The Enforcer : Labor Chief Vicky Bradshaw Makes Sure Employers Toe the Line--or Else

In her purse, Vicky Bradshaw carries a snapshot of a 9-year-old girl holding a sharp knife and smiling into the sun against a backdrop of grapevines. The knife, says Bradshaw, is for cutting grapes.

“And look,” she adds, “she’s wet her pants because there weren’t any toilets for the field workers.”

Bradshaw--California’s labor commissioner--enforces laws that regulate child labor, unpaid overtime and minimum-wage violations, among other things. But the photo notwithstanding, she’s hardly a white-collar crusader: She may respond to a human plight, and even point it out, but she doesn’t dwell on it.

Bradshaw’s a different breed of bureaucrat, and not just because she’s the first female labor commissioner in the 112 years of the office. While she cares about exploited workers, she also has concerns about the competitive disadvantages of employers who obey the law. She considers limited resources and trimmed budgets a creative opportunity, and she likes plans that produce visible results--quickly.

“She’s persistent, aggressive and pushy, but not in an offensive way,” says Jose Millan, the senior deputy labor commissioner, who joined the agency in 1986. “She is definitely the right commissioner for her time, because she’s good at making do with less. She’s a walking, talking ‘let’s re-invent government’ type, and that’s the kind of person you want to bring into government service now, not people who want to keep things the way they’ve always been.”

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One recent morning, five labor investigators, including the commissioner, arrive unannounced at a Glendale factory. They fan out into the office and among the rows of sewing machines and piles of little denim overalls bearing the Baby Guess label.

One man sets up a laptop computer in the office to type in information while he interviews the factory’s supervisor. Bradshaw, down from her San Francisco base for the day, seizes time cards and works the phones. Millan and two field investigators interview the Thai and Latino workers.

The inspectors find that the site, which is light, airy and clean, isn’t registered with the state. Half the work force is temporary and paid in cash--well below minimum wage--just 12 cents a piece, averaging 180 units a day, or less than $22 in an 8-to-5 day. Often they have to work a sixth day--Saturday--at the same rates.

But Baby Guess, which contracted for the work, inspected and received it, and paid the bills, “had no knowledge of what was going on,” says a Baby Guess official later, but promised Bradshaw when called from the site that the violations would be corrected immediately, the workers given back pay and the penalties paid.

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The Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, which Bradshaw has headed as commissioner since October, 1991, comes under California’s Department of Industrial Relations. It licenses and registers companies in certain industries--garment manufacturers, farm labor contractors, talent agents and movie studio teachers among them--handles employee complaints through 24 district offices, and goes out to investigate industries, says Bradshaw, “where employees don’t know they can complain or are afraid or there’s indication of a systemic problem.”

Bradshaw is an unexpected presence at those inspections--raids, really--on fields and factories. She doesn’t supervise; she participates, bagging confiscated clothes or directing pre-dawn traffic on farm roads.

She has also put unexpected vigor into the process. She created a task force of federal, state and county agencies that used to work separately, often overlapping. They now share information and investigation results, and instead of doing random inspections, they use that pooled information to target specific industries, regions or even companies that have proved troublesome.

The result: In the first nine months of this year, the task force did 624 inspections in agriculture alone, compared with 178 in all of 1991, says Millan. The inspectors issued 267 citations, compared with only 26 in all of 1991.

Bradshaw, 44, never expected that one day she’d be chasing down labor-law violators. She once assumed she’d go into the restaurant business, like her parents, who ran Luoto’s in Campbell, Calif. She and her brother spent so much time working there “from the time we could wash a dish” that when she grew up and married, she had to learn to cook for two. “I could only cook for 36,” she says.

She once worked keeping the books at a neighborhood Taco Bell while in college at UC Davis. But she found she preferred retailing, specifically department stores, which in the early 1970s were “locally owned and thriving, with a lot of opportunity for young women.”

So after getting a master’s degree in business and public administration from Cal State Sacramento, she started at Weinstocks as an assistant department manager in handbags.

From merchandise, she moved into personnel management (Weinstocks, the Emporium, Robinson’s in Florida), and on to corporate vice presidencies in personnel (Marshall Field, the Batus group) and operations (Breuner’s). She also went from coast to coast, sometimes commuting weekly, sometimes moving her base to be with her daughter, now a senior in high school, and husband, an exotic-animal veterinarian.

By the late 1980s, she was divorced, remarried (to an attorney who specializes in labor law) and back in San Francisco, running her own consulting firm, Bradshaw & Bradshaw (though there was only one of her). She also had almost two decades of extensive experience in both personnel management and corporate finance, and a useful expertise in getting work done on airplanes.

