They work to ensure that others get paid

Laura Martinez’s first job in California was at a garment factory, piecing together trendy clothes 60 hours a week. She was paid by task -- a hemline was worth 14 cents, a sleeve 24 cents. Sometimes it averaged out to minimum wage, but most times it didn’t. She did this for eight years.

Eventually, she filed a claim with the state for unpaid wages and won -- she was owed nearly $30,000. But when it came time to collect, she was told her former employers couldn’t pay because they were no longer in business. In reality, they had simply reopened the factory at the same address, under a different name, to escape payment.

“They treated me so badly,” Martinez said. “I couldn’t understand how they could have simply opened up again.”

In California, where the underground economy thrives, it’s not uncommon to find workers paid less than minimum wage or denied overtime. Victims are encouraged to file claims with the state, but only a small fraction ever do. Those who win soon learn that a successful claim doesn’t mean much -- unscrupulous employers are adept at avoiding payment.

“The question everybody struggles with is ‘How do you turn these judgments into money?’ ” said Melvin Yee, a lawyer who co-founded the Wage Justice Center.

The organization, which celebrated its one-year anniversary this month, is trying to take up this black hole in the battle to get workers their due.

Yee and Matthew Sirolly got the idea for the organization when they were law students at USC. They volunteered with legal-aid clinics helping underpaid workers file claims with the state and courts, only to see their winning claims go unpaid.

After graduation they started the Wage Justice Center, a nonprofit that employs a variety of legal tools to collect unpaid wages. They received a grant to help fund their organization but work side jobs to make a living.

There is no easy answer to the problem. Employers use a variety of strategies -- such as using shell corporations or transferring assets to family members -- to keep employees from collecting, Yee said. They’ve worked on cases in which employers transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets to a relative. In other cases, employers falsely claim that they have already paid.

Such scams might be easily identified in court, but employees often don’t have access to lawyers to pursue such legal action.

This year, the state’s Department of Industrial Relations stepped up efforts to enforce judgments, said spokesman Dean Fryer. But many still go unpaid every year.

Martinez’s case was one of the first to be taken on by the center, which now has a trove of law-school volunteers.

When she walked into the center’s downtown Los Angeles office, she saw Sirolly -- a young man in a rumpled shirt and pants, his hair tousled.

“I didn’t really believe he was a lawyer,” she said.

He told her he thought he could help. She wondered whether to confide in him. It hadn’t been easy deciding to fight for the wages in the first place, and two years later, there was still no payment, she said.

Eventually, the Wage Justice Center filed suit against the renamed company. Two months later, the defendants agreed to pay.

In its first year the organization has counted several victories.

But, Yee and Sirolly say, the goal is to tackle a larger problem.

“The solution to this problem isn’t to get hundreds or even thousands of dollars for one worker,” Yee said. “The solution is figuring out how to empower all of these workers to ensure this doesn’t happen in the first place.”

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paloma.esquivel@ latimes.com