Local growers of Chinese vegetables who faced potentially crippling penalties for what they called minor, accidental and one-time labor violations reached a settlement agreement with state regulators, according to legal advocates.
The California Labor Commissioner’s Office is still working on finalizing the settlement paperwork and declined to comment, office spokesman Peter Melton said.
An attorney who has been working with the growers to reduce or eliminate the fines she calls unfair confirmed that the fines originally imposed last year on Morgan Hill farmers Xay Duc Hoang, Fanny Tam and Siu Wah Mok were reduced by 80 percent.
Specifically, that means Hoang’s original fine of $9,000 was reduced to $1,800; Tam’s fine was reduced from $5,000 to $1,000; and Mok’s fine was dropped from $1,500 to $300, according to the attorney Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Law Economies Center.
The penalties were imposed after the farmers were cited by state labor regulators from the California Department Labor Standards Enforcement in summer 2013. The citations were issued following inspections of each farm, and were for violations such as providing incomplete information on their employees’ pay stubs.
Orsi and other advocates for the farmers complained that the original fines were unreasonable, and in some cases even applied illegally due to incorrect information provided by inspectors on citations. Plus, the farmers – who speak little English – were not provided the opportunity to explain or contest the DLSE’s claims on-site because they were not offered adequate translation services.
Still, labor regulators have a long way to go before their citation and penalty procedures are fair to all employers in California, Orsi said.
“It is a relief that these matters are finally closed and that we will not need to work on any additional litigation,” Orsi said. “However, the outcome still feels unjust. For example, Mr. Hoang is still paying a fine of $1,800 for a very small clerical error, and this is on top of all his legal fees and travel expenses to attend hearings.”
Orsi said a “better outcome” would have been to reduce the fines to an amount equivalent to that of a parking ticket, because the growers were cited for “harmless and inadvertent” errors.
“And I strongly believe the DLSE should reform its enforcement practices, so that farmers do not need to struggle through the arduous appeal process to defend against unfair fines,” Orsi continued.
Furthermore, DLSE’s fine schedule is “unconstitutionally excessive,” Orsi added.
Orsi’s intern is in the process of writing a guide for employers on how to comply with state labor codes and prepare proper wage statements, and Orsi hopes the DLSE will include something similar on its website.
The Sustainable Law Economies Center is a nonprofit organization that offers legal education, research, advice and advocacy for “just and resilient economies.”
