The state’s wage claim system was designed to give workers a faster alternative to the courts. Employees who believe they were shorted on pay, denied required breaks, or otherwise cheated by an employer can file a claim with the Labor Commissioner and receive a state hearing. If a hearing officer sides with the worker, the employer can be ordered to pay back wages.

By law, those cases are supposed to wrap up within about four months. In practice, workers have often waited far longer — sometimes years — before their claims are even scheduled for a hearing.

The problem drew scrutiny in 2022, after CalMatters and other news organizations reported on lengthy delays and disappointing payouts in wage theft cases statewide. Lawmakers responded by ordering a state audit, which found in 2024 that the Labor Commissioner’s Office was chronically understaffed and sitting on a backlog of roughly 47,000 unresolved claims. Wait times, the audit found, were running more than six times longer than what state law allows.

Earlier this month, an Alameda County Superior Court judge declined to dismiss one of several lawsuits filed against the agency over the delays. The case was brought by the employment law firm Moss Bollinger and the nonprofit Legal Aid At Work on behalf of a hotel worker from Santa Monica who waited more than a year for a response after filing a wage claim. The worker only got a hearing scheduled after taking the agency to court.

“Most low-wage workers have no practical way to recover stolen wages because the Labor Commissioner’s wage claim process is broken,” said Alexx Campbell, senior staff attorney at Legal Aid At Work. “Laws protecting workers are meaningless if there is no way to enforce them.”

The delays are especially frustrating given the state’s finances. California collects millions of dollars annually in enforcement funds tied to separate wage-related lawsuits filed by workers against employers. Yet hundreds of millions of dollars in that fund have gone unspent in recent years, even as the backlog of unresolved wage claims — and staffing shortages at the agency responsible for handling them — continued to grow.

CalMatters reported last year that the state has, at times, borrowed from that enforcement fund to help cover budget shortfalls elsewhere. A spokesperson for the labor agency said at the time that such borrowing is a routine budgetary practice.

For now, the pending litigation could force changes at an agency that workers’ advocates say has too often left low-income employees — including car wash workers, hotel staff, and other service industry employees common throughout Southern California — without a meaningful path to recovering wages they are legally owed.

Original source: CalMatters

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