Labor And Employment — 2026-04-29 (partial)

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Actually, before we do that, Assemblymember Calra, would you like to make some comments? Thank you to our wonderful co-chairs. And I'll just simply say that, you know, we need to do more of this when we actually pass legislation to actually follow up to see if it's working, to see how it can work better. And so I'm very grateful that this hearing is being held. And secondly, as indicated by Chair Ortega, the number one form of theft is wage theft. And we put so much time and energy in this building. our colleagues, stakeholders, and special interests outside the building and the media put so much attention on retail theft, while the number one clearly form of theft is wage theft, and we don't nearly spend enough time focusing on that. And so I'm so grateful that that is happening today, and I really hope that our colleagues will also learn lessons from today in terms of what we need to do to combat the greatest

Good morning, Assembly members. It's a dream to be able to be in front of you today to talk about my favorite topic in the world, which is wage liens. My name is Tia Koontz. I am now actually Policy Director of the UCLA Labor Center, which I'm very excited to be. First one so far. But I also teach this at UCLA. So I teach labor and employment law, sometimes in the law school, sometimes to our undergrads. And whenever I teach it, I like to tell my students that the truth of the matter is that enforcement of our wage and hour laws and our labor standards generally is actually the honor system, really. There's just not a world in which we're going to have so many investigators in any agency that we have a credible threat of a compliance check. And you have a compliance officer parachute into the workplace randomly in order to be able to conduct a spot check. Instead, we are the frontline defense. We are ourselves as workers, right? So I'm going to talk today about creating a culture of compliance through leverage that's available as early as possible in the process of wage theft. So I'll talk about settlement negotiations and creditors remedies. The Assemblywoman already went through kind of some of the biggest data points about the intractability of wage theft. You have a presentation in front of you. Like I said, I teach this, and so I like to be able to go off of slides that I'm really intimately familiar with. But overall, I would say the heavy hitters are 8 in 10 folks experience wage theft who work in low-wage industries. We know that 20% of Californians are earning less than minimum wage. If you add together just the three major metro areas, which is San Diego, the Bay, and L.A., researchers estimate $4.6 billion a year stolen from workers. And then we see an increase. I'm so sorry about the weird typo from the conversion from Google Slides to the PowerPoint. But actually, we see that one study shows an increase of 56% in wage theft just between the years 22 and 23. And obviously, it has dramatically disproportionate impacts on vulnerable folks. So we think that in L.A., more than half of Latinas in L.A. are earning less than the minimum wage. And young and immigrant worker, for example, is twice as likely to make less than minimum wage as his or her U.S.-born counterpart. Now, when you experience wage theft, you've got three basic options, right? You can go to court. So if your case is greater than $10,000, good luck finding a lawyer. If it's less than $10,000, you can take your boss to court in small claims. Good luck there, too. You can go to BOFI, right, the Bureau of Field Enforcement. You can file a whistleblower claim, which I'm sure you'll hear a lot about today. You can also, in addition to BOFI, file a claim, your own claim at the Wage Adjudication Unit. And I've put the steps for the Wage Claim Adjudication Unit onto this slide so you can see. But what you'll note, there's eight of them, right? And so time is on the employer's side. The eight steps are you file your claim, then the DLSC will send out a notice to your employer and schedule a settlement conference. The settlement conference occurs. If you can't settle, then you'll get a notice of a hearing. Then you'll have a hearing with a hearing order, decision or award that's issued. If neither party decides that they're gonna go ahead and contest, that, then within 10 days, that gets converted to a final judgment. And then until SB 588, the worker was largely on her own going out to enforce that judgment on her own. We'll talk a little bit about what that looks like in a second. But I want to emphasize from that very first step, it's important to think about opening the door to settlement and to think about how you're going to force that employer to be able to make good on their promise to you. So in looking at the previous slide, understand that 72% of the employers in the wage claim process pay at some point. We're talking about the most intractable employers who comprise the great majority of employers in low wage industries. Those who are going to pay, pay early and often. We're talking about here, the roughly 13% of folks who don't pay without a judgment or who aren't dismissed. So you'll look at this slide, and this is from your own audit just a couple of years ago, and you can see that about 44% of cases get dismissed. Maybe the worker has walked away. Maybe she's able to resolve the complaint on her own outside of the labor commissioner's office. 