NWJP’s Year in Review – Our Long-Haul Fights for Systemic Change: NWJP Pushes for Meaningful Public Enforcement Reforms
Over the last two years, NWJP has been working to help the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industry (BOLI) radically reimagine the role of public enforcement of wage theft cases. Meaningful access to justice for low-wage and immigrant workers simply cannot be achieved without creative public enforcement and collaboration with trusted community partners. BOLI is a critical resource to address wage theft and provide remedies for employment discrimination and retaliation, however it cannot not meet the needs of all workers unless it operates strategically.
“Federal gridlock and disfunction have caused a shift in focus to seeking greater worker protections at the state and local level. Workers’ rights organizations have been vital to passing an array of new and innovative laws at the subnational level. All too often, however, these new policies have not been accompanied by adequate funding for enforcement or co-enforcement and little attention has been paid to identifying and including strong enforcement powers in the laws. Effective enforcement is in the details.”
- Janice Fine and Jenn Round,
Rutgers School of Management And Labor Relations, Federal, State and Local Models of Strategic Enforcement and Co-enforcement Across the U.S. 2021
Working with NWJP, PCUN, unions, community partners and Rutgers’s Workplace Justice Lab, BOLI has been working to improve its services to our client communities by engaging in “strategic enforcement.” Instead of simply responding to incoming complaints with limited resources, strategic enforcement identifies industries where there are high rates of violations but few complaints, and then builds a co-enforcement model where government and community-based partners investigate selected cases together.
We have helped BOLI set up four industry-based teams comprised of BOLI staff and community partners, focused on janitorial, construction, farm and care industry workers. These teams identify and investigate low-road employers, using creative and culturally responsive co-enforcement. Significant co-enforcement investigations are in process, and we believe the outcomes will create powerful ripple effects in the four identified industries.
This approach, while nascent in Oregon, has the potential to be groundbreaking for public enforcement. By working with workers, unions and other community advocates, we have seen BOLI learn to flex a wider range of enforcement muscles. Often these are powers of enforcement that NWJP and other community-based groups do not have. At the same time, community partners like NWJP have earned the trust of workers who may otherwise not be willing to speak to a government agency, and we are then able to serve as a bridge between skeptical workers and BOLI. Also, being more transparent about their internal processes, we have been able to identify and help BOLI change systemic barriers for our client communities.
BOLI has been chronically underfunded since its inception, and especially over the past three decades. In response, they have had to make some drastic changes to their policies and focus only on workers making less than $52,710 a year. They have a significant budget request before the Oregon Legislature to address their severe underfunding. But by working with BOLI to engage in strategic enforcement, NWJP is helping the agency rethink and sharpen their unique enforcement tools.
Our work to strengthen and re-imagine Oregon’s public labor enforcement mechanisms provides us all some protection from national efforts to shrink or eliminate federal labor enforcement.