What We Do

Our current focus is on promoting sustainable wages and working conditions. This includes raising awareness of and enforcing existing worker rights, engaging and empowering low-wage workers, increasing the minimum wage, strengthening worker and work-family rights and building cross-sector community alliances.

Workers Rights E3 Program:

Education, Empowerment, Enforcement

The Workers Rights E3 Program was launched in January 2017 in order to address key findings of economic injustice in Santa Cruz County, specifically high rates of wage and labor violations, which were highlighted by the 2015 Working for Dignity Study.

Please refer to our Workers Rights E3 Program Fact Sheet 2017 for more details.

The Workers Rights E3 program aims to,

  • Educate low-wage workers on current labor law
  • Identify workers who have experienced wage theft at their jobs
  • Refer workers to community resources to challenge their employers, such as the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) in Santa Cruz and Watsonville
  • Develop systems for monitoring and verifying complaint enforcement by appropriate government agencies
  • Recruit, train and support low-wage workers to become active leaders of EJA

Background

Santa Cruz County is the fifth most expensive rental market in the country (National Low Income Housing Coalition). The UCSC Working for Dignity Survey showed that many workers experience wage theft, discrimination, health and safety risks and retaliation. According to the 2014 Santa Cruz Community Assessment Project, 36.2% of all county households fall below the self-sufficiency standard (SSS) - this includes 63% of all Latino households compared to 26.2% of white households.

This reality means that thousands of county residents are juggling 2-3 jobs, struggling to care for their children, crammed into inadequate housing, trapped in vicious cycle of poverty and inequity. We are answering these harsh realities with a call to action for economic justice.