The Moctezuma’s restaurant chain FAFO’d and workers won back $850,000.

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You heard that right: 1,400 Moctezuma’s workers received $850,000 through a settlement after enforcing our rights against wage theft and violations of our breaks.

Anyone who has worked in food service has some familiarity with what the boss did: being worked so hard preparing and serving food that there’s no chance to take breaks even when working double shifts. The break time that the boss stole was also the boss stealing wages. Word to the wise: not giving workers breaks is wage theft!

Here’s what happened and what it means: In 2022, workers came together through the Fair Work Center and our co-counsel to file a class action lawsuit against Moctezuma’s in King County Superior Court. This lawsuit for over 1,400 workers was a tool to ensure that the workers got the money that belonged to them from the start.

The company chose to settle and a court approved it in 2023. This victory wasn’t handed down from above. Workers reclaimed what was owed by powerfully speaking up together to protect our collective rights. It wasn’t just one worker looking after themselves to get what was owed to them personally. Workers organized together and used every available tool and tactic to win.

At Working Washington, we don’t separate legal tools from organizing. Government agencies and community-based organizations shouldn’t treat the courts as a single option leaving us beholden to a slow justice system. Using legal tools only as a means to settle individual complaints is like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole. Workers build power through organizing, and in addition, the courts should be a tool to stop unfair bosses from violating our rights.

This settlement demonstrated how strong enforcement helps workers reclaim what we’re owed. Community-based organizations and government agencies should be working to enforce workers rights more strategically. When the rules are clear and support for workers and businesses trying to do the right thing is there, being strategic with where we prioritize enforcement can help shift norms in entire industries.

DON’T WANT TO PAY FOR THE CLEANING WORK OF THE HOTEL LOBBY? COOL, WE’LL JUST PUT A LIEN ON THE FANCY HOTEL.

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Subcontracting agreements create distance between employers and the people that get paid to work for them, allowing hiring entities to pretend it’s the fault of the subcontracting company or the workers themselves if the working conditions, pay, or treatment are bad. We saw this play out against a Seattle worker, who seized back her power – and won.

In the fall of 2022, Wendy was hired to clean the common areas of the luxurious Thompson Hotel in Seattle, which is owned by Hyatt. She was hired by a subcontractor called Jusalis House Cleaning instead of the hotel directly. Wendy showed up and did the job, cleaning a property that charges guests hundreds of dollars per night. It was long hours on overnight shifts and physically demanding work. After two exhausting months of work, she left the job. Then, as it happens to so many other workers in low-wage industries, the companies decided to mess with her pay.

When she left, she was missing about $1,000 in unpaid wages. Jusalis House Cleaning admitted they owed her that money. But instead of simply paying up in full when Wendy asked for what they owed her, the company decided to make retaliatory threats. Classy, right?

Wage theft is theft. Full stop. And it’s not just about one worker, either. It is embedded into an entire economic system full of corporate evasion that uses subcontracting, confusion, delay, and intimidation to avoid accountability and allow a few people at the top to keep profiting from our hard work. Wage theft is one of the most common crimes in the country, and one of the most under-enforced. It’s practically a business model. 

In Washington State alone, bad bosses steal millions of dollars of wages from tens of thousands of workers every year. They do this by not paying workers at all, like what they did to Wendy. But they also do it by making workers do work off the clock, not paying overtime, not paying for missed breaks, illegal deductions, and by misclassifying workers as “independent contractors.” The Fair Work Center’s 2022 wage theft report found that in King County, nearly 3 in 10 low-wage workers had bosses who committed minimum wage violations against them over a ten-year period. That is not just a glitch in the system – that is the system. 

But workers aren’t helpless in the world we live in today, either. When Wendy found the Fair Work Center, we made a plan together to get her money back. We worked with the Office of Labor Standards to ensure Wendy had every available path to justice, exploring public and private enforcement. When community based organizations like Fair Work Center and agencies like OLS partner together, we have more options to enforce workers’ rights. 

Ultimately, private enforcement offered the best path to accountability and economic fairness. We tried to recover the wages Wendy was owed through small claims court. Jusalis House Cleaning did Matrix-style bullet-dodging to avoid being “served” the legal papers that called them to court. Unsurprisingly, the company didn’t show up for the court hearing. It’s a page in the classic wage theft playbook: deny, stall, dodge, and hope the worker gives up and disappears. Not this time. We went a different route. 

