Rachel Brahinsky (San Francisco Bay Guardian): Tracking time cards

[Jack Rabbit]

From the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Dated Saturday February 12

Tracking time cards
A year after the minimum-wage law took effect, strong city enforcement is helping workers collect back pay
By Rachel Brahinsky

Immigrants from Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the Cetina sisters bunk with six other adults and two children in a cramped two-bedroom Mission District apartment. Olga and Susy Cetina have young children, and for a while both say they worked about 50 hours each week as bartenders at Carlos's Club on 24th Street, earning the state hourly minimum of $6.75.

But last August, they told the Bay Guardian, they realized they were being shortchanged under the year-old city ordinance that guaranteed them at least $8.50 an hour. "We saw a paper that said the minimum was higher," Olga told us in Spanish. "(Owner) Carlos (Gutierrez) fired us before the city investigated." She said she suspected the firings took place because Gutierrez knew they were planning to complain.

Gutierrez denies this. "When they went to complain, they were no longer working for me," he told us in Spanish. "(Their complaint) was not the motive."

The Cetinas contacted the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which pulled Carlos's books and found that eight employees were owed a total of $7,182 for eight months of lost wages. Gutierrez said he'd thought he qualified for the city's small-business exemption, which would have allowed him to pay less, but that when he learned he was incorrect, he immediately repaid his staff, including the Cetinas.

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