Supes Unanimously Approve $500K For Office Protecting Workers’ Rights (CA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Bay City News Service
Published 6:44 pm PST, Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to stand with workers who have experienced wage theft or abuse from their employers by increasing the budget of its enforcement office by $500,000 on Tuesday. 

The decision brings the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement’s overall funding to $1 million, which will be directed toward multilingual workers’ rights trainings, individual interviews for workers who report abuse and greater partnerships with community-based rights organizations. 

The training curriculum may include education on human and labor trafficking, wage theft, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and retaliation, as the office moves toward expanding its purview in these areas. 

The office was established in November 2017, but many workers argued its scope was limited. Some individuals said they had won settlements against their employers, but the money had not yet been awarded to them due to a lack of enforcement. 

The supervisors’ vote begins to address funding for both issues. 

“This decision will have a major impact on wage theft in Santa Clara County and help to protect workers from wage theft, human trafficking and sexual assault,” Derecka Mehrens, executive director of Working Partnerships USA, said in a news release. 

Smaller local organizations, such as those directed to Vietnamese, Filipino and Chinese-American communities, will be able to work with the county to identify industries that frequently violate the law.  

(Read More)

AG Becerra, Assemblymember Gonzalez Unveil Legislation to Strengthen Program to Combat CA’s Underground Economy (CA)

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Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on February 23, 2019 – 8:34am


SAN DIEGO, Feb. 22, 2019 – California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez today unveiled legislation, AB 1296, the Tax Recovery in the Underground Recovery program (TRUE Act), to combat underground economic crimes. AB 1296 is sponsored by Attorney General Becerra and was introduced by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez.

“With underground economic crime, our workers get exploited, business owners face unfair competition, consumers get ripped off, and taxpayers bear the burden,” said Attorney General Becerra. “AB 1296 expands on successful efforts to prosecute violators and recover funds involved in wage theft, tax evasion, counterfeit commerce and other economic crimes. The funds recovered become available to benefit cheated workers, our schools, law enforcement and our communities.”

“The underground economy hurts everyone: workers who are left without protection, consumers who are sold dangerous or fake products, and the state as we lose tax money,” said Assemblywoman Gonzalez. “This task force is a unique, collaborative approach for law enforcement to breakdown its usual silos and execute wider solutions for targeting the underground economy.”

According to a University of California at Los Angeles Labor Center report, the state’s underground economy generates between $60 to $140 billion in unreported revenue annually, depriving the state of $8.5 billion in corporate, personal, and sales and use taxes each year. TRUE’s pilot program, established in 2014, allowed agencies in Sacramento and Los Angeles to work together to investigate and prosecute the most outrageous felony-level multijurisdictional underground economic crimes in California. In September 2018, Attorney General Becerra announced the results of a year-long investigation that led to charges against a family of four for labor exploitation and human trafficking. In October 2018, Attorney General Becerra also announced that the State of California regained lost state revenues from an underground prescription drug business, from an illegal pharmaceutical scheme and from operators who possessed counterfeit merchandise intended for sale. AB 1296 builds on the success of a state pilot program by permanently establishing law enforcement teams in Sacramento and Los Angeles and authorizing additional teams in the three other major metropolitan regions of the state-San Diego, the Bay Area, and Fresno.

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City of Industry construction firm fined nearly $12 million for wage theft (CA)

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The violations impacted more than 1,000 workers at projects in Los Angeles and Orange counties

By KEVIN SMITH PUBLISHED: February 11, 2019 at 5:11 pm

A City of Industry construction firm has been fined nearly $12 million in what state regulators are calling the biggest wage theft violation ever by a private company in California.

The state Labor Commissioner’s Office announced Monday, Feb. 11 that it cited RDV Construction Inc. for violations that left more than a thousand workers waiting weeks or months to be paid, only to receive a portion of what they were owed.

The company hired crews to provide framing, drywall and other trade work for hotels, apartments and mixed-use buildings around Southern California.

A litany of violations

Investigators determined that between 2014 and 2017, RDV employed more than 1,000 workers at 35 construction sites scattered primarily throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and typically worked its crews nine hours a day without proper rest breaks or overtime pay.

The company “habitually and illegally” withheld up to 25 percent of the wages workers earned, investigators said, and during a 21-month period, they were paid with checks that bounced due to insufficient funds.
RDV projects have included the Crown Apartments complex in West Hollywood and Boardwalk by Windsor, an upscale apartment community in Huntington Beach, among others.

…

“Dodging labor laws and stealing wages hurts workers and creates unfair conditions for law-abiding employers,” California Labor Secretary Julie A. Su said in a statement. “Stealing earned wages from workers’ pockets is illegal in California and this case shows that employers who steal from their workers will end up paying for it in the end.”

The citations total $11,943,054 payable to workers in unpaid wages and premiums…

(Read More)

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San Jose to consider proposal to help employees receive pay they deserve (CA)

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Construction workers on the Silvery Towers project downtown were held in squalid conditions

By EMILY DERUY
PUBLISHED: January 31, 2019 at 6:00 am

Months after it surfaced that workers on a high rise in downtown San Jose were held in captivity and forced to work without pay, the City Council is expected to consider stronger wage protections to prevent companies from refusing to pay employees what they deserve.

In a memo to the city’s Rules and Open Government Committee, several members of the San Jose City Council – Raul Peralez, Chappie Jones, Magdalena Carrasco and Sergio Jimenez – suggested broadening the city’s current wage theft protections to cover construction workers on both public and private projects. They also said developers proposing construction projects involving more than 5,000 square feet of floor area should have to disclose wage theft violations by their contractors and subcontractors. If companies are found to have unpaid wage theft claims, the council members argued, they should be disqualified until the claims are paid.

In July, the U.S. Labor Department announced that more than a dozen immigrants working on the Silvery Towers project at the corner of N. San Pedro and W. St. James streets were held in squalid conditions in a Hayward house and forced to work on projects across the Bay Area.

The changes, the council members wrote, “will ensure that another Silvery Towers does not occur again and that the city is not blindsided by another atrocity.”

…

Construction workers and labor groups urged the council to make broadening its wage theft policy a priority. However, business groups warned doing so could create demanding new regulations for developers and hamper the city’s aim of adding thousands of new affordable homes in the next few years.

“It is the ethical and quite honestly the honorable thing to do,” said Steve Flores, with the group Santa Clara County Residents for Responsible Development, adding that the update would close “gaping loopholes” that leave construction workers fending for themselves.

(Read More)

Could Gov. Newsom’s ambitious housing goals be sidelined by a worker shortage? (CA)

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Labor think tank says California would need at least 200,000 new construction workers

By LEONARDO CASTAÑEDA
PUBLISHED: January 14, 2019

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he wants to build as many as 3.5 million new houses by 2025 to solve California’s housing crisis.

But those ambitious goals could be derailed without hundreds of thousands of new construction workers needed to dramatically accelerate the pace of California home building, even assuming that cities agree to zone for more housing and there’s money available to build it all. And it’s hard to imagine, given recent trends, where that many additional workers in the low-wage, high-risk industry would come from.

Newsom took an early stab at the money question in his first budget, offering $500 million in state funding for middle-income housing, But he wants California’s companies to take on a bigger role funding new homes. And he said he’s already talked with some Silicon Valley tech companies who are open to cooperating.

Ramping up housing construction from about 100,000 units in 2016 to 1980s levels – about 300,000 new homes were built in 1986 – would require some 200,000 new workers, according to the researcher behind a new study for Smart Cities Prevail, a pro-union nonprofit. But even that influx of workers wouldn’t be enough to meet the goal of 500,000 new houses a year that Newsom floated during his campaign.

“Workers are not going to fall out of trees,” researcher Scott Littlehale said.

Littlehale’s study found that California housing construction isn’t just failing to attract new workers. It’s losing the workers it already has, many of whom are low wage and lower-skilled.

From 2006 to 2017, California lost about 200,000 construction workers. And within the construction trade, many workers are opting for commercial building jobs, which pay more, have better benefits and steadier work.

During the boom building years, the construction industry was “dependent on young workers without a college degree and on immigrant workers,” Littlehale said. Today, both populations are on the decline.

(Read More)

(View PDF of Study – Rebuilding California: The Golden State’s Housing Workforce Reckoning)

Prevailing wage and collective bargaining boost labor market competitiveness and productivity

  • The housing industry currently lacks the wage competitiveness and career training pipeline needed to offset the physical and economic risks of construction. This is hindering its ability to attract and retain the workers needed to increase production of new units.
  • Prevailing Wage standards and collective bargaining agreements are consistently associated with higher wages, increased apprenticeship enrollment, more production efficiency, and fewer workplace safety problems.
  • Most peer reviewed studies have concluded prevailing wage has no significant effect on overall project costs.

Housing builders’ reservoir of low-wage, less-skilled labor is not refilling itself. Background regulations that promote labor-management cooperation around the vital elements of skilled construction workforce development can play a vital role in restoring California residential building to the production engine that it once was.

(Executive Summary)

(Rebuilding California – Video)

Calif. Prevailing Wage Law Applied to Recycling Plant Employees (CA)

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By Joanne Deschenaux
January 4, 2019

California’s prevailing wage law requires that all workers employed on “public works”-generally, construction projects-be paid at least as much as is generally paid for the performance of similar work in the same geographic area. A California appellate court has ruled that this law was not limited to construction projects and applied to workers who sorted recyclable materials at two publicly owned and operated recycling facilities.

The plaintiffs, who worked as sorters, sued a staffing company that provided employees to the two facilities under contracts with Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, alleging, among other claims, that the defendant had failed to pay them the prevailing wage.

The trial court granted the staffing company’s motion to dismiss the prevailing wage claims, ruling that the work done by the plaintiffs did not come within the prevailing wage law’s definition of “public works” because it was not construction work. The plaintiffs appealed.

The appellate court reversed the trial court’s decision. One provision of the prevailing wage law defines public works as “construction, alteration, demolition, installation or repair work done under contract and paid for in whole or in part out of public funds.” But this is not the only definition in the statute, the court said.

Another provision further defines public works as work done for “irrigation, utility, reclamation, and improvement districts, and other districts of this type.” The recyclable sorting work here was done for a county sanitation district, and so the work at issue fell within this second statutory definition and the plaintiffs were entitled to receive the prevailing wage, the court said.

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(PDF Copy of Decision)

Some Workers Need Jobs as Much as Builders Need Workers. Cities Connect Them. (CA)

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By Joe Gose
Jan. 8, 2019

A year ago, Jeromy Gaviola was struggling to find steady and meaningful work in San Francisco. Living in the working-class neighborhood of Hunters Point, he heard about a program that was training residents to build the Chase Center, the $1 billion, 18,000-seat arena in Mission Bay that will be the new home of the Golden State Warriors when it opens this fall.

Mr. Gaviola, 33, applied to the program, was accepted and completed six weeks of training in early September. He then began working at the arena and was recently installing insulation and acoustical ceiling tiles above the Warriors’ practice court.

…

Facing a tight labor pool, developers, public officials and community organizations are using commercial projects to provide residents with careers in construction. Together, they’re making an effort to recruit men and women from impoverished neighborhoods or challenged populations, such as former prison inmates. In booming markets like San Francisco, Denver and Miami, where gentrification is squeezing affordable housing, demand for these types of programs is growing.

The training programs are also occurring in smaller markets. In Milwaukee, for example, Gorman & Company, an apartment developer, has teamed up with city, state and community agencies to give former inmates on-the-job training restoring dilapidated, tax-foreclosed homes, which are then rented to low-income earners.

“There’s a very limited number of jobs that people re-entering society can do, but they are key to our success,” said Ted Matkom, president of the Wisconsin market for Gorman. “They can earn a good wage and are motivated.”

In some cases, contractors are required to meet local hiring targets, particularly on big projects that include incentives or are providing a public benefit. Cities and community organizations are recruiting and training workers to help builders meet the thresholds.

In addition to classes, the programs typically provide tools, boots and other equipment to the candidates, and they pay for items such as apprentice application fees, child care and gas. Case managers at the organizations even make sure newly employed graduates receive wake-up calls.

The developers of Chase Center are getting a hand from San Francisco’s CityBuild Academy, a program that has trained about 1,400 workers since it was introduced in 2006. Among other services, the academy provides 18 weeks of training for apprenticeships in partnership with City College of San Francisco. JPMorgan Chase, which acquired the naming rights to the arena, has also kicked in $350,000 to fund special training courses.

To date, those programs and others have provided union apprenticeships to 81 graduates, according to representatives from CityBuild and the National Basketball Association’s Warriors. The workers can make hourly wages of $20 to $30, not including overtime, said Joshua Arce, director of work force development for San Francisco.

