On this, unions and legislators agree: Wage theft is rampant in California, and the state system set up to help bereaved workers is broken.

But a Bay Area legislator’s call for an independent state investigation into what went wrong has provoked opposition from, everywhere, California’s powerful labor unions. The unions are seeking to block the action when Senate and Assembly lawmakers meet on Wednesday

to consider audit requests.

State Senator Steve Glazer (D-Orinda), who proposed the investigation in January, said he was stunned.

“It is ironic that the unions are resisting a second set of eyes on this serious problem,” Glazer said by phone.

Glazer’s office said state officials told them that employees with wage theft claims currently have to wait more than two years and 780 days for a hearing before

the Department of Industrial Relations, the state employment agency.

Under state law, hearings must be held within 120 days.

The backlog, as well as the labor department’s struggle to fill vacancies in the wage theft unit, have long been the subject of legislative hearings and administrative pledges from

action.

It’s time, Glazer said, “to get an unpainted image.”

“Sometimes,” Glazer said, “the problem identified is not one the administration wants to solve. … It may not be as simple as more money and hiring more people.”

Union lobbyists initially said they would not take a position on an investigation into wage theft, Glazer said.

But the California Labor Federation is now pushing for its own agenda.

“We don’t need to be distracted in the middle of all this. We’ve done all the work to find out what’s wrong,” said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former member of the state assembly who is now the federation’s senior officer. . “We’re trying to take action today.”

Gonzalez Fletcher said labor leaders have privately come to their own conclusions about what needs to be done.

“We literally gathered all the experts, the lawyers, the workers’ centres, the unions, and came up with a whole set of enforcement tools that we need to apply,” she said.

The federation blitzed a two-page summary of its plans to all lawmakers on Friday. The list of suggestions includes a streamlined hiring process for wage theft investigators, relaxed hiring standards, and higher wages. It also endorses legislation that allows for state sanctions against companies that misclassify their employees as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime and other benefits.

Engaging researchers whose findings would be public would “hamper” those changes, Gonzalez Fletcher claimed, diverting staff and resources.

The federation represents some 1,200 local unions with workers in retail, manufacturing, construction, hospitality, healthcare, and government and health care, among others. The letter of opposition to the wage theft control was signed by 11 other unions and union organizations, including Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and Worksafe.

The Department of Industrial Relations has not taken a position on Glazer’s audit request. The agency also did not respond to a request to interview Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower.

She was appointed by

Gavin government

Newsom in 2019. Nearly two decades earlier, Garcia-Brower built wage theft cases against janitorial companies

as a director of Los Angeles-based Maintenance

Cooperative Society

Trust Fund, which is financed by union caretaker services.

The audit will be voted on Wednesday by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, which is chaired by Councilman David Alvarez (D-San Diego), who co-signed Glazer’s request. Until union opposition emerged, approval seemed guaranteed.

Other agenda items include a state request

Sen delegate

Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) to investigate California cannabis licensing errors. The request came in response to an investigative series by The Times documenting widespread local corruption and bribery, a market collapse that drove small-scale cannabis growers out of business, rampant illegal cultivation overtaking rural communities, and the exploitation and death of cannabis farm workers.

Publicly available information about

Bet theft claims are sparse, and reporting by the employment agency to lawmakers provides no information on backlogs. The current waiting period for hearings was disclosed to Glazer staff in a closed meeting and no written report was prepared.

The Department of Industrial Relations did not answer questions from The Times about waiting times for hearings or whether staff shortages have led to major delays.

A time when widespread exploitation of cannabis workers was documented, workers waited more than a year for an initial settlement conference, months more for a hearing, and even months more for a decision, while exposed to hostile employers.

State files obtained by The Times showed there was no record of an agency response to a lawyer’s requests to expedite hearings for two brothers who reportedly received death threats if they took their cases against a state-recognised cannabis farm in Yolo County not moved in. In other cases, there was no further investigation when workers alleged employers brandished guns at them or engaged in patterns of exploitation of undocumented workers.

The Joint Legislative Audit Committee sets the agenda for the office of the California State Auditor, whose investigations into details of state failure often become political fodder.

The Labor Federation said it was working with a number of lawmakers to address wage theft issues at the Department of Industrial Relations, including Senator Dave Cortese (D-San Jose), who chairs the Senate Labor Committee and is also a member of the audit committee will vote on Wednesday.

Cortese aides disputed that, saying on Monday the senator “is not working on a plan related to DIR and wage theft claims.”

Cortese and Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger) are sponsoring their own town hall meeting on cannabis industry workforce issues at the end of the month in response to Times reporting of cannabis abuse practices.