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Fair Work Center fights for the rights of immigrant workers every day. From our know your rights trainings and free legal services to our partnerships with immigrant community organizations, we stand with low-wage, immigrant workers fighting for their rights on the job.

Recently, we joined the fight for immigrant rights that has been raging for years at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. The NWDC is a privately-operated, for-profit prison that contracts with the federal government to detain community members fighting their immigration cases. It is operated by the GEO Group, the 2nd largest private prison company in the country. GEO has long been under fire for the NWCD’s abysmal conditions and mistreatment of detainees, including those whose labor keeps the detention center running. GEO pays these detainee workers just $1 a day, even though Washington minimum wage is $12 an hour. For the record, $1 a day at the state minimum wage buys you about 5 minutes of work. GEO’s entire business model relies on stealing at least 91% of detainees’ wages, all while generating more than $2 billion in annual revenue. 

In September 2017, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued GEO Group for failing to pay detainee workers the state minimum wage. This summer, the Fair Work Center was asked to support the lawsuit by filing an amicus brief due to our expertise in enforcing minimum wage protections for Washington workers. An amicus brief is the legal term for providing expertise, information, or other insights to the court to aid in a case that isn’t your own. You can read the brief we filed in support of the Attorney General’s case here. In it we argue that Washington’s wage and hour laws apply to all employees, that wage theft is rampant in our economy, and that GEO is committing wage theft from detained workers. 

This lawsuit is about the value of work, and specifically the value of immigrant work. Immigrant workers, even detained immigrant workers, have the right to the legal minimum wage for their work.

As we argue in the brief, “wage theft is a systemic problem that disproportionately impacts vulnerable low-wage workers.” There probably isn’t a more vulnerable worker than a detained immigrant who faces deportation – but all employers in Washington have to follow the law, and all employees in Washington are covered.  By calling out GEO’s particularly egregious acts of wage theft, Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s lawsuit has the potential to put all employers on notice: no worker is ripe for exploitation in Washington, which is why Fair Work Center is proud to be lending our expertise to support the suit in this way.

Read the full amicus brief here, and remember to contact Fair Work Center if you or someone you know is having their rights violated at work.

PS – We are seeking third-year law students or recent law graduates interested in applying for public interest fellowships with Fair Work Center beginning in fall 2020, including Skadden, Equal Justice Workers, Justice Catalyst, and other independently funded programs. Learn more here!

Julia is a Mexican immigrant who works as an apple picker in Washington’s Yakima Valley. Recently, Julia’s supervisor instructed her to tend to a section of apple trees in a field that had been sprayed with pesticides only days before.

Pesticide exposure is a major occupational hazard for farmworkers and their families. In fact, pesticide exposure is attributed to higher rates of health problems among farmworkers’ children, including leukemia and cancer, because parents come home with pesticides on their skin and clothes and expose their children.

Julia knew she shouldn’t have to work in the recently sprayed field, but she didn’t know what to do about it – until she talked to Ricardo, an outreach and education specialist with Fair Work Center & Working Washington.

Julia contacted Ricardo after hearing him on a local Spanish radio call-in show. Julia took Ricardo to the field she was instructed to work in and they took pictures of the signs warning people to stay away because of pesticides.

Together they filed a complaint with Washington’s Department of Safety & Health (DOSH). DOSH confirmed that Julie and her coworkers shouldn’t be working in that field and instructed her employer not to send workers there.

León works in a commercial kitchen located in a grocery store in Yakima.

Conditions in the kitchen were miserable, especially since the air conditioner and other kitchen equipment was broken. Ricardo also supported León in filing a complaint with DOSH, who sent an inspector to verify the broken air conditioner and other equipment. The inspector filed an official request for the grocery store to fix the broken equipment, which they have since done. And, while the inspector was on site, he spoke with León and his coworkers and learned they were also being discriminated against because they are immigrants, so he supported them in filing complaints with the Washington Human Rights Commission.

Now, thanks to Fair Work Center and Working Washington’s presence in the region, Leon and his coworkers are working in a safer and healthier workplace, and are happier too since they are no longer being harassed and discriminated against at work. 

Our presence in the Yakima Valley is possible in part due to funding from the DOSH Safety & Health Investment Project.

Su, a Korean immigrant who worked as an assistant to a hairdresser in Bellevue, answered phones, greeted customers, swept up hair, and provided tea and snacks. She worked 45 hours per week but was paid just $1,000 per month, less than $5.50 per hour. Her employer thought that she could take advantage of Su and her desire to break into the personal care industry, telling her that she was not an employee but an “independent contractor.”