(Read More)

California needs 200K construction workers to help affordability (CA)

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by Steve Randall
20 Jan 2019

The lack of housing supply has multiple factors including the cost of borrowing and materials; but a shortage of labor is also a major factor in many areas.

In California, the Housing and Community Development Department has said that the sector needs improved productivity to tackle housing affordability. But a new study says there is a key barrier to this – a workforce shortage.

Smart Cities Prevail, a construction industry-focused non-profit, says that the residential construction industry in California must do more to attract the 200,000 workers it needs to meet the ambitious goal to improve affordability.

“The data shows residential construction work is more dangerous, economically risky, and lower paying than most other jobs in our economy,” said study author Scott Littlehale. “When you consider these dynamics alongside the industry’s aging workforce, its failure to institutionalize investments in apprenticeship training, and a shrinking supply of young workers and immigrants, it is clear why the housing sector is struggling to attract the new workers it needs.”

Littlehale found residential construction workers earn 24% less per year than all other jobs on average, and less than half have health insurance coverage through their employer. This is exacerbated by a typically longer commute.

(Read More)

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Palm Springs should back unions by denying Virgin Hotel project timeline extension (CA)

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Robert Julian Stone, Special to The Desert Sun
Published 8:00 a.m. PT Jan. 6, 2019

On Wednesday, Jan. 9, Palm Springs’ City Council will consider Grit Development’s request for an extension of completion timelines for the Virgin Hotel. The developer is asking for a three-year extension but, despite the Planning Commission’s 5-2 vote recommending that more time be granted, there is simply no justification for any extension on this project.

On Nov. 15, 2017, the council granted Grit a rebate of 75 percent of the transient occupancy taxes (TOT) for 30 years on the new Virgin Hotel and set forth a timeline for completion. The city estimates the value of this TOT rebate to be between $18 and $50 million.

This year, the State Department of Industrial Relations opined that a TOT rebate and other public funding agreements between the city and Grit Development for downtown work done so far, including on the completed Kimpton hotel, make Grit responsible for paying its construction workers a prevailing wage.

Grit wants a three-year extension because the developer intends to keep the promised TOT rebates while appealing the prevailing wage determination to the state. If that appeal fails, Grit’s attorney has indicated the developer will litigate the issue in court.

It appears the developer simply refuses to pay a living wage to workers on this project – and is willing to sue to be relieved of that responsibility.

Even with an extended construction deadline, it’s likely we will be exactly where we are now in three years. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration; the Democrat legislative super-majority; and the courts are unlikely to look favorably upon such a request.

It is disappointing that City Council did not pro-actively require prevailing wages for the project at the time they approved the generous TOT rebate for the Virgin project in 2017. Palm Springs is an increasingly expensive place to live. It is incumbent upon our legislators to protect the livelihood of local workers and advocate for a living wage

(Read More)

Labor Joins Gonzalez Fletcher to Introduce New Bill to Protect Workers from Misclassification

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By Nick Kotsopoulos
Telegram & Gazette Staff
Updated Dec 9, 2018 at 8:05 PM

Imagine working side-by-side with others who have all the benefits of being an employee of a company including paid sick days, a minimum wage, workers’ comp, unemployment insurance and more. Now imagine you are doing similar work without any of those protections because your boss decided to call you an “independent contractor” instead of an employee simply because he wants to cut corners on costs.

It’s called misclassification, and it’s a growing and devastating problem for workers, businesses that do the right thing and our economy as a whole.

The California labor movement joined Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher today to tackle this problem head on, codifying into state law a recent California Supreme Court decision that provides a simple test employers must meet to classify workers as independent contractors. The test, a version of which exists in other states, removes uncertainty and ensures workers who are doing the job of an employee have all the protections and rights that should be afforded to them.

Alexei Koseff details the new effort to protect workers in today’s Sacramento Bee:

The bill would strengthen rules that make it harder for employers to classify workers as contractors and limit their rights under state labor laws.

“Individuals are not able to make it on three side hustles. That shouldn’t be the norm. That shouldn’t be accepted,” Gonzalez Fletcher said. She said the court’s decision is essential for maintaining solid employment for workers in a changing economy and for combating the income inequality that has helped drive California’s poverty rate to one of the highest in the nation.

“What we permit, what we don’t permit, what has worked for generations and built the middle class of California, needs to be largely intact,” she said.

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