The San Diego City Council will consider amending the municipal code on Tuesday to strengthen the city's ability to enforce wage theft laws, including allowing civil action to recover unpaid wages and overtime.
San Diego City Councilmembers Marni von Wilpert and Sean Elo-Rivera proposed the amendments to the law, which currently does not authorize such civil actions.
"Wage theft is a widespread and underreported form of economic harm affecting workers across San Diego, often occurring at a scale that rivals other forms of theft," a city document states. "It takes many forms, depriving workers of wages and benefits they have legally earned. Data from the U.S. Department of Labor underscores the scope of the issue, with significant amounts of unpaid wages recovered each year, while many violations still go unreported."
On Jan. 1, 2027, San Diego's minimum wage will rise from $17.75 to $18.35 per hour, but von Wilpert and Elo-Rivera said the increase will matter only if workers receive the wages they are owed.
If approved, San Diego would join a growing number of cities nationwide taking enforcement action to combat wage theft. In September, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a $131.5 million enforcement action against DoorDash for violations of the city's delivery worker laws. More than $115 million is expected to go directly to more than 260,000 delivery workers.
In July of this year, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the recovery of more than $500,000 in back wages for six workers at a San Diego deli who were not paid the local minimum wage or required overtime. According to a city document, federal investigators found that the employees regularly worked 11-hour days and averaged 55 hours per week while being paid a flat rate of $100 per day. The enforcement action resulted in each worker receiving approximately $83,000 in back wages.
Wage theft can take many forms, including denial of legally required meal and rest breaks, failure to pay overtime wages, misappropriation of employee tips, requiring employees to work "off the clock," failure to provide or allow use of earned sick leave, unauthorized or unlawful deductions from paychecks and failure to reimburse employees for business-related expenses.
In addition to the proposed enforcement changes, Tuesday's proposal includes technical and conforming amendments to "better align" the earned sick leave provisions in the city's Earned Sick Leave and Minimum Wage Ordinance with existing requirements under California law.