34% get paid before a judgment. So again, an employer who wants to pay is going to do so early and often, right? And my colleagues will tell you about the value of the threats that SB 588 has added to get those settlements, those 34% of settlements to get them higher and to get them earlier and more often. So it's working in the private bar. It's also working at the labor commissioner's office, which I'll talk about in a moment. Now let's talk about real briefly what I mean when I say judgment enforcement. So employers get away with it because time's on their side. It takes years from the date that you file your claim to the date of you get a hearing. What we know is that by the time an order decision or award is issued against an employer. And again, that's an intractable employer. That's an employer who has not settled, right? So that's one of that 13% that goes all the way to judgment. 60% of them are out of business by then. So you're holding a piece of paper against a company that you have to go track down if they fraudulently transferred their assets. It's also because of Fisher employment relationships. So we're all working for, I think all of us here might be working for the state, right? But let's say I'm cleaning this building. I'm not getting a paycheck from the state. I'm getting a paycheck from a paycheck company that is retained by the contractor that's retained by the higher contractor that's retained by the higher contractor that services this building. It's one example of Fisher and employment relationships. Others are franchising. Others are high temp workers, et cetera. It just makes it way harder for a worker to figure out who her employer is and how to hold them to task. Employers can also ignore the process all the way down the line. So if a worker doesn't show up to a hearing, if a worker doesn't show up to one of these settlement conferences. If a worker doesn't do any of these things, she loses her claim. But if an employer does, if an employer ignores it all the way down the line, they don't suddenly get a default judgment, right? And there are a couple of fixes to that. We see that Senator Lola Smallwood Cuevas' SB 1316 this year would prevent employers from using evidence that they haven't turned over against a worker in a hearing. But they can just ignore or abuse the process by showing up to the hearing surprise with records that they hadn't turned over previously. And then the last part is collections is so, so hard. So I liken collections to making a teenager clean their room. If you have a teenager, you've ever been in charge of one, you know, they will just call your bluff and you need leverage. Collections is different from judgment enforcement. And let me tell you why I think that's important. I think that's important because from practitioners' perspective, thinking of this as collections helps you understand how things play out on the ground right A worker is a creditor just like the bank right Just like Chase Credit Card Company to whom I owe all this money And I don know about you guys but it's really easy for me to ignore a phone call from a debt collector. So that's a worker. Workers gotta start thinking like a debt collector from the beginning. A worker's always trying to collect way before she gets to judgment phase, right? And most collections work is actually based on the threat that you are gonna sue, the threat that you are gonna get that judgment, right? So judgment enforcement can mean specifically using legal tools to seize assets or to seize income. By the time you get to a judgment, the likelihood you're going to recover something has dramatically diminished. Right. So we're thinking of collections. We being the worker, we being the worker advocate, we being the state. We're thinking of collections right from the very beginning. Now, let's talk about what SB 588 did differently. So I said SB 588 lets the labor commissioner act like a creditor. This is also true of AB 1897 and other efforts that this body has passed in recent years to try to close that loop in the Fisher and employment relationship, right? So you're holding the deeper pockets accountable all the way up the food chain to the garment company, right, to the actual retailer or the company that hired the temp agency, et cetera. What 588 did is let the worker think like a creditor and let the labor commissioner collect like a creditor, have all the tools that the banks have. So you can name every person who is responsible. So you can name individuals. You can name joint employers. You can name shareholders, officers, et cetera. You can name successors. That is all available. You can also place a prejudgment lien on the property of any of those folks at the beginning of the process. So in the event that under 238.5, you've got an employer that has an outstanding judgment against them. There's somebody who refused to pay, refused to settle, ignored the judgment. You can place a lien on the property of that employer if you're the judgment enforcement unit of the labor commissioner's office. My understanding they've placed a few hundred. But even the threat of that lien is so powerful because what a lien does is follow the property no matter where it goes. So if you get a lien filed on your house, not that that's ever happened to me. It did happen one time. I had contractors come to my house, and I did not know that the contractor had not paid the day laborers, and they placed a lien on my house. And you better believe as soon as I found that out, I got that worker paid that day, right? And that worker's claim was only for $330, but he could have mortgaged my, or he could have actually filed for a sale of my house to recover that $330. So that's the power of a lien. And the earlier you place it on a property, the less likely that property is to disappear during the process of proving the claim. You can also require employers to get a bond so that there's just an asset, a tangible asset there. They've posted a bond for wages owed in car wash, in garment, in construction, in agriculture. These are longstanding