Christina Stephenson, Oregon’s top labor law enforcer, spoke to the Labor Press Jan. 10 about how years of underfunding have created a crisis for her agency.
DON McINTOSH: This year, you’re going to be delivering a message to the Oregon Legislature that the Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) is badly underfunded. Governor Tina Kotek agrees with you. How bad is the mismatch between BOLI’s job and the resources BOLI has been given?
CHRISTINA STEPHENSON: It’s an enormous mismatch from our perspective. BOLI had over 200 employees in the ’80s, and now we’re in the 150 range. That’s why I think we’re seeing these enormous backlogs. When you have the number of workers going up and the number of staff going down … the need is huge.
Speaking of the backlog, let’s say an employer commits wage theft, one of the most maybe egregious things they can do — tells an employee to work off the clock, doing prep, cleanup, etc. They file a complaint with BOLI. How long today would they expect it to take before they see any kind of justice?
It might be as long as six months before anyone gets the first contact in an investigation. They’ll have a “notice of claim” that will go out, but that’s only the first piece of the puzzle, and if someone has to go all the way through prosecution of the claim, that could take years.
And if you’re a low wage worker, what are you going to do?
Exactly. I mean, the impacts are huge. We know over 60% of the folks that are accessing our services are saying that they’re experiencing hardships — inability to pay their rent, their medical expenses, childcare — and it could be the difference between making rent or not.
Oregon lawmakers have passed a lot of great new laws, and they’ve made BOLI responsible for enforcing them. Could you highlight some of the most important ones, and say if any of these came with new funding for enforcement?
We took a look back, and over the last 10 years or so, the legislature’s passed about 85 laws that directly impact BOLI’s responsibilities. Of course, those are all tremendous steps forward for workers’ rights, but a lot of them did not come with sustainable funding for enforcement of those rights. So just a recent example, Paid Leave Oregon, which is incredibly impactful program. It offers, you know, critical support for workers and especially lower income workers. But we’re already on track to receive over 600 reports of violations of these statutes. Just in one month, we answered over 1,200 inquiries related to Paid Leave Oregon, and have fielded thousands of questions from employers in a year and a half, and none of that was funded.
What happens in a labor market when employers have reason to believe that they won’t be caught or penalized when they break the law and violate workers rights?
Well of course, it’s a complete disincentive to pay their workers with their owed. You have bad actors who just use it (wage theft) as a business model, and then they’re competing with folks who do things right, and it’s completely unfair competition. We can’t send this message that violating workers rights comes with no consequences. Employers that cut corners by engaging in wage theft — denying overtime, misclassifying workers — they cannot gain an unfair advantage in Oregon, and that’s the consequence if we don’t enforce these laws.
As the labor commissioner, have you been hearing frustration from law-abiding employers who feel like they’re competing with folks who are taking advantage for breaking the law?
Absolutely. We hear from a lot of Oregon employers who say,
“I’m doing the right thing. We just want everyone else to be doing the right thing too.” So we know that a lot of Oregon employers are supportive of BOLI’s efforts to increase the budget so that we can root out wage theft and discrimination.
You also have personal experience as a lawyer who represented wronged workers. What are some of the frustrations that you experienced with BOLI then? And have you learned anything in two years as head of the agency that explains what you were seeing then?
I represented workers since 2009 as an attorney for both wage theft and discrimination cases. And I experienced firsthand how difficult it was for my clients to pursue justice through BOLI. It was clear then, just as it’s clear now, that it isn’t about the individuals that work at BOLI. The folks who work here are very mission oriented, mission driven. They want to do this work, but this is a structural problem, a lack of resources. So we are all on the same page that these delays are unacceptable.
In September, I was shocked, and I think a lot of people were shocked, when you announced that BOLI — for now — is not going to be investigating wage claims for workers who make over $25.34 an hour. Why did you make that decision?
It was the hardest decision we’ve had to make so far. I mean, it’s devastating, but the reality is we’re just taking too long to investigate these claims. So we worked with the Rutgers Workplace Justice Lab to develop a system that would prioritize those that were the most in need, who it really made a difference to get that money to them quickly. And for all workers, we’re sending out a notice of claim, and that — about half the time — will end up in those people getting paid….
A notice of claim — that’s like a letter to the employer saying “you’ve been accused of this”?
Exactly, and then half the time they pay. And I’m hopeful that the impact will be that the people get what they’re owed. In the meantime, we’ve worked on all kinds of resources, referral guides, in order to make sure that folks can still exercise their rights.
So BOLI may not have the resources to investigate all wage claims right now, but it’s not that you’re just walking away. You’re notifying the employer, and you’re helping these folks know what they can do. Do they have the right to sue if BOLI is not going to take the case?
They do. They can take it to civil court. They can do small claims. We started an attorney referral list. We’re also keeping the information so that hopefully we could restart their claims, if we have the staffing to do so.
In a recent presentation you made to some labor leaders, you said this was not the first time that BOLI stopped accepting certain complaints. Can you talk about the work that you discovered BOLI hasn’t been doing, in some cases since 1994, totally out of the public eye?
Yeah, we were shocked to see that too, that sometimes BOLI was just not taking claims and not telling people they weren’t taking claims. And we thought it was really important for people to understand what was happening so they could know the impact of the systemic underfunding here.
This may seem like the least interesting thing to talk about, but you’re also making a case, budget-wise, that the software you have to manage your cases has reached “end-of-life status.” It’s become costly to maintain, and it’s hampering your ability to process claims efficiently. What is the software, and what are examples of the limitations that are causing problems?
The rumor is that this case management software started out as a dog catcher database in Florida and has been repurposed since then. And you know, I love a scrappy system as much as anyone, but we’ve found that people are just wasting enormous amounts of time, when this outdated system is glitching and not saving their work or doesn’t allow them to do batch processing, things that are just really basic at this point. We did invest in some tiny upgrades, because it does take a long time for these case management systems to be upgraded — it saved our workers 45 minutes on one little thing. Those things compound. And you can only imagine if we could use a 2025 system how much time we could save in order to help workers faster.
