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

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.