Building Good Governance through Labor Enforcement Partnerships

In California alone, wage theft costs workers more than $4 billion every year. Yet in the past two years, the Trump administration turned away from combatting wage theft by laying off Department of Labor employees responsible for enforcement and rescinding other rules meant to safeguard worker pay, benefits, and rights. At the same time, the administration’s violations of the right to due process in its attacks on immigrant communities have increased worker fear and heightened mistrust of government institutions. In this climate, workers are justifiably wary of turning to public authorities when employers steal their wages or violate their rights.

But in California, worker organizations and the state labor agency are pushing back on this trend by actively building trust, fostering good governance through community and government engagement, and strengthening labor law enforcement.

For the last ten years, NELP has stewarded the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership (CSEP), a pioneering model of cooperation that brings together community organizations with deep ties to immigrant worker communities and the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, the state agency with enforcement authority over labor laws, to fight wage theft in eight target high violation industries. CSEP is a key component of NELP’s worker-first protection strategy, which focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of public enforcement capacity to deliver justice for workers.

In the decade since CSEP was founded, NELP has seen both the state and worker-focused community organizations benefit from strengthened cooperation. By engaging worker centers, the agency can reach more workers and more effectively achieve its mandate of enforcing labor laws. By engaging state labor officials, worker centers can help workers overcome the barriers to coming forward to report workplace violations, including real concerns about facing retaliation from their employers. Community organizations bridge the relationships between workers and government to increase trust and demystify complicated enforcement processes. When discovering an active wage theft case, worker centers not only provide individual support to affected workers but also proactively connect with more workers at affected worksites and bring workers together for collective action. Worker organizations in CSEP build and sustain the largest wage theft cases in the state through continual worker engagement.

Community organizations bring decades of experience supporting workers affected by wage theft, building expertise about the employment practices and industry structures that too often leave workers cheated out of their earned wages. For example, CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a community partner in CSEP, has organized carwash workers since 2007 to fight the widespread minimum wage and health and safety violations in the industry. CLEAN’s leg work monitoring carwashes across LA County has expanded the capacity of the state to enforce the carwash registration requirement, which protects workers by ensuring employers obtain workers’ compensation coverage and post a surety bond for any potential unpaid wages. CLEAN shares knowledge about the industry such as seasonality, geographic concentration of noncompliant employers, and a list of bad actors who are unregistered. With a stronger understanding of the conditions workers experience on the ground and the types of violations to look for, state agency staff are able to conduct follow-up investigations that are more likely to result in citations for violations. This type of community partnership strengthens the agency’s enforcement effectiveness across CSEP’s eight target industries.

As many communities continue to lose trust in government institutions and worry about democratic backsliding, CSEP provides a powerful counterexample of responsive governance where community members and public officials are partnering to build more accountable institutions that better serve the real-life needs of working people and their families. CSEP shows what good governance and democracy can look like: by working together, community and government can more effectively uphold the rule of law and increase workers’ access to government processes meant to promote economic justice.