The Wage Justice Center was officially launched in September of 2007 with seed funding from Echoing Green. Using innovative legal theories and legal tools borrowed from commercial collections law—and supported by a 25-volunteer clinic, The Wage Justice Center has collected over $540,000 of back wages and penalties owed to low-income workers. Most of these back wages were collected in cases that community groups, legal aid attorneys, and the State of California had long written off—cases involving the sort of highly unscrupulous and exploitative business that are rampant in the underground economy. 

Innovative Wage-Collection Strategies
To be effective, approaches to collecting wages from these employers must be informed by commercial law, business/corporations law, and the law of remedies.  Commercial collections cases, brought by suppliers or funders against these same businesses, do result in compensation for the aggrieved party. The Wage Justice Center aims to give low-income workers the same power to collect their wages that commercial entities have collect their claims against other businesses. Ultimately, The Wage Justice Center seeks to reform the law through strategic litigation and policy advocacy to recognize a privileged claim by workers to collect unpaid wages against the businesses’ (and the business owners’) funds and assets that were accumulated, in large part, by these workers’ sweat.
Read select Wage Justice Center case studies. >>>  

By developing new strategies to enforce wage rights and educate workers, advocates and the public, The Wage Justice Center empowers long-abused workers to assert their basic rights and collecting unpaid wages from employers who have previously escaped consequences for illegally underpaying their employees.