Eva Rodriguez has earned minimum wage at a Subway franchise in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles for more than a decade. She has stocked ingredients, wiped down tables, and served thousands of meals in the strip mall shop that’s sandwiched between an optical store and a Mediterranean restaurant. Often, she worked 70-hour weeks so her family could afford the basics.
“I’m not someone with a lot of money. I have to fight to eat everyday. I have to fight to have a place to live,” Rodriguez said in Spanish.
Only last year did she learn that she didn’t have to labor under those conditions—a revelation that led her to accuse the franchise’s owner of violating numerous labor laws. Rodriguez claims her boss forced her to work under two names to avoid paying overtime rates, denied her sick pay, skimmed her tips, and threatened her residency status. She is seeking nearly $100,000 in back pay and punitive damages, according to a complaint she filed with the California labor commissioner against the owner, Amarjit Singh, known to workers as “Ms. Happy.”
“I’ve been a victim of every kind of theft you can imagine,” said Rodriguez, who is 58 and a grandmother of seven.
Singh declined repeated requests to comment, including one made in a letter hand-delivered to her restaurant. Subway did not respond to requests for comment.
While wage theft is common in low-wage industries, Rodriguez’s case is “particularly egregious” due to the sheer scope of alleged violations, according to Daniel Rojas, one of the lawyers representing her. It is especially prevalent in industries with significant numbers of immigrant workers, like construction, healthcare, and food services, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2023, more than 1.5 million low-wage workers in California were victims of minimum wage violations, more than double the figure of just a decade earlier, according to a report from Rutgers University.
Advocates say foreign-born workers like Rodