Wage Theft Is A Crime! And the Center for Workers’ Rights strives to communicate this message to workers throughout California. When a worker reports an incident of wage theft to us, but faces barriers in filing a claim with the California Labor Commissioner’s Office on their own, we can assist them through our wage claim clinic. At our wage claim clinic, volunteers from UC Davis School of Law help workers calculate wages and penalties owed to workers by their employers. Just this year, we referred over 75 workers with identified wage theft violations to our wage claim clinic. These consultations resulted in submissions of wage claims to the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, Wage Claim Adjudication Unit.
In 2022, our wage claim clinic:
- Calculated wage theft for individual workers who together claimed just over $3.5 million of wages and penalties owed to them for workers’ rights violations.
- Saw a massive increase in the number of wage theft cases coming from the cannabis farm workers, resulting in about 40% of the workers we assisted at the wage claim clinic.
- Filed a majority of the claims in the Sacramento Labor Commissioner’s Office.
Our goal with the wage claim clinic is to overcome the barrier to fighting wage theft by supporting workers through the claim filing process and demystifying the process of recovering wages at the Labor Commissioner’s Office and help support them through the process.