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Jeanne Kuang and Alejandra Reyes-Velarde | CalMattersMcDonald's workers, including Lizzet Aguilar, celebrate winning a state retaliation claim against a Boyle Heights franchise location. Four workers won more than $100,000 in lost hours, penalties and backpay after they alleged the owners illegally retaliated against them for making a workplace safety complaint during the pandemic.Amid an upswing in labor activism, claims of retaliation are rising across the state, CalMatters has found.
Amid an upswing in labor activism, claims of retaliation are rising across the state, CalMatters has found. “Why this retaliation happens is workers standing up for themselves, standing up for their rights, and owners and companies putting those workers down, deterring the other workers by this increased fear,” said Jules Yun, who organizes restaurant and retail workers for the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance, an advocacy center in Los Angeles.
. Officials dismissed 228 of those claims for a lack of evidence, deciding in the worker’s favor in just nine cases.After being fired from her McDonald’s job, Aguilar’s debt piled up and her household income dwindled. The officer ruled that the owner of the Boyle Heights franchise location, R&B Sanchez, Inc., along with its owners Beverly Sanchez and the late Robert Sanchez, and their nephew who was the human resources manager, had illegally retaliated against the four workers for making a legally protected workplace safety complaint.
The center surveyed 1,000 California workers of various incomes and found 38% said they had experienced a workplace violation, but only 10% had reported it to a state agency. Many workers said fear of retaliation would prevent them from reporting a violation, according toSandra and Veronica Barreno felt that fear after complaining this March that their employer had underpaid them for overtime work.
For part of the conversation, several organizers with the worker center accompanied Sandra. After the manager, Sandra and the organizers talked about the lawsuit, the organizer said, they left. Sandra recalled that she felt frightened by the conversation and wanted to go home.She called the Koreatown worker center organizers back crying, Yun said, and repeated to them what she said the manager had just told her. The organizers returned.
But the lawsuit does not include allegations of retaliation — the Barrenos’ lawyer said they would be hard to prove. Nor have the sisters filed a retaliation complaint with the state — worker center organizers knew of a significant backlog, Yun said.
Under current state law, workers must prove their employer’s actions were retaliatory to win their case. Then the state could fine the business or force the employer to pay back pay for an illegal firing.Yun said the bill could encourage more workers to organize themselves to make workplace demands together: “It won’t eliminate all the fear, of course, but it is one more step.
These concerns killed a similar measure the Legislature passed in 2002. That bill was an effort to encourage workers in the underground economy to come forward about labor violations. In 2022 nearly a third of the unit’s 60 positions were vacant. The Legislature has since added funding to grow the unit to 94 positions in the next year, but the office’s employees have complained ofRepresentatives for the Labor Commissioner’s Office said their increased outreach to workers about labor rights may be in part driving an influx of retaliation claims.
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