She had also established the philosophy behind her presence at local raids: “You don’t get to understand the basic problem by listening to someone else. You have to go down and see how something works yourself.”

California’s Merchants and Manufacturers Assn. urged Bradshaw’s appointment as labor commissioner. Not only had she been active in its education program, says association spokesman Lou Custrini, but she impressed many in the 4,100-member group as “intelligent, responsive and objective. She doesn’t just think employer, and she has a very progressive, humanistic approach to the workplace.”

One might assume that labor standards exist to protect the little people. But Bradshaw’s appointment sits well with business groups who understand, as Custrini says, that “vigilance on her part protects employers who do comply with the law.” Bradshaw herself often points out that companies “not paying minimum wage are flooding the market with goods that undercut legitimate business. The business community may think they don’t want increased enforcement, but we want to give the advantage back to the good employer. Enforcement levels the playing field.”

The knottier question these days is how to strengthen enforcement in an era of limited resources, when her division has been reduced to 380 employees from a 1980s high of 500.

“It appeared to me,” she says now, “that the answer to many problems in government is you throw more people at it. But I thought maybe there was an opportunity here. Maybe the time to streamline is when you’re going through a budget crisis, so that you build a strong foundation for when there are additional resources, rather than build something and then have to dismantle it during lean times.”

Her streamlining includes the joint enforcement program introduced a year ago, linking the many agencies with authority over labor problems--her own, California’s Employment Development Department, CAL-OSHA, county health departments and such federal entities as the Department of Labor and Health and Human Services.

“Before,” she says, “everyone was very territorial. By combining resources, we can present a formidable force.”

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By noon that day, the investigators are on the third floor of a building full of workshops on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles’ garment district, entering a big room crowded with people, sewing machines, piles of fabric and finished clothing.

Once again, the little group fans out to inspect and interview. They find that the company’s registration has expired. Its employees work 11 or 12 hours a day, often six days, sometimes seven. They’re paid up to 16 cents a piece, and average 170 units a day, or $27. Their wages are noted on the back of their time cards, to be cashed--for a 1% transaction fee--at a booth on the first floor.

Here, the county health official finds health and safety violations--blocked fire exits, no aisles between tables, too many plugs per outlet and too much lint on hot lights.

The clothes are labeled Lisa Collection and Lafel. The contracting company is Agora Fashion. It, too, is unregistered, and its nearby offices were closed when the investigators arrived after calling ahead. With no promise that back wages and penalties will be covered, the goods must be confiscated: Everyone stuffs clothing into big plastic bags, and carries them to a van. Other workrooms have now been shut, the building emptied. People in the lobby and on the street ask, “Are you Immigration?” *

All agencies in the program can share in the results. For one thing, investigators feed inspection reports, audit information and citations right into their laptops at the site, and anyone on the system can read it.

The agencies present “get the information and will do a referral to the others,” says Bradshaw. “There’s a very high correlation, for example, between those who don’t pay their employees and those who don’t pay their taxes.”

In a joint program last year with EDD, Bradshaw’s division did 13,700 inspections in construction, auto repair, restaurants, retail stores. From those, EDD was given 2,600 audit leads which brought in an additional $8 million in back taxes.

The message, she adds, is: “If you do something wrong, you will be caught and not only by one agency, but you’ll get a referral to other agencies.”

(The joint programs don’t include the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however--partly because the labor code does not distinguish between legal and illegal workers, and specific court cases have prohibited the distinction, and partly because many workers wouldn’t cooperate if the INS were involved. Besides, says Bradshaw, “We can’t enforce the law just for the people here legally, or there would be an incentive to hire illegals.”)

The program goes by the bureaucratic acronym TIPP, for Targeted Industries Partnership Program, with the emphasis on “target.” Agriculture and garment manufacture are the chosen targets in TIPP’s first year, given their multiple problems--not just wage and labor violations, but health, housing, taxes and workers comp.

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Agora Fashion’s Pico Boulevard contractor was closed down. But even while negotiating penalty and back-wage payments, Bradshaw’s staff was trying to expedite the contractor’s re-registration so it could get back in business once the liabilities were satisfied.

Baby Guess and its contractor were issued notices of joint liability, and are being assessed back wages and penalties. But no garments have been confiscated while they work it out, because of Guess Jeans’ record of compliance, and Baby Guess’ assurance, says company lawyer Deborah Siegel, that “we will step up to the plate, and whatever liability is found, we will make sure the contractor is in compliance.”

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If they don’t, Bradshaw and her forces will. There are various kinds of education, and various degrees of voluntary compliance, and enforcement is a large part of both.

“I’m not Pollyanna enough to think this citation in and of itself changes things,” says Bradshaw. “But we come back--back to the company, back to that building--to give them all the idea that there’s a high probability of getting caught.”