SAN MATEO COUNTY HAS LAUNCHED a new county office to help enforce laws against wage theft, particularly among vulnerable employees who work in the agriculture, hospitality, construction, and domestic work sectors.  

The Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement, or OLSE, is a joint initiative of the County Executive’s Office, County Attorney’s Office and District Attorney vs Office that will engage in outreach to businesses and workers about their rights to a minimum wage and investigate and prosecute employers who underpay their workers. 

The office was created to take advantage of new authority granted by a state law passed in 2024, Assembly Bill 594, that gives local prosecutors the power to enforce labor laws that only regulators at the state level previously had, according to a news release from the OLSE. 

The OLSE was established by a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors in June and became operational on Thursday. 

A multilingual hotline was launched as part of the outreach campaign to answer questions from employers and employees that will also serve as a complaint hotline for workers. Complaints can also be emailed to olse@smcgov.org. 

Enforcement can include injunctive relief, administrative citations and penalties for violations such as maintaining incomplete payroll records, failing to pay a minimum wage, and retaliation. 

Carolina Babbidge, a county attorney with the new office, said wage theft was a significant problem in the state, and particularly in San Mateo County. Babbidge said in a statement that the OLSE was created to provide a legal resource for people who might not otherwise have access to once because of financial, language, or immigration barriers. 

She said those are most often the workers who are taken advantage of because they are in vulnerable positions. 

“I feel this very close to my heart,” Babbidge said, “because I’m an immigrant myself, so I know the difficulties that this represents for people who do not have the means to hire an attorney.” 

The office was an initiative of Supervisor Ray Mueller and former Supervisor Dave Pine, who helped launch the process when he was still on the board last year. 

Mueller said the office and hotline would protect workers and also give employers a resource to understand and comply with labor laws and local minimum wages, which vary by city and in the unincorporated area of the county. All are all higher than the state’s regular minimum wage of $16.50 per hour. (Fast food companies throughout the state must pay their employees at least $20 per hour.) 

More information is available at the Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement website.