Fresno City Attorney could be among first in state to prosecute wage theft under new law

The Fresno City Attorney’s office could soon be among the first in California to prosecute wage theft, city officials announced Tuesday.

The Fresno City Council is considering a new policy that would give the City Attorney’s Office the power to prosecute employers through both civil and criminal action, a power that was previously exclusive to the state Labor Commissioner’s Office. 

Councilmember Tyler Maxwell, who is sponsoring the bill, held a news conference Tuesday alongside Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz to speak to the need for this policy in Fresno.

“We are a very large working-class community,” he said in an interview with Fresnoland on Monday. “We have a lot of folks living paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet, and our economy relies entirely on those families. Those are the folks most prone to being taken advantage of.

“It’s important that we create an alternative resource for folks that want to file a claim,” he added, “that think that they’ve been wronged (and) that they’ve been a victim of wage theft, but don’t have a year or years to go through this bureaucracy at the state level.”

Janz said Tuesday that his office will create an intake form for local cases that will first be referred to the Labor Commissioner’s office. If 30 days pass with no action, Janz’s office will take up the case. 

Though city leaders didn’t have local data from the state to share Tuesday, Janz estimated there are “hundreds, if not thousands,” of wage theft cases locally. Violators can face fines of between $10,000 and $20,000 through civil court, he added.

If the resolution passes council, Janz said the City Attorney’s Office would look to launch in April, deploying current staff from the office’s litigation unit at no additional cost to the city.

Assembly Bill 594 paved the way for Fresno’s potential new policy. The state law authorized public prosecutors like city attorneys to pursue civil or criminal actions against employers who commit wage theft in their jurisdictions in response to “widespread” wage theft in California, especially in “low-wage industries,” the law reads.

Maxwell said Fresno would be a “trailblazer in California” if the policy passes and hopes other cities follow suit.

AB 594 also bestows this prosecutorial power on district attorneys across California, though the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office wasn’t part of Tuesday’s news conference. 

A spokesperson for the DA’s office told Fresnoland the office only learned of the city’s proposed policy Monday morning.

“We look forward to working collaboratively to combat wage theft cases within the City of Fresno and County of Fresno,” said DA’s office spokesperson Taylor Long in an email Monday evening.

“Until such time, and within the guidelines of existing law, our office will review any wage theft cases submitted to our office and determine if civil or criminal charges are warranted,” she added.

Maxwell named the building trades as a sector of Fresno’s economy with numerous cases of wage theft. Representatives from building trades unions joined Tuesday’s news conference, including Chuck Riojas, executive secretary and treasurer of the Fresno-Madera-Tulare-Kings Building Trades Council.

“This is going to protect workers’ rights,” he said Tuesday. “It’s going to protect them on the job site, and hopefully correct those … low-road contractors (and) those low-road players that use it as a business model to undermine their employees’ pay.”

The issue has stretched into other sectors of Fresno’s economy as well. Ex-employees for the failed Fresno tech company Bitwise Industries told Fresnoland they struggled to navigate existing processes aimed at helping them recover unpaid wages following Bitwise’s demise in June 2023. 

Hundreds of workers who saw their final checks from Bitwise bounce had the option to join lawsuits, file proof of claim with bankruptcy court, and file claims with the Labor Commissioner’s office.

Maxwell told Fresnoland that Bitwise specifically was in “the back of my mind” when he decided to sponsor the resolution regarding the Fresno city attorney.

“If we could put together a task force to make sure that folks that feel like their rights are being violated have an avenue to lodge a complaint and have it heard in a timely manner,” he said Monday, “I think that we could do a good job of making sure that we never have another Bitwise incident again.”

Janz said Tuesday it “remains to be seen” whether his team would go after Bitwise but didn’t rule out the possibility.

“We have the U.S. Attorney’s Office already investigating (and) prosecuting those individuals for wage theft and other similar crimes,” he said, “so I’d be concerned about some double jeopardy issues there.”

Though city leaders estimated there are hundreds of local cases of wage theft going off of statewide figures, Maxwell said he hopes this potential new policy would help gather more precise local data.

“I’m hoping that we can be leaders on that front as well,” he said, “making sure that we have reliable numbers going forward, that we’re tracking incoming cases and their status, so that we can have those numbers going forward.”