Su knew this was unfair and was referred to the Fair Work Legal Clinic by 21 Progress, one of our Fair Work Collaborative partners. The Legal Clinic represented Su, filing a charge of wage theft on her behalf with Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries (L&I).

L&I initially found that Su’s employer must pay $2,000. But Su brought in her records showing that she was actually owed double that amount. L&I agreed and ordered Su’s employer to pay the full $4,000 she was owed. Su is thrilled with the result and we are thrilled that we could support Su in standing up for her right to a fair wage. That said, L&I could and should have gone further in cases like Su’s.

Unfortunately, in the majority of its cases, L&I does not require that employers pay interest when paying back wages stolen from their workers’ paychecks. This means that if L&I orders payment a year after the theft happened, the employer gets to use the worker’s money during that whole time. This is like an employer taking an interest-free loan from its employees’ paychecks. Meanwhile, low-wage workers – who are disproportionately women, people of color, immigrants and refugees – have the pay the interest on credit card debt or payday loans just to get by. This isn’t right, and Fair Work Center will continue to advocate that L&I must include interest in these wage and hour cases.

If you think you are not being paid the minimum wage, or what you are owed, please call our hotline at 1-844-485-1195, email us at help@fairworkcenter.org, or fill out our our web-form.

No single group has done more to raise standards for low-wage workers over the past decade than low-wage workers. It’s easy to take for granted the annual increases to the minimum wage in Washington, Seattle, SeaTac, and Tacoma that just occurred last week on January 1st. It’s easy to forget how we got here, and just as importantly, who got us here.

In late 2012, Working Washington began organizing in SeaTac with the idea of making every job at the airport a good job. Those efforts resulted Proposition 1, a ballot initiative passed in November of 2013 which raised wages to $15/hour with annual adjustments for inflation for airport and hospitality workers in SeaTac. It also provided paid sick days and provisions that gave workers opportunities for more hours and ensured they received all the tips or service charges they earned.

Six months later, hundreds of fast food workers with Working Washington in Seattle launched strikes across the city, calling for $15 for all workers across the city. Prior to the first strikes, the only fast food workers you heard from in the media were actors in commercials, but through their courageous action, these low-wage workers sparked a citywide debate about the poverty-wage economy and the future of work in Seattle. Despite initially being dismissed as unrealistic by nearly everyone, Seattle’s Fight for $15 was soon embraced by the public and a wide spectrum of leaders in the city.

Check out this video, “Walking Out Into History” for more on the epic win of $15 in Seattle.

The speed and scale of the shift was extraordinary. Workers continued agitating after those first strikes, with additional strikes, a march from SeaTac to Seattle, and a number of creative street actions to turn up the heat on local elected leaders to act. And in less than six months of high profile actions, a $15 minimum wage was a major plank of both mayoral candidates’ platforms and everyone, from City Hall to workplaces large and small, was talking about the inevitability of raising the minimum wage. On May 1, 2014 – just one year after those first fast food workers took to the streets – Mayor Ed Murray announced a proposal to increase Seattle’s minimum wage over the course of the next seven years to $15 or higher for all workers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fair Work Center comes out of this history. We were founded shortly after $15 was established in Seattle in order to ensure that the new minimum wage – as well as other progressive labor standards workers won like paid sick and safe leave and fair chance employment – was enforced and that workers were getting paid the wages they fought for.

Today we provide know your rights education to thousands of workers each year. We support hundreds of workers in exercising their rights through our legal clinic. And we are partnering with Working Washington to build lasting power for low-wage workers across the state.

For more information on the minimum wage or your other rights on the job, to learn how to access our free legal clinic or arrange a know your rights training in your community, check out www.fairworkcenter.org.

Please join us in shaping the future of worker power on November 1, 5:30-7:30pm at WithinSodo (map). Fair Work Center and Working Washington are joining forces to build a powerful, sustainable and scalable worker organization to advance worker and economic justice in Washington and beyond. Join us in celebrating this alignment and raising funds to fuel the 21st Century workers movement.

We are excited to announce our special guest speaker, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. In addition to his strong resistance to the Trump administration, Bob is a tireless champion for working people in Washington, and we are thrilled he will be joining us.

RVSP online today!

The suggested ticket price is $50, but there is a sliding scale so you can pay what makes the most sense for your budget.

If you have any questions, please contact Hannah Cole (hannah@workingwashington.org).

We look forward to seeing you on November 1st!