Philadelphia workers are readying a bill with a basic demand: Just enforce the law

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

Adriana still remembers the day last spring when she got paid less than minimum wage. She was at a big suburban house outside Philadelphia that was at least three stories tall, and it had taken her and a crew more than six hours, without breaks, to clean it. At the next house, the supervisor told Adriana, who’d asked for a break, to wait in the van. She’d been fired.

Adriana said she got $40 cash for the eight hours she spent in the van and cleaning that day. She’d been promised $90 for the day. If she’d been paid minimum wage, she would have earned $58.

“I didn’t know whether to cry or scream,” said Adriana, who asked to have her last name withheld to avoid problems with potential employers. “We just had to learn and try not to make it happen again.”

That’s why Adriana is working to urge passage of a new bill intended to enforce worker protection ordinances, fight wage theft and protect the victims of workplace retaliation. Slated to be introduced in 2025, it is backed by Philadelphia’s National Domestic Workers Alliance and a coalition of other nonunionized worker organizations and is aimed at one of workers’ thorniest problems, in Philadelphia and nationwide: making sure employers follow the rules.

Supporters say the worker protections bill will start to fix a broken enforcement system under the city’s Office of Worker Protections that leaves workers in limbo for too long, and often allows employers to cheat workers without facing consequences.

The goal of this bill is “to incentivize workers coming forward by providing them with more supports,” said Nicole Kligerman, founder of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She explains that the bill “has more of a carrot-and-stick approach to employers, [which] improves the process for those cases.”

The Office of Worker Protections did not return repeated requests for comment.

The bill expands enforcement in several ways. It allows for anonymous complaints, which Kligerman said are key because employers often retaliate against workers who complain by firing them or by telling other employers not to hire them. The bill would add domestic employers to the agency’s “bad actor” list, which tracks employers who have violated the law, making their names public until they fix or otherwise resolve the legal or code violations. This would allow potential employees or customers to choose to not work with businesses that have a track record of breaking the law. The bill would also ensure that money collected from abusive employers goes to workers (rather than a fine paid to the city).

In addition, the bill would expand protections for immigrant workers, including translation services in languages other than English and Spanish, and help workers qualify for visas that allow victims of trafficking and other crimes to stay in the country legally. It would also give exploited workers access to mental health care.

City data suggest that few workers who complain to the Office of Worker Protections get help. Last year, Philadelphia’s Department of Labor reported that the Office of Worker Protections, housed in the Labor Policy and Compliance division, reported receiving more than 1,200 inquiries on its worker hotline and took in 282 formal complaints. Still, the agency completed only 181 investigations within 2023. Currently, investigations take “6-12 months,” according to the Department of Labor, but will “sometimes take longer.”

When complaints to the agency go unanswered, said Kligerman, “The result is a real, chilling effect on workers.” That’s especially true for domestic workers who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers, said Kligerman. Many are immigrants for whom English is a second language, enabling employers to threaten workers with calls to the border patrol. What’s more, domestic workers often rely on referrals from employers to find jobs, leaving them dependent on bosses not only for their current job but for their next one too.

NDWA’s legislation would not only help domestic workers, but other vulnerable workers too. For example, contingent and temporary workers are employed by agencies but cycle between different workplaces. If a worker complains at a job, it’s easy for a supervisor to send them home and request someone more compliant. If workers are particularly desperate to stay employed, as with formerly incarcerated workers for whom work is a condition of freedom, a complaint opens the possibility of losing work.

That shared vulnerability to employer abuse has birthed a loose, intersectional coalition supporting the bill. Although the NDWA has headed the call for the bill, they are now joined by other groups, including the Philly Black Worker Project, which organizes Black workers to address inequality; Asian Americans United, which advocates for Asian Americans and against anti-Asian hate; VietLead, which organizes Vietnamese American community members around social justice; Juntos, which advocates for immigrants’ human rights; and Women’s Way, a nonprofit working to improve the lives of women and girls.

The Office of Worker Protections did not answer Capital & Main’s repeated requests for comment. Public documents from the agency note that “investigations are a free service that takes time.”

In all this, Philadelphia workers face a local version of a national problem: a lack of enforcement, which makes it difficult to hold bad employers accountable. Over the past 40 years, the average number of workers per federal Department of Labor investigator tripled — from 61,000 per inspector to more than 198,000. By comparison, the International Labor Organization recommends 10,000 workers per inspector.

In Philadelphia, a city of around 760,000 workers, the Labor Policy and Compliance program employs just 20 staff members. Of those, only four are charged with investigating worker complaints, leaving each investigator responsible for an average of roughly 200,000 workers.

This summer, Philadelphia advocates sought $2.6 million from the City Council for the Office of Worker Protections, hoping to “staff up” the agency, said Councilmember Kendra Brooks. They were unsuccessful. That amount would have more than doubled the budget of the Department of Labor division that houses the Office of Worker Protections. For the 2024 fiscal year, city officials cut the Department of Labor budget by $409,139.

“We need to have pro-worker policies that aren’t just getting paid lip service to but that have funding behind them [to] get employees to actually be able to do these things that we are fighting so hard for,” said Brittany Alston, executive director of the Philly Black Worker Project. As evidence that the city could afford to boost enforcement if it chose to, Alston points to the city’s allocation of $17 million in new spending on cop cars and surveillance drones.

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Strengthening enforcement feels especially crucial to the city’s domestic workers, who fought for two years to win Philadelphia’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in 2020. The bill declared that domestic workers had the same rights many other workers often take for granted: paid breaks, sick leave and time off, safe working conditions and protection from harassment, as well as a contract in their native language.

Since the passage, advocates say, few of the city’s 16,000 domestic workers, the majority of whom are women of color, have seen their jobs improve. Despite their new rights, domestic workers’ average annual income in 2023 was $10,000. That is notably below the city’s “deep poverty” line of $13,000.

Indeed, said Premilla Nadasen, a historian of women’s labor movements who has followed the rollouts of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights nationally, these kinds of bills of rights rarely achieve immediate direct change in workers’ lives. “The material realities of these workers on a day-to-day basis has shifted very little,” said Nadasen.

Indeed, the Bill of Rights may be most powerful as a way of showing workers they deserve to be treated well at work — and can push for change. “Part of the strategy of pushing for a bill is to mobilize people,” said Nadasen. “It’s building a movement.”

That’s something Adriana has experienced firsthand.

“These things continue to happen, and we need a lot [to] further protect workers and ensure that there’s consequences for these employers,” Adriana said. “But it will always be to your benefit to speak up.”

After the suburban cleaning job employer stiffed her on part of her wages, she filed a complaint with the Philadelphia Office of Worker Protections in the spring of 2023. Then a jurisdictional issue forced her to refile it in February 2024.

One year and eight months after all those unpaid hours in the van, Adriana is still waiting.

Copyright Capital & Main 2024