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At their home in Anaheim, Maria Luisa expressed little optimism in recuperating the wages owed to her husband, Saul Pedroza, by the firm RDV Construction. March 7, 2024.California regulators have failed to compel the state’s worst cited wage theft offender to pay the millions of dollars his companies stole from workers, a KQED investigation found.: The California Labor Commissioner’s Office ordered Rafael Rivas’ RDV Construction Inc. and RVR General Construction Inc. to pay $16.
The California Labor Commissioner’s Office ordered Rafael Rivas’ RDV Construction Inc. and RVR General Construction Inc. to pay $16.2 million for defrauding more than 1,100 workers in Southern California.assessed $450.6 million in unpaid wages and penalties against thousands of employers statewide, including Rivas’ companies. The agency recovered as little as 16%, or $74.5 million, according to records it provided to KQED last month.
The job vacancy rate at the Labor Commissioner’s Office reached 42% last year, according to an analysis of staffing documents kept by the state Department of Finance. Dozens of wage theft investigators, attorneys and others at the agencyThe Labor Commissioner’s Office will continue to explore all avenues towards restitution that are available to our agency.
The state Attorney General’s Office, which can criminally prosecute wage theft cases, declined to answer whether it had taken any action against the employer. The carpenters were given paychecks that bounced due to insufficient funds. After they quit, Pedroza and Gonzalez said they went to the worksite and RDV’s offices to demand their earnings, and they both filed wage claims with the Labor Commissioner’s Office.“I see it as a mockery of all the people they defrauded and of the government,” Gonzalez, 61, said. “It was a robbery in broad daylight what they did to us.
San Bernardino County Assessor’s records show Rivas transferred at least one commercial property in Fontana, which is listed as RVR’s official business address, to a family member, Rosa Rivas, months after filing for the company’s bankruptcy. Rivas also owns an adjacent vacant plot of land. “Realizing that he was not compatible with the family partners as business associates, Rivas did venture out on his own and began doing business by himself through RVR,” Jones added. “However, a significant amount of damage had already been done.”
“You can make a negotiation with respect to getting money now while everybody’s still alive, as opposed to having no idea if it will ever be paid off,” said Reiss, who is also a bankruptcy mediator for the Central District of California.The Huntington Beach City Council is considering outsourcing the operation of its public library system to a private company.
And according to Close the Gap, of 19 districts that are either guaranteed or likely to elect women, 13 feature at least one woman of color advancing to the general election. Tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado finished first in a crowded field in the 14th Council District and has forced incumbent Councilmember Kevin de León into a runoff;
In what some experts say is a maturing of the progressive movement, candidates and organizations were able to stage strong grassroots door-knocking efforts across multiple campaigns. One organization launched an independent expenditure campaign for the first time, sending out mailers to counteract a negative campaign against a progressive candidate by the police union.
The citizen-led Healthy Streets Initiative, which will require billions of dollars in investment into more bike and bus lanes as well as street safety measures, overwhelmingly passed with 65% of the vote; “Nothing beats having one-on-one conversations with folks at their door and them really being felt listened to, feeling respected,” Torres said. “It was all gas, no breaks to make sure we were able to secure a win.”
Jurado said her campaign “consistently emphasized the marginalized voices in the district — folks that have felt forgotten and not listened to.” “They have gone back to basics — and that is the ground game,” said Fernando Guerra, professor of political science at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “They have mastered how to do it. It's incredibly difficult to implement but they’re doing it.”In Jurado’s case, according to her campaign field director, there was a cadre of young people willing to walk the district. Torres said groups including Ground Game L.A.
Raman won reelection outright with 50.64% percent of the vote. It was just a few hundred votes that put her over 50%, allowing her to avoid a runoff in November against her closest challenger, Ethan Weaver. One of the city council candidates endorsed by those guides was Burgos, who finished second and made it into the runoff in District 12 despite being far outspent by her opponents. Burgos is an optician, owner of the North Hollywood theater company Dainty Dames Events, and a member of the North Hollywood Neighborhood Council.
In the 10th District, which covers Koreatown, mid-Wilshire and Leimert Park, pastor and community organizer Eddie Anderson finished with 19% of the vote and out of the runoff. “The electorate has embraced some of these progressive reforms,” said Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College. “Although I think we will see just how far they have done so come November.”Frank Stoltze explores who has power and how they use it at a time when our democratic systems have been under threat.Many nail salon workers are paid by the manicure, according to a new report co-authored by the UCLA Labor Center and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative.
Researchers, using U.S. Census Bureau data, estimate that the hourly median wage for nail salon workers in 2021 was $10.94 — below the then- Instead of giving these workers hourly wages, employers are paying them by the manicure, with 60% going to the worker and 40% to the salon. Researchers estimate a third of workers are compensated this way.
As for getting to the root of pay issues? Among the solutions suggested are raising prices for customers, or getting salon owners to share more of the profits with their workers.“They put in their 'X' number of hours in the salon and they're only seeing three to four clients a day,” said Vo, putting the range for basic manicures between $25 to $35.
“My effort is in trying to educate the industry — I know it's not going to happen overnight – to get people to come around to understanding that you got to make the changes,” Vo said. “It’s going to be more costly to correct what they could have avoided in the first place.”Vo said the 60/40 pay structure dates back decades. That's when Vietnamese refugees entered the nail salon industry en masse after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
The industry is so dominated by Vietnamese Americans that when a crisis like the pandemic hits and forced the shutdown of salons, it was felt deeply community-wide, as many have friends and family who are manicurists.Several years later, some salons have not entirely rebounded. Some manicurists have reported to the collaborative that they've been making less money since the pandemic, noting that customers are not returning for services at the same frequency they did before.
Lucero Herrera, one of the UCLA analysts behind the nail industry report, said slowed customer traffic since the pandemic may have affected some owners' ability to cover both business expenses and workplace improvements, such as increasing manicurist pay.“How can we think of innovative solutions and labor practices that can really uplift both workers and owners?” Herrera said.
Her hope is that as more workers familiarize themselves with the law, they'll be able to better advocate for themselves. "Stress is a portion of burnout," said Ballesteros,"but with burnout a lot of time we see constant anxiety about work. There's a lot more physical, mental, emotional fatigue because you are expending more resources than you might have."
She had a hunch that was she was experiencing something more than stress and different than depression. "Most people can look at their life and point the finger at what it is that is causing them the most exhaustion or overextension. Once these areas are identified, they can be addressed."Ballesteros said she recognizes that setting boundaries can feeling like an emotionally charged conversation, but added it can feel much simpler when we look at it in terms of our time management..
The chance of wet weather is expected to spread across Riverside and Orange counties in the afternoon, before moving into Los Angeles and Ventura counties until around 10 p.m. Monday. They could pop up anywhere from the mountains to the coast, Lund said, so you might want to consider a change of location if you have any plans outside.“You also want to wait at least 30 minutes after you last hear thunder before you even try to go outside again,” she noted.Potential for isolated strong tstms thru this evening for LA, Ventura, Santa Barbara counties. Threats include local strong wind gusts to 50 mph, hail, and isolated dry lightning strikes.
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