’s route to winning the carpenters’ union’s favor is not a straightforward YIMBY promise to upzone neighborhoods and facilitate new construction.

Instead, Mahmood, who is running for District 5 supervisor against incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston , introduced a proposal on Thursday to combat wage theft by employers.

If elected, Mahmood would introduce legislation that forces anyone applying for a building permit in San Francisco to disclose subcontractors who would work on the project. Having a full accounting of companies on the job site, Mahmood and his backers believe, would help investigators track and root out those who are stealing from workers.

Mahmood supports additional funding for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office to help investigate and crack down on wage theft, which can occur in many forms. For example, an employer can misclassify an employee as an independent contractor, withhold wages, or fail to pay the proper overtime rate.

Wage theft is common in the Bay Area, amounting to more than $1.4 billion every year, according to a new report compiled by Rutgers University researchers. Wage theft is also common on the kinds of job sites where carpenters work, according to the Nor Cal Carpenters Union.

Leaders in San Francisco and California are already growing aware of the problem. City Attorney David Chiu launched a worker protection team within his office and has helped secure civil settlements from companies accused of wrongdoing. Earlier this year, the California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) and the Labor Commissioner’s Office dedicated $18 million to help local prosecutors tackle wage theft.

Part of Mahmood’s pledge is to fight for more funding to hire additional attorneys in the Worker Rights Unit of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

But the resources dedicated to wage theft are insufficient given the scale of the problem, Mahmood argues. When wage theft is reported, “the caseload proceeds at a snail’s pace.” Even when a case is won, the restitution is limited and requires an agonizing wait.

“Most of these wage theft cases, they settle, and when the person settles, they’re also just taking a fraction of their wages that were stolen and in turn the developer gets off scot-free effectively,” Mahmood said. “Bureaucracy has allowed this corruption to persist, when things take so long to get justice for, the bad actors will continue to exploit.”

Ferreting out those responsible for wage theft could also be made easier, Mahmood argues, by having a full accounting of everyone working on a job site, even the lowest subcontractor on the rung. It’s a pressing issue for organized labor in part because subcontractors often use non-union labor.

Jaime Huling, a former deputy city attorney who prosecuted workers’ rights cases in San Francisco and now Oakland, argued that “wage theft is rampant in the Bay Area” and that Mahmood's proposal would make her job easier.

“Its transparency provisions will make local prosecutions faster and cheaper. Sometimes it takes over a year of investigation just to find out that complaints that we’re getting from locations are all about the same employers because their employers are subcontractors and hide behind a general contractor,” Huling said at a press conference announcing the legislation outside City Hall on Thursday.

Workers, too, want a sharpened focus on criminal prosecution of bad actors, arguing that the civil settlements to which companies often agree amount to a slap on the wrist. In other words, a wage theft settlement can be written off as the cost of doing business.

The most vulnerable to wage theft — including immigrants — often don’t feel empowered to report wage theft, according to the union.

“Imagine you’re an immigrant, imagine you don’t know the system, imagine you’re worried just to have a job day to day — you take it on the chin, so to speak,” Huling said.

It’s an issue that applies not only to carpenters, but all kinds of workers, Mahmood said he’s learned in his conversations with union leaders.

“They’re all pretty uniform in that wage theft is one of their top issues,” he said.