requirements. SB 588 created a bond requirement for existing judgment debtors. We see that bonds are very effective in construction, where the state contractor's licensing board posts the bond numbers publicly. And then you can also put anything that the employer has that's of value into receivership. So you can file a motion for receivership. The SB 588 didn't actually change this, but this is something that the unit can do now that it's got more staff. And receivership means I'm taking that asset and I'm holding it in trust until the case gets decided. So I've done this with like a liquor license where there was a day laborer who didn't get paid renovating a couple of bars in Hollywood And I took the liquor license and I got it held in receivership And the day that I got that liquor license in receivership that worker got paid And this was a seven claim right So receivership is super powerful. Locate the source of the money as soon as you can. You want to also get in line, establish order and priority of bankruptcy, right? Which SB 588 did, which means that if the employer does file bankruptcy, like I said, 63% of them are out of business by the time the ODA comes around. So a lot of them will have filed for bankruptcy. the worker can take their place in line so that they don't go to the end of the line behind the banks, behind the credit card companies, behind all the other like, you know, more sophisticated financial actors. And then lastly, just finding these pain points, right? So revoking licenses, revoking permits or debarring, whatever's going to cause that employer to suffer is what's going to give you the leverage to make that teenager clean their room, to make that employer do something they never wanted to do in the first place, which is pay you for the work you did. SB 588 did create the ability to revoke the licenses of nursing homes. So my colleagues are going to talk to you today about using those efforts. I wanted to just show you some of the data here. Oh, and then also SB 588 create the ability for the labor commissioner's office to levy creatively. Okay. So a lien is a passive remedy, right? A lien just sits on the property as like a little flag so the property can't disappear. A levy is actively going to take it. So there's a bunch of different kinds of levies. There's a mail levy, which the labor commissioner can do on the bank account that employer. They can take it directly from the bank. There's a till tap where you take it out of the till. There's a keeper where the sheriff stays there all day long and all the money that's supposed to go into the register goes to the hands of the worker, goes to the sheriff to give to the worker. The labor commissioner now can levy directly through the mail using SB 588. And that has dramatically increased the chances that a worker is going to get paid of a final judgment. So this reflects pre-588, post-588. And we see that we, of those cases, that 13% of folks who refuse to settle all the way down the line, pre-588, only about 15% recovered anything. Post-588, almost 25% are recovering something. That to me, in 10 years, during which we've had this enormous backlog, during which we've had a pandemic, is a really significant increase in amount collected. So I argue that SB 588 is working great, but of course I have suggestions on how to improve it. But I will stop talking and pass it on to my colleagues who are going to talk about the experience of enforcing outside of the judgment enforcement unit. So this 76% of folks who choose not to have their judgments enforced by the labor commissioner and instead have a private advocate or enforce themselves. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting us here to testify. Not only do I supervise the workers' rights practice, and we have weekly clinics, I also am the supervising attorney of the legal advice line for our OLSC. We do clinics in the community. We're part of the Rural Strategic enforcement and also CWOP. So I see a lot of workers every day. I going to discuss how the tools that SB 588 provided have made existing enforcement mechanisms easier to use and have added expanded powers why these tools are less effective in the care home industry and what general recommendations I would propose to strengthen SB 588, not only for care homes, but also for all industries. When workers obtain a final judgment, as you've heard, many employers do not pay or attempt to shift or shield assets and dissolve their corporate form, all in an attempt to make themselves judgment-proof. In response to these difficulties, as you know, California enacted SB 588 and gave the JEU new enforcement tools. And the statistics and numbers I'm using are from Public Record Act requests. The JEU is one of the Labor Commission units with the highest retention rate and the fewest vacancies. It has filled 92% of its positions and only has two vacancies. Despite its small staff of seven lawyers and 23 investigators, the rate of recovery of judgments from the enactment of SB 588 is 46%. And as you've heard, 72% of wages are paid, wage theft judgments are paid, but the cases that remain are the most difficult and most labor-intensive cases, affecting the most vulnerable workers with many cases involving fraudulent transfers, corporate shell games, and successor liabilities. One of my big focus is on the care home industry, and unfortunately, none of the SB 588 tools are particularly effective in obtaining wages owed to care home workers. And the few times that they were effective, the JEU had to conduct lengthy, resource-intensive investigations and use multiple enforcement tools. One of the SB 588 tools that has been most successful is the mail levy, as you've heard. SB 588 made them easier to deploy by making the labor commissioner instead