We filed a wage lien against the real property of the Thompson Hotel for ~$4,200, an amount that included Wendy’s unpaid wages and damages allowed under Seattle’s wage theft ordinance. (A lien is a legal tool that lets workers claim wages directly from property owners when their work goes into maintaining that property.) 

At first the legal representatives for Thompson Hotel/Hyatt disputed that the lien was valid. Their excuse? They said they didn’t know her and they didn’t have a record of hiring Jusalis House Cleaning or Wendy. (Remember how earlier we explained that companies like subcontracting so they can create distance between themselves and the people who get paid to do work for them?) We explained the law to the company’s lawyers – the employment structure is irrelevant under the Washington wage lien statute; if a worker “maintained” someone’s property (which includes cleaning) without full compensation, the lien can be filed against the property owner(s), even if they weren’t the employer. The company backed down from their arguments and paid up $3,500 to Wendy for what she was owed, and some extra for the hassle and losses related to waiting to be paid.

Wendy’s case is an example of why enforcement matters. It doesn’t just resolve one complaint. It holds the powerful accountable and forces even global corporations to take responsibility for what happens at their workplaces. When we use the tools we’ve got we don’t just win cases, we change the cost benefit analysis for bosses who want to benefit from our hard work without paying us back. Enforcement should be about resolving cases and building worker power.

Justice Shouldn’t Wait for Bad Bosses to Cooperate

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Until recently, bad bosses who stole wages from their own workers could try to get away with it by using government bureaucracy to cause delays or derail the whole effort. The Washington State Supreme Court recently issued a decision that could change that for good, if government agencies act wisely. This could mean fair treatment for individual workers whose bosses rob us of our hard earned wages, and the opportunity to use enforcement to change the bad behaviors of bad employers in whole industries.

In his concurring opinion on the decision, Justice Steven González cited our very own Fair Work Center’s 2022 report on wage theft in King County, underscoring how widespread wage theft really is. The problem is much more common than most people know. Employers stole the wages of 3 out of 10 of their own workers in King county between 2009 and 2019!

We have many strong laws to protect workers in Washington, but oftentimes workers are too scared to speak up or find that, when we do, bad bosses try to hide evidence or derail investigations that could lead to justice for workers. But enforcement agencies don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) let the shady tactics of bad bosses stop them from doing the work to enforce our rights at work and prevent unfair companies from violating our rights in the first place.

The case at the center of the state Supreme Court’s recent decision began when multiple workers at a cannabis business spoke out about not being fully paid what they were owed for their work. Rather than cooperate fully with the investigation by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (L&I), it resisted efforts to uncover the full scope of violations against its workers. When the company did not reach a settlement agreement with them, L&I persisted in trying to enforce the law against wage theft to help the workers recover wages the company owed to them.

In court, the company argued that L&I shouldn’t be allowed to sue a company unless it first issued a formal demand calculating exactly how much money was owed. This was something L&I was reluctant to do without the full records the company refused to provide.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court stepped in and sided with the workers and L&I. This means that government agencies like L&I can continue to push forward with enforcing the law without being tripped up by an employer’s refusal to share critical information during an investigation. This is a win for workers and the organizations that we use to enforce our rights.

This decision by the state Supreme Court is a reminder for us that enforcement doesn’t have to be just reactive. Filing paperwork and waiting for a company to cooperate isn’t good enough. Enforcement can be used to investigate industry-wide patterns and to try to change the bad behavior of bosses and companies at scale. In other words, it can be used to decrease violations of the law across entire industries, protect workers who are most at risk, and ensure that bad bosses don’t think that dodging investigations for violating workers’ rights is just a routine cost of doing business.

We have some of the strongest workplace standards and workers rights laws in the country. But that strength is just an on-paper formality without good enforcement. In a time when many workers feel like government institutions aren’t on our side or are either unequipped or unwilling to help us fight for our rights and wellbeing, strategic enforcement offers a different vision. If we want our labor laws to actually mean something and make a difference in the lives of workers, we need enforcement agencies, worker organizations, and community groups who are willing to go beyond the routine paperwork. Enforcement should be about shaping employer behavior to increase compliance with the law and fight for economic justice.