The power to sue abusive employers protects all workers

OPINION – Challenging a powerful company that has wrongly taken your money is rarely easy; big corporations have spent decades lobbying for laws to keep it that way.

Now, powerful companies like Wells Fargo, Koch Industries, Walmart, and Big Pharma are trying to change one of the few laws on the books that give everyday people a shot at justice: the Private Attorneys General Act. If they succeed, they’ll open the door for millions of California workers to have their wages stolen. Legislators should say “NO” to  watering down the law.

For my mother and me, PAGA helped us hold the giant tobacco company Juul accountable for stealing wages that we worked hard to earn and were counting on to pay the rent and buy groceries.

A few years ago, Juul Labs hired us to phone bank and canvas door-to-door for their campaign in support of a San Francisco ballot initiative backed by the e-cigarette and vape company.

We were expected to fill multiple roles, and on some days we had to split our time into two shifts, sometimes on opposite sides of the city. The days were long, and Juul did not pay us for the time that they required us to travel between offices. We often had to eat lunch on the bus, when rushing to get from one office to the other.

A little over a month before election day, campaign operations shut down without any notice. We desperately combed through news articles trying to understand what happened. Suddenly losing our jobs and being forced to survive without income was terrifying. We felt exploited by a campaign we’d helped build for a hundred-million dollar company, when we had been promised jobs that would last through election day.

Through an organization called Legal Aid at Work, we learned that Juul’s campaign had illegally classified campaign workers as independent contractors — a trick employers often use to avoid paying taxes, pay less wages, and save money on basic benefits like healthcare, unemployment insurance, and retirement security.

The Private Attorneys General Act gives whistleblowers like me and my mom the power to win back stolen wages and enforce our rights. With help from our attorneys, we won a settlement covering over 350 colleagues in our workplace who experienced the same violations of our rights. Our victory and others like it are exactly why the corporations want to take this tool away – to discourage workers from coming forward to demand what we worked hard to earn.

Although the powerful corporate lobbying group the California Chamber of Commerce is leading the push to strip PAGA away from workers like me, they’ve made feel-good sounding non-profits the face of their advocacy.  Yet an analysis by UCLA researchers found suits against non-profits amounted to just 2% of PAGA cases in the last 2 years. Most PAGA cases aren’t brought against charities or good faith employers, but rather companies like Juul that take advantage of workers like me.

Hiding behind non profit groups is just the latest dishonest Chamber tactic. The group also falsely claims that they are trying to “fix PAGA” for workers by steering us into a “more efficient” process for making claims to the State Labor Commissioner even as they are pushing a ballot initiative that would weaken the agency’s power to enforce the law.

Many corporations are requiring workers to sign contracts that force us into a company-controlled arbitration process so we can’t enforce our rights through the courts or state agencies at all.

Employers cheat 1,600 workers every single day in California by paying less than the minimum wage, with losses to workers exceeding two billion dollars per year from this one form of wage theft alone. If big corporations succeed in removing workers’ PAGA protections, there will be little stopping them from exploiting even more workers and pocketing our hard-earned wages. And they’ll be free to double down on exploitation of the most vulnerable workers, including low-wage workers and immigrant women like me and my mom.

It felt really good to stand united against a huge company and win; now I’m fighting to keep the path to justice open for other exploited workers. Legislators: reject corporations’ attacks on PAGA.

Luz Perez and her mother blew the whistle on labor violations by Juul Labs; their 2020 PAGA lawsuit resulted in a $1.75-million settlement on behalf of 350+ wronged workers.