by Kaylee Tornay, InvestigateWest, Oregon Capital Chronicle
September 19, 2024
A new report from Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries spotlights the hurdles barring the agency from enforcing critical protections for workers, from wage theft to civil rights and paid leave.
The agency, which is tasked with overseeing myriad worker rights, may need to dismiss more than 460 claims related to wage theft and minimum wage violations per year merely because it doesn’t have enough investigators. In the civil rights division, 400 cases are on track to be thrown out by the end of the fall for the same reason. Oregonians are losing an estimated $283 million to $405 million every year in minimum wage violations alone, according to an analysis cited in the State of the Worker report that the labor bureau released this month.
Last year, InvestigateWest reported on the bureau’s struggles to collect stolen wages and penalties even in the cases that it was able to investigate. Over an eight-year period, the bureau failed to collect nearly $5 million in unpaid wages and penalties that it had determined workers were owed. State leaders, including Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson, have cited the findings, including in the new report, as further evidence of the fallout that they link to decades of underfunding at the agency.
To make meaningful improvements, Stephenson said, the agency needs more money. She and other bureau leaders are planning to ask the state Legislature in 2025 for just that: a $17.9 million increase to its annual operating budget. Oregon Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson. (Courtesy of Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries)
“No worker should have to be told, ‘Your rights don’t fit within our budget,’” she said in an interview. “It feels like we are being forced to triage justice, and we’re dismissing cases not because of the merits. We’re just dismissing them because we don’t have any resources.”
The 30% bump would help the bureau recruit and retain key staff, reducing backlogs of more than 1,000 claims in both the wage and civil rights divisions, and increase its ability to hold employers accountable for upholding paid leave and retirement savings requirements. It would also help the bureau avoid steps that it says will be necessary without more resources.
Those measures include establishing an earnings threshold for wage claims, meaning the wage division would only investigate claims made by workers making less than around $60,000 a year. Without additional staff to enforce Oregon’s paid leave laws, the bureau will need to keep pulling investigators away from the wage and civil rights divisions, Stephenson said, which just makes the backlogs grow.
“Oregonians have to know that this is the choice that we’re at,” she said. “We either dismiss hundreds, maybe thousands of claims, or we just allow this backlog to grow and grow. It’s not a real choice, and we have the ability to do better.”
As an independent state agency led by an elected official, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries isn’t subject to the direction of Gov. Tina Kotek. But the request nonetheless reaches well beyond the 1% ceiling at which Kotek has instructed state agencies to cap their requested increases, according to the Oregonian/Oregonlive.
The labor bureau primarily needs more people, the report and Stephenson said, a claim that the numbers bear out: Today, the agency has one employee for every 20,000 workers in Oregon. By comparison, 40 years ago, there was one labor bureau employee for every 5,750 workers.
The report makes note of the ways that the labor bureau has tried to maximize its existing budget or make its processes more efficient. That includes using a method called strategic enforcement to focus on cases with the biggest potential to encourage compliance in an industry, and making information about how to follow disability and wage laws more accessible to employers. The bureau also began seeking penalty wages in all wage theft cases to incentivize compliance with the law.
While the Legislature has been historically willing to delegate enforcement duties to the labor bureau — including in 2024, when it cleared the way for the agency to more strongly enforce child labor laws — it hasn’t always been so amenable toward increased funding to support that work. The requested budget increase doesn’t just account for investigators, but includes office staff, customer service workers and personnel who can train employers on compliance to help them avoid violating the law in the first place.
Democratic leaders in the Oregon House declined an interview request through a spokesperson about the labor bureau’s budget request. The spokesperson said House leaders are waiting on presentations that Stephenson will deliver during informational hearings on Sept. 23-25 that preview the upcoming session.
Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, also did not respond to requests for an interview.
But Stephenson said she thinks supporting workers and creating a fairer playing field for law-abiding employers can draw bipartisan support.
“I think our focus is just going to be having the conversation of what it is that we value as Oregonians,” Stephenson said. “When I think about the backbone of our economy, I think about workers. I think it’s just a really simple expectation that we all have, that workers will get their pay, and will be able to work in the type of environments we want. So it’s very simple, but of course, it’s not easy, and it requires someone to actually uphold that expectation.”
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InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kaylee Tornay covers labor, youth and health care issues. Reach her at 503-877-4108 or [email protected]. On Twitter @ka_tornay.
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: [email protected]. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and X.