State Opens Racetrack Probe

The state labor commissioner has launched an investigation into the working conditions in stable areas of California’s horse-racing tracks, officials announced Monday.

A spokesman for the state Department of Industrial Relations would not give details about the probe, but said news reports of minimum wage violations and scant record keeping piqued the interest of Labor Commissioner Arthur Lujan, who can levy fines against employers.

The investigation comes in response to a recent Times story documenting poor labor and living conditions in the so-called backstretch areas of the state’s nine racetracks and at six county fairs, where about 4,000 employees lack some of the most basic protections. The horse-racing industry has long enjoyed exemptions from regulations that apply to other California workers, including overtime laws and housing standards.

“We read about it in the article and are taking it as a referral,” said Dean Fryer, spokesman for the commissioner. “Some of these issues are of great concern to us.”

He said the probe could take up to 60 days.

Also on Monday, a local lawmaker who chairs the Assembly committee that oversees horse racing announced that he will convene hearings next week in Sacramento to address the problems.

Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City) has called a joint hearing of three Assembly committees--Governmental Organization, Housing and Community Development, and Labor and Employment--for May 11 in Sacramento.

“I believe that we need to act as quickly as possible to address the situation,” Wesson said in a statement. “I hope that our hearing will shed further light on the problem and that we can improve the quality of life for the working people who literally make the horses run.”

It is not clear who will testify at the informational hearing on behalf of the low-wage, mostly Spanish-speaking work force. They are not unionized and lack knowledgeable advocates. Many say they don’t complain because they are scared of being fired, blackballed or deported.

At a state Industrial Welfare Commission meeting in February to discuss whether they deserved overtime pay, not one worker submitted a letter or showed up to testify.

The stable hands are the only agricultural employees in the state who can work seven days a week, year-round, without overtime pay. The Industrial Welfare Commission has been studying whether to extend that exclusion for the horse-racing industry in light of a new state overtime law.

But in March, the commission and the U.S. Labor Department determined that the industry’s 13-year-old exclusion was at odds with federal law, raising the possibility that the tracks owe the workers a potential fortune in back wages.

Wesson said the Housing and Community Development Committee will join the hearings next week because of reports of unsanitary and substandard living conditions on various racetracks. For the last 25 years, horse racing has been the only industry whose living quarters can’t be regulated or inspected by state housing officials.

After inquiries from The Times, the Los Angeles County Health Department found filthy restrooms at Santa Anita, as well as rooms unfit for human habitation there and at Fairplex in Pomona. Officials have been complaining for years about decrepit conditions in the stables at Golden Gate Fields on the border of Berkeley and Albany.