recommendations from the task force. i just wanted to say that wage theft is a civil rights issue. it's an economic justice issue and i'm very, very proud to have stood side by side with the progressive workers alliance and other community groups to make sure that san francisco stand tall in projecting low wage justice for everyone. >> thank you, supervisor. i don't think we have any other comments from the committee. why don't we hear now from the co-chairs of the task force, charlotte noss and donald levitt. and, again, thank you for your incredible, incredible work. ~ knauss >> good afternoon, supervisors. i'm donna levitt, and this is co-chair charlotte knauss, and we will be both presenting the

final report from the wage theft task force. as you know, the task force was created by the board of supervisors on june 12th, 2012. it was charged with making recommendations to the board regarding how the city could best address wage theft in san francisco. we met monthly from october 2012 to september 2013 and our finding and recommendations were presented in a written final report that was submitted to the board. i'd like to introduce the members of the task force. in addition to charlotte, who at the time was an attorney at the legal aid society employment law center and is now self-employed, and myself, and i'm the director of the office of labor standards and enforcement. laurel turner represented the

city attorney's office. rebecca wagoner represented the district attorney's office. captain thomas cleary represented s.f.p.d. karen yu represented the department of public health. lou phillips from the treasurer and tax collector's office. regina [speaker not understood] from the office of small business. in addition to those city agencies, community, business and labor representatives included ace wise man from young workers you needthed. [speaker not understood] lou from china progressive association. and for part of the time lin fred gau from asian americans advancing justice sat in [speaker not understood]'s seat. terry valin from the filipino community center. tina chin from united here local 2. manny chic from the mayor law group. karen highsler from mission pie

and don houston from elery owe, the two business owners. ~ el rio and many of those task force members are here today. and if you would please stand, those of you who were able to make it today. a few. thank you for coming. (applause) >> so, the task force had a year to educate ourselves [speaker not understood] to develop recommendations and there is a sense of responsibility from the task force members to make good suggestions and to dive right in and have ideas about what they see about the problem. we did, of course, discuss what wage theft was. we heard, you know, testimony from workers about the scope of the problem. we talked about current enforcement strategies. and spent the majority of our time talking about remedies and things that the city could do and the city in collaboration with community groups to better

prevent and remedy wage theft. over the course of the year we were lucky enough to have [speaker not understood] kick us off in our initial meeting. we heard testimony from san francisco workers. we heard from chinese restaurant workers. we heard from latino laundromat workers. we heard from filipino care givers. we heard from experts on issues of retaliation such as [speaker not understood] and [speaker not understood] especially on the issues of using immigration status in retaliation. we heard from the folks that are doing current enforcement, the members of the task force, and also members of this state enforcement agencies. and the task force numbers were incredibly participatory. we discovered the wage theft is pervasive. those local and national studies show that a large number of low-wage workers still experience wage theft. that up to a quarter of them

are not paid minimum wage and up to three quarters of workers are not paid overtime. we found that there are certain industries that were affected more common in or can occur across industries, but that certain industries [speaker not understood] you can read the list, care giving, janitorial work, was especially preach leapt. ~ prevalent. we heard about how wage theft is harmful not only to the workers who experience that violation by not bringing home a satisfactory paycheck to support their families, but also the impact on communities, the impact on decreased revenues to local government, and the unfair competition with responsible businesses. >> the participants in the task force reviewed current strategies that are being used to combat wage theft in san francisco. san francisco not only lead the country in the most progressive

labor laws, but we're fortunate to have the country's most robust local enforcement agency. the olrc has taken a different approach than most enforcement agencies which distinguishes the agency and some of its success. when a claimant files a complaint at the olrc in san francisco, the agency investigates all of the workers in the business. the agency does not make out one individual claimant, come to a conference with the employer a would happen if a complaint is filed at the state. that encourages workers to come forward who might otherwise be fearful and we maintain the confidentiality of the claimant's identity to the extent that we can through the process. another thing that distinguishes our enforcement strategy is that we work closely with the collaborative

of community-based organizations and that collaborative is under contrived to the tune of about $460,000 a year. it's a collaborative now of six community-based agencies who you'll hear from later in this testimony. but their work is critical because they are culturally competent and they have relationships in the community and sometimes workers feel more comfortable approaching a community agency than bringing a complaint directly to the city. that collaborative is headed by the chinese progressive association and includes the filipino community center, [speaker not understood], young workers united, dolores street community services which houses both the day laborer program

and la collectiva, and i forgot somebody, asian law caucus, asian americans advancing justice. thank you. >> you'll hear during later comments from other agencies that are also active in current enforcement efforts and also some of the changes they've made since the task force concluded. the task force identified four major challenges that confront worker and the city when they seek to enforce wage and hour laws. number one was a lack of resources. despite the investment that san francisco has made in the office of labor of standard enforcement, having a local enforcement agency that look to around the country as a model for how to do local enforcement, the task force still believes the investment of resources is not enough to combat the problem.

the second big challenge was the lack of data sharing between agencies. there's no single coordinated system by which a business interacts with the city. so, the department of public health trackses a business in a way that does not necessarily coincide with how law office of labor standards tracks a business ~. so, a city department could be interacting with a business that has violations in other city departments without the two departments knowing about the commonality of the business. the third main challenge, independent of of out orlc does enforcement and investigation process, many workers seek to recover their wages through other avenues. we considered data from the department of labor standards enforcement that state labor commissioner as well, and the data from the state agency [speaker not understood] on the number of workers who come forward and win a claim versus

the amount of wages which are actually collected and it's somewhere along the lines of 20% of wages are actually collected. and, so, there are challenge to collecting wages outside of orlc process through the labor commissioner process is a huge challenge to combating wage theft. and the fourth big challenge is the vulnerability of the employees that we're talking about. we're talking about low wage worker who are often not completely fluent in english who are often the full income generators for their family who are dependent upon that job. however, [speaker not understood] depending upon that income to support their families and therefore fear losing that job. when worker come forward they often face retaliation. they face not only community pressure among the ethnic community to not come forward and speak against the employer, but also threats that they're going to be fired or threats using their immigration status as, you know, in retaliation. based upon all of the data that

we heard or the testimony and the current enforcement strategies and the challenges, the task force came to these conclusions about what the problem statement was. it was really important to identify those areas where the problem was so that we could make recommendations targeted at them. so, these are the findings of the task force and we try to include all the players involved. so, the city does not have a comprehensive strategy and sufficient resource he to combat wage theft. the general public in san francisco is not aware of how prevalent wage theft is. workers often lack information or are afraid to come forward. agencies lack resource s and lack efficient data system. we heard a lot in the last point ~ about why employers commit wage theft and we came to this conclusion. some employers lack knowledge. they simply don't know. they've gone into business, many of them are immigrant employers who are first time business owners in the city of

san francisco, and i will grant you that operating a business in san francisco, there are a lot of laws to follow. so some of them simply lack knowledge. some of them have made a calculated financial decision that it is worth it in the short term to steal wages from workers versus the chances of getting caught and paying those back wages in the future. some business owners lack the skills and resources to comply. they are trying their best to comply, but they don't have the staff or human resources department, or they don't have an outside payroll company, whatever the reason. and then there are those industries where they simply are a culture of noncompliance, where it is very difficult to find a responsible employer. for example, we talked a lot about the care home industry where residential care homes are pretty much across the board operated in violation of workers rights and it is very difficult in that industry to find a responsible -- although there are some. it's difficult to find a responsible business owner.

so, for one or many -- >> supervisor mar had a question. >> yes, since we just dealt with the university home, could you give us some examples of wage theft in the nursing home industry? >> yeah, i deal a lot with the care home industry which is a smaller facility. they're usually a six-bed facility. it is either elderly individuals or folks with developmental disabilities that receive funding through private or through the state. the common practice in those care homes, small residential care homes is to hire one or two individuals to take care of the residents in the facility and pay them a certain flat rate. so, you'll hear testimony actually in the public comment section from a woman who worked in one of these facilities who came forward and complained about the conditionses and a collaboration that largely came out of the task force, with we were able to collect wages

through attorney and [speaker not understood] being involved in the community center. these individuals work up to 17, 18, 24 hours a day sometimes, for a flat rate of $60 a day. and $60 does not compensate somebody for minimum wage and over time for working 24 hours. they often are provided with housing, you know, a facility like that may have a bed for them to sleep in. employers are allowed to take a credit for that facility, the bed. but only with a written agreement and those written agreements pretty much across the board don't exist. >> i'll just add that i found -- i was so touched by the last item on the agenda and the testimony and it really rang home for us because of the work we've done around trying to

enforce labor laws with residential care home. and, you know, we see a business model that's not working. >> thank you, supervisor mar. so, we'd like to highlight a couple of key recommendation from the report and there are pages in the report, we'll summarize them. the number one recommendation from the task force was to increase [speaker not understood] available to olrc. the task force specifically recommending four new positions within the office of labor standards enforcement and also to research and implement a new case management system for olrc to more efficiently track cases that they are investigating and recovering wages for workers. in addition, what the task believes, the coordination between agency which was born in the task force and the

conversations which starts in a relationship developed through the task force were incredibly valuable and that establishing some variety of permanent working group, a task force supporting that ongoing collaboration amongst city departments, perhaps including agency that were not sitting on the task force but do have a part to play, the ongoing collaboration among the city departments is of utmost importance. we also recommended that if it's not already inherent and in permits and business licenses and in other city regulations, that the board of supervisors should act to authorize city departments to suspend or revoke permit business he that violate wage theft laws. and finally, information showing this is one of the big challenges we discovered, but that some ways for agencies in the city to coordinate data around business data through

the interactions of businesses uniformly to violators can be tracked. we have had specific recommendations directed at the agencies that sat on the task force, and most of these recommendations were amazingly generated by the agencies themselves about ways that they could more efficiently participate in the fight against wage theft. their recommendation was that the city attorney increase the number of cases they bring, they do bring caseseses but we'd love to see more. but the district attorney bring more criminal prosecutions. they have brought some that have been very high profile that assisted in raising the awareness and consequences of violating your workers' rights, but the district attorney could do more. we wanted to make sure that wage theft violators are not benefiting from any city recognitions or tax incentives. so in some way to screen businesses and there have been more recent ordinanceses passed, but to make it

meaningful across the board. so, more business that has violated a workers' right and outstanding judgments and workers wages will be benefiting from their relationship with the city. and finally, to identify ways that departments interact with worker and with employers to educate, just to continually educate workers and employers about workforce rights and responsibilities. >> i'm going to summarize some of the steps that have been taken since the issuance of the final report which was now six months ago. as was mentioned and as you know, there was a budget add back a couple of weeks ago to add $170,000 to fiscal year 14-15 and 15-16 for increased staffing at the olrc. that will allow us to hire one

new compliance officer. unfortunately there is not enough money in that second year for us to budget a second position, but it will be in temp salaries and hopefully we will -- it's my plan to be able to use it. the minimum wage ballot initiative that the language will be finalized in the coming weeks includes language, the last i saw it, that would strengthen city departments' ability to revoke permits and licenses of wage theft violators. and since the time of the wage theft task force started, the collaborative has -- the community-based organization -- the number of community-based organizations that we partner with has increased.

it's now, as i mention, six partner organizations. our office is developing specs for a new case management system whether we have funding for it or not. we are collaborating with the department of labor, the da, and the da's office on a case and this is the first such collaboration that we've done. we're collaborating with community-based organizations and the state bureau of field enforcement on what will be the largest minimum wage case that olrc has handled. we've reached out to the treasurer and tax collector's office -- >> i apologize. i think we're going to lose a quorum pretty soon. i was wondering if you can -- >> sure. in conclusion -- >> thank you. [laughter] >> let me show you some graphics that the state labor

commissioner's office has issued with their campaign that wage theft is a crime. and finally, i want to thank again everyone who participated in the wage theft task force and spent many months of hard thinking to collaborate together to figure out how to move this work forward. i look forward to working with all of the participants and the city agencies to i am ~ implement the recommendations. >> thank you very much. yes, supervisor yee. >> excuse me. >> sorry, supervisor yee. >> i just have a quick question. you mentioned earlier in your presentation that some of the employers may not be aware of the laws or regulations and i don't know if it's a big percentage or not, just a few people.

then i'm looking at your recommendations that have been implemented. the outreach contracts that you've given, the six, i guess six one, what is the focus on there? is it outreaching to employees or employers? because if there is an issue with employers, it seems like you would want to do some outreach for them. >> point well taken. i spoke about the community-based organizations who do outreach and education to workers and who encourage workers -- work with worker to help prepare claims before government agencies. we also work with the office of small business and the treasurer and tax collector's office to disseminate information on the front end as businesses are applying to do business in san francisco. those agencies are providing information about san francisco

labor laws and i see that the office of small business is here today and perhaps she'll talk to you more about that. we do partner with though agencies for those purposes. we have -- we do an annual mailing with notices to every registered business. we are featured in the new business portal that's being developed by the office of small business. and we're certainly open to any other suggestions about how to do that in our community. >> well, i assume that whatever you send out to the businesses would be done bilingually or tri lingually? >> six languages. >> supervisor mar. >> why you yes, i just wanted to thank you for the presentation and the task force for the hard work over the year. at some point i'd like information about the culture of compliance and what

industries comply and what the barriers to break that noncompliance culture. and also i know the multi-lingual capabilities of the six community based organizations and that is our model being a key part of what we do to prevent wage theft. but i'm just wondering if you could talk about the demographics of workers that face the most prevalent wage theft and how -- we have language abilities and cultural competence in organizations whether it's in olrc, osic, and within community-based organizations. >> so, we find that most wage theft victims who are mono lingual in languages other than english are spanish speakers or cantonese speakers. both the olrc and the

community-based organizations have numerous compliance officers or workers who are bilingual and cantonese, spanish, and mandarin. what else was your question? >> i know we're expanding the capability of tagalog and other filipino dialects. >> right. >> so, within the city it looks like language equality and language access is helping, but within the olrc and then work with community-based organizations, sounds like we have language capabilities to address the disproportionate number of immigrants and their language abilities. so, it seems like we're well prepared on the language front. >> i feel good about that with our agency. we have compliance -- two compliance officers who are bilingual in tagalog. we have one -- several with cantonese, four, i think, who are bilingual in spanish, two -- one with mandarin, one with

thai. and that said, we also use language line which we have been able to do effectively. most recently with nepalese workers. it was an interesting situation where the employer brought an interpreter in with nepalese workers. we asked the interpreter to leave. we use language line. the workers were reportedly brought in to tell us they wanted to withdraw their claim. when we spoke with them without the designated interpreter in the room with language line, that was not the case at all. >> thank you. >> great, thank you. >> i would just like to add to that, olrc has incredible language capacities. the cultural competency and the support the worker that the community based worker can provide is incredibly important in helping workers to get that first step in coming forward.

it's incredible once they have come forward that there are people they can talk to in their native language at olrc. >> thank you. like to call on the district attorney's office and i don't know if -- yes. ms. wagoner. i would simply ask folks to keep their comments as brief as possible. i know that i have to tend to a personal matter so we don't want to lose a quorum. >> thank you so much. and first on behalf of district attorney george gascone, i'd like to thank the board of supervisors, specifically you, supervisor mar and supervisor campos, for shining a light on this very serious issue. and on behalf of the district attorney's office and mr. gascone, we would like to let you know that we intend on using all the t-a-o-zv in ~ tools in our tool box to combat wage theft and also the safety of workers and osha violations and of course the most extreme

example being human trafficking and those types of things. we have multiple criminal prosecutions that we have done over the last few years, including ongoing criminal prosecutions and, of course, that's the most serious tool in our tool box that we will intend on using and have used in the past. in addition, the district attorney's office has authority and jurisdiction to file civil suits under 17 200 in addition to the city attorney's office, also has that concurrent jurisdiction. and we are working collaboratively with many organizations, including olrc and the nongovernmental organizations and the state contractors licensing board and osha and other organizations as much as possible to collaboratively address the issues of workers' rights, their safety, their entitlement to payment and we are creating

a multi-lingual wage theft hotline that we intend to reach out to the public with through our da newsletter and we will have many languages as they can report wage theft and other workers rights issues directly to the district attorney's office. we do already have the da newsletter set up. and we also have a lot of other languages that are -- that we have -- we do language surveys at our office to identify many languages that we can use to contact or speak to people that call in. and, of course, one of the main issues -- main roles of our office is to ensure that the victims of wage theft get restitution for their losses. so, we look forward to working collaboratively with the city attorney's office, with olrc, and we hope to work together in the future in an ongoing collaboration on a wage theft task force group so that we can work together on various offender that we identify and

work on the best tools on how to go forward and make sure that they get in compliance and that the worker are protected. and thank you so much again for shining a light on this. >> thank you very much, ms. wagoner. if we can hear from karen yu of the department of public health. >> supervisors, i'm senior environmental health with the environmental section of the health department and also a member of the wage theft task force. so, in the report prepared by the task force, there are several recommendations revolving around how city departments can have a bigger role in deterring wage they arethv. and today i would like to provide two examples of how the health department can -- has illustrated how city departments can become more involved. since 2010, the environmental health branch of the health department was approached by olrc to consider suspending and revoking health departments to establishments whose owners have fai