of the sheriff be the levying officer. Although the Labor Commission or the JEU has issued an impressive 15,826 levies, again from the PRA, male levies are less effective in residential care because residential care homes have a high concentration of very thinly capitalized businesses with low startup costs. These businesses are more likely to have no assets or, in almost every case, employers transfer their assets or businesses to new entities to evade debt. Money may still be recovered through resource-intensive administrative actions or civil legal actions against successor entities, recipients of fraudulently transferred assets or other third parties. As you heard another one of the tools is liens The JEU records liens in every single case The JEU has recorded an impressive 5 liens on real property since 2021 and 2 liens on personal property 306 mechanics liens which was the lien that Tia talked about and four crop leans That a very new law So that important In the care home industry care homeowners regularly transfer ownership as I said to new entities or people before a judgment is issued. In these cases, filing a judgment lien is ineffective, so the JEU has to bring a fraudulent transfer or alter ego case in civil court. In Tess Brillante's case, as you'll here later, the care homeowner transferred ownership to an administrator. The JEU has recorded 129 pre-judgment liens under Labor Code 238.2 and 238.3, including five in care homes. However, and this is a real problem, as you've heard, with regard to pre-judgment liens, they can only be used against employers that have an existing unpaid judgment when the new claim is filed. We would like to get rid of that requirement. Since most businesses with a judgment end up shutting down or transferring ownership, there are fewer instances in which the JEU can issue these liens before a judgment is entered. As mentioned, SB 588 provided new tools for imposing liability on individuals and successors, and you heard about upstream liability through joint and several liability. Successor liability and individual liability have been game changers for me and for the workers I represent. Individual liability has been the impetus for settlement in my cases involving restaurant and hotel workers, day laborers, and even on occasion care home workers. Solely on the basis of successor liability, I settled a case against a hotel restaurant with a Labor Commission mediator, and they have excellent mediators that involve both unpaid retaliation and wage theft judgments and 14 defendants. However, cases involving care homes are resource intensive for the JEU because, as I have mentioned over and care homes transfer ownership to evade debt. And I was just talking to Tess and she regaled me with a number of care homes that have done that and how they've done that. Joint and several liability is effective in the property industry, as you've heard, but it's less useful in the long-term care industry since employers don't typically outsource services. Stop work orders are the most effective tool that SB 588 has. And that's true in the care home industry. However, there are problems in the care home industry that I'm going to talk about in a minute. The JEU has issued 84 stop work orders since 2021. In one of our cases against, of all names, Crazy Buffet, a restaurant that changed owners 21 times, JEU was able to close the restaurant, and they actually sent me 21 times. The last one was a student at UCLA, and when they close it down, they send me a picture of clothes. And I also coordinate a wage theft coalition, and we had a lot of actions in front of Crazy Buffet. So SB 588 created a new mechanism for holding long care and health care employers accountable Under Labor Code Section 238 this is really important the State Department of Social Services has the ability to deny new or renewed licenses for judgment debtors who are licensed through those departments. However, because the law is permissive instead of mandatory, what is happening is JEU dutifully sends a list of wage theft judgments and care homes to Department of Social Services every single month. And that's required by statute. And the department takes no action. It just completely ignores them. And care homes are more likely, this would be the best tool, are more likely to pay wage theft judgments if they fear that they'll be ordered to shut down. And I want to give an example from Santa Clara County. And this was something that the Wage Theft Coalition advocated for and we got. Beginning in 2019, Santa Clara County OLSC gained the power to suspend retail food health permits for employers with unpaid wage theft judgments. and actually close them down. This program has been so successful at returning stolen wages to workers that the county in all those years only had to close one business and only for one week, and they paid because they wanted to stay open. Last year, Assemblymember Ortega introduced AB 485, which was modeled after the Santa Clara County program and would have required all state agencies to deny new and renewed licenses for employers with unpaid wage theft judgments. It was unfortunately held in the Senate Appropriations Committee. However, AB 485 would have offered a powerful incentive for employers to satisfy wage theft judgments and prevent future wage theft. To conclude, the JEU has made impressive strides in collecting wages for workers since the enactment of SB 588. More staff and amendments to SB 588 will enable JEU to put more money in the pockets of workers with unpaid wage theft judgments. For care home workers, there must be improvements to the law to ensure that employers in the industry aren't acting with impunity. and I'll be happy to share my eight recommendations at the appropriate time. Thank you.

50 other, well, not 50, but let's say 14 others that they have. So they're habitual offenders, and yet you can't get at them. And this would be the most powerful.

Yes. My eight-point plan. Okay. All right. One, amend Labor Code Section 238.4 to allow the JEU instead of DSS to issue mandatory stop orders to care facilities and develop a process with DSS to close the care home and transfer patients as is done when there is elder abuse or sanitation issues. They don't seem to have a problem then, but all of a sudden now they want to keep them open because wage theft isn't important. Just real quick for those, you know, who might be watching this hearing later and don't really understand the acronyms, do you mind naming the agencies? Oh, Judgment Enforcement. Sorry. Judgment Enforcement Unit. DSS is the Department of Social Services. Thank you. Sorry. No, it's okay. And I know, yes, acronyms are difficult. So enact a bill comparable to AB 485. In other words, I would like the original version of that bill. Fund more JEU positions. There are 20 local Labor Commission offices in the state. There should be at least three JEU positions in every office. And if they start early and they really work with the deputies, we would see even more of a collection rate. The budget committee is considering 14. I mean, it's good to have even 14, but that's not enough. And that, as you've heard, a prejudgment lien like a mechanics lien. And like Tia, I've had great success. I mean, they call and say, where can I bring the money? Remove, and you've heard this one, remove the reference to Labor Code 238, which is the prior unpaid wage theft judgment. So 238 and 3 incorporate by reference 238 which refers to the pre unpaid judgment Amend Labor Code 238 upstream liability provision to include more industries beyond property services and long care businesses Seven for care homes amend 238.5 or pass another statute to impose wage liability on whoever owns the real estate that the care home operates on. That would make a huge difference. And I was just talking to the worker you're going to hear from, Tess, about how many of the care homes are owned by others, because that owner will get on that care home and make them pay. And finally, and this is very similar to what Tia was saying, expand license revocation provisions to include the revocation of liquor licenses in the face of unpaid wage judgments and ensure that any forced sale of the license gives preference to the employee's wage claim. So those are the eight points.

Sorry. I just wanted to make a clarification because I know earlier you had mentioned the receivership for the liquor license.

Absolutely.

Sure. So that was an example of individual wage claims, although there's also, you know, ongoing investigation into the practices of at Winko. So, but this was an individual wage claim that we received assistance also from Legal Aid at Work on, and they were able to indicate responsibility up the chain to WinCo to make sure that when it came time to get that ODA, that WinCo understood their responsibility and wanted to make that go away. And I think that's what I talked a little bit about with Optum, too. We did a public press conference in front of Optum to highlight what was in the law, which is you can't wash your hands of the responsibility for the violations by the contractor who you hired, who is doing cleaning in your buildings, that you need in order to have a functioning urgent care, for example, or a functioning grocery store that's hygienic. And so it is the understanding of their liability under the law, and it's also the potential threat of knowing what these tools are that is going to force you to pay anyway. That makes the relationship in the industry is the client is the boss. The client is setting the amounts and who gets the bid when they put a contract out to bid. And so, you know, if you are putting out a bid for janitorial contracting services and one of your contractors comes in at half the price of the other bidders, you should know that something's going on there, right? You should know that there's no way you can get that work done without those costs coming off of the backs of workers. And so this law both in the individual wage claim arena and in the Bureau of Field Enforcement where the whole company is being investigated by the Labor Commissioner's office says you as the client don't get to pretend like you didn't know what was happening or you should have known what was happening there. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Tess Briante, and I've been a caregiver in RCF for seven years. And I stand before you today, not only for myself, but for many caregivers who continue to suffer in silence. I want to share my story. This is not just my story, but our reality. I have experienced abuse and many hardships in this line of work. There were times when I was paid less than minimum wage. I was only paid for eight hours, even though I was working 12 hours. Imagine that four hours of unpaid labor every single day. And it does not stop there. When I wake up in the middle of the night to change patients' diaper or help them to go to the bathroom, I am not paid for that. We are not paid for our breaks our meal times and even sick leave So for us it is simply no work no pay If you get sick you don get paid If you get injured on the job, you rest, but without pay. Some caregivers I know are even asked to clean swimming pools or take care of gardens with no pay. We also do not receive proper benefits for workers' compensation. This is our reality. Sometimes I ask myself, when will we be valued? We give so much of ourselves, not just our physical strength, but our hearts. We care for people as if they are our own family. But why does it feel like we are the ones who are not valued? And when we try to stand up for ourselves, when we try to file claims at the Labor Commission, it is very difficult. It is intimidating. It is exhausting. Many of caregivers are afraid to speak up and file claims, afraid of losing their jobs, afraid we will not be hired again, or afraid of retaliation. But I am here today on behalf of all caregivers. Please hear us. Please help us make the process of filing wage claims at the Labor Commission faster, clearer, and more fair. Hold abusive employers accountable. Ensure that every hour we work is paid. Even when caregivers win their cases and receive judgment, the struggle is not over. Collecting that judgment is very hard. I was fortunate because I was able to get paid. But many caregivers never see a single dollar of what they are owed. Employers know there will be no real consequences if they refuse to pay. The state will shut down care homes for human trafficking or unsafe and sanitary conditions, but not for failing to pay wage theft judgment, even though the law allows it. Care home owners should not be allowed to keep their licenses if they do not pay what they owe. Without accountability, there is no incentive for them to stop committing wage theft. And this is what I always say to my fellow caregivers. Do not be afraid. I know it is hard. I know it is scary, but we have rights. Let us file cases against abusive employers. Let us fight for wages we have rightfully earned, not just for ourselves, but also for all the caregivers who will come after us. because we deserve dignity, we deserve fairness, and we deserve justice. Thank you very much.

name is Daniela urban from the Center for workers rights and we represented Marta Leppin Martinez and hundreds of other workers and their wage claims with the labor commissioner we are based here in the Sacramento area I'm here to share how the tools created by SB 588 have helped recover wages for workers and why the continued investment in judgment is a judgment enforcement is essential. First, I want to return to Marta's story. Why is it that she hasn't been able to receive any money? As she shared, her case is still open with the Labor Commissioner's office in their judgment enforcement unit or JEU, as you've been hearing about. And she hasn't received any payments since the 2019 determination that she is owed wages. Right now, her justice depends on whether the property owner, who is 87 years old, eventually sells his home so that she can finally be paid for the work completed. They did have another property that was owned at the time that the case started. But with the delay in the case that property was sold prior to judgment So there was no ability for the judgment enforcement unit to state any claim before the sale of that property The earlier the judgment enforcement unit or the labor commissioner has authority to preserve asset assets The more likely there will be payment Another way that marked his case could have been prevented is with the expansion of restitution funds These funds are available for workers where the employer just doesn't have the money to pay once the judgment is issued. We have restitution funds for some industries like garment workers, farm farm workers, and car wash workers. And we believe expanding this model to more industries would allow the workers not to have to suffer when their employer did not have the assets to pay them from the start. I also want to share how these enforcement tools have worked well in very complex enforcement actions. We've had several very complex cases. I want to share two of those. So our office worked with another group of care home workers with the Bureau of Field Enforcement that resulted in a $1.3 million judgment for a group of care homes in Sacramento affecting 24 workers. The enforcement of this judgment relied heavily on the SB 588 tools. At the time the citation was issued, the employer did already have an unpaid wage judgment from a separate case. So you heard earlier about how often that is a barrier. And in this case, that judgment was in place. One of the workers had gone to private court and attained a judgment more quickly than Bofi was able to issue their citation. But JEU was required to give notice to the employer before they could issue the enforcement tools. And so in response, the employer decided it was much cheaper to pay one worker than 24. And so they paid that judgment, and they couldn't issue the lien. While payment in that case is positive, the employer did pay for some of the wage theft. It did prevent the state from securing the access for the larger group of workers. To prevent this loophole, we recommend expanding the prejudgment lien authority to employers who have previously filed wage claim violations, regardless of whether they're ultimately satisfied, and eliminate the notice requirement in the current provision. In this same care home case, enforcement continued even though both individuals passed away before the citation was finalized. To avoid the anticipated levies on the personal assets, before their death, one of the owners actually withdrew all of their funds, all of their personal funds from the bank and had them converted into cashier's checks. After the death, the Judgment Enforcement Unit, after extensive investigation, discovered that some of the checks were never cashed. So they opened probate, secured a court order directing the bank to issue those funds to the workers. And this was the first step for these workers to recover any of the funds. But the enforcement didn't stop there. The Judgment Enforcement Unit also used the successor liability tools. These were actually part of AB 3075, which happened after SB 588. And the state investigated the sale of the care home and determined that the company was transferred below market rate. So the successor employer was pursued, and ultimately he paid the difference between how much he paid for the care home and what it was worth. And that was the second way these care home workers were able to be paid for their lost wages. Both the probate action and the successor liability claim required significant investigation and attorneys in order to pursue these claims, just demonstrating the importance of additional staffing and investigation time. time. Workers told us that they were deeply grateful for these efforts, even though they did not recover the full amount. Seeing the funds come in through these tools made them appreciate that the state was using every available tool to pursue justice. A third example of this complex use of the SB 588 tools was regarding a group of workers we had from a drug and alcohol detox facility These were actually a series of individual wage claims but all for the same employer While their claims were pending, the facility was sold and the owners left, as you saw the statistics indicate, often happens. Because the individuals responsible for the wage theft had been properly named as part of SB 588's authority to name individuals, the Judgment Enforcement Unit were able to pursue the owner's personal assets. The employer ultimately filed for bankruptcy, but the workers recovered a substantial portion of those assets through that process. Again, this was a time-intensive work because you had to go through the bankruptcy process in order to recover the wages for the workers. Over the last decade, we have closely monitored the implementation of SB 588. It has proven incredibly effective and essential part of the wage claim process. Without strong judgment enforcement, wage theft decisions risk becoming paper victories rather than real justice. We urge the legislature to continue investing in enforcement staff and expand the tools of SB 588 that the SB 588 created so more workers can actually collect the wages they are legally owed. Thank you.

So for us as a worker advocate, one of the main tools from SB 588 that has been, has changed the way that we pursue these claims is the individual liability. So when we sit with workers as part of our wage claim clinic and talk to them about who they're going to put on their wage claim, we first talk about all the businesses. So the prior panel talked about all the different levels of liability. So the name that's on the check and the name that's on the door and the name that's on the accountant's records, all of those might be different. And then we talk to them about all of the individuals who are responsible for the unpaid wages. So often these are folks who are the owners or maybe the higher managers of the company. And this has been effective in resolving claims early because as soon as you put their name on the claim, they're much more likely to pay because they know they can't just rename their company, but their name is going to be associated throughout the claim process. So this is a tool where we're able to prevent it to get from collections, where we're able to recover really early because we're going after that individual and they are at risk for that long-term financial liability. Where are the gaps again? You talked a little bit about this, but things that we can do moving

increasing the number of staffing in judgment enforcement unit. They prioritize low-wage worker cases. So we do see a lot of our cases being taken on by the unit. But in order to have that preventative measure where all of the claims are going to be pursued quickly and efficiently, we need to have swifter enforcement. And it needs to be expanded not just to the low-wage workers, but to anyone's judgment who hasn't been collected.

This has been very helpful and thank you again for the workers and muchas gracias por venir hoy Thank you Thank you As we prepare for our final panelist I want to acknowledge Assemblymember Ward who has joined us. I don't know if there's anything you want to know. Okay. Thank you for being here. Finally, we have our California State Labor Commissioner, Lilia Garcia Brower.

Welcome, Commissioner. We're excited to have you here today, and thank you for making the time. You know, we've heard a number of panelists this afternoon, and so, you know, wanted to ensure that you had an opportunity to talk a little bit about your agency and talk about SB 588 and then anything else that you would like to add on in terms of what you've heard this afternoon. Thank you.

Thank you for that presentation. Really, we're, you know, incredible work that we're doing together to really make a difference in workers' lives. Assemblymember Ward, do you have some questions?

We don't have that data based on our internal data, but we have that information as documented in the state auditor's report that identified we recover for 72% of the workers that go through that process.

I believe we are doing the right things aligned with what the legislature has identified. We are using the existing tools of liens and mail levies and the various theories of liability. And we have currently a budget change proposal into the legislature asking for more resources. As has been identified, our judgment enforcement team are 33 professionals. And although we are also leveraging as I just mentioned in our bureau and field enforcement we have trained another team of about 25 professionals to initiate this bank levy program And then we've also trained our wage claim adjudication team and created an intake investigator position who are becoming specialists in individual liability and ensuring that we are naming all the possible defendants. because we're essentially filling a gap, as I identified and as the panels previously have stated. These tools were created to protect workers, and the workers themselves don't understand how to use it. And so when claims are filed with our office, they don't have this information. They are not perfected. And that's a great part of what's contributed, what slows down the process. So by us investing in training our team, we now have 40% of the claims that we perfect, and we conduct that original research of naming, of identifying the different employers and assisting workers in reconstructing that information. We now have 40% of claims are naming individual liability, which is why my initial response

And remind me again, do you take a portion of any penalties that are levied against any of the guilty employers, or is this all general fund support?

Not the wages, but is there an additional penalty for violating the law, or is that not currently?

Yeah. Thank you.

I mean, I think in your opening statement, you mentioned you've been doing this for a long time, as I have. And we're hearing a lot of the same stories over and over again. So here the goal is to figure out, you know, what's working. Clearly there are some things, some tools that you now have that are making the enforcement or your job easier to be able to get these wages for these workers? And so the question is, there's still bad actors out there, a lot of them. There's 47,000 wage cases that are backlogged right now. So I guess my question is, how do we continue to move this needle forward? I mean, the ultimate goal here is not to punish employers or to put them out of business, but to have some accountability so that this does not happen, so that we do not get to the place where we're having use all these tools. But in the event that we are, as we've heard today, some of the things I'm hearing are, you know, we need an earlier start. You know, a lot of workers are afraid to report some of these cases. And if we give employers time after chance, after chance, after chance to kind of not pay, or in the case we heard 21 times they changed their name so they don't have to pay. I want to get your feedback, your thoughts about what else can we be doing together to address some of these concerns moving forward.

were looking to see, are you going to change your business practices?

And so, you know, looking at, and that's what I continue to hear, is that there's a long time period in which employers, bad employers, have time on their side while workers do not.

Right. Like the the partnership with the sheriff. Right. That that doesn't go well.

Thank you. I think we're out of time. I want to leave time for public comment. So I just want to thank you for being here today and sharing what your department has been doing to address this issue and what's working and not working on some of the legislation, including SB 588.

Couldn't make me grand.

We will go ahead and get started Oh maybe it just one Maybe it just me Renee I could have had the commissioner here a lot longer then Renee Marado representing SEIU California We were one of the

Seeing no other comments, Assemblymember Ward, would you like to close or any comment?

Okay. Well, thank you everyone for being here again. I really appreciate all the comments and the commissioner for coming in to talk about such a very important issue as wage theft. And looking forward to what's to come out of this hearing. Thank you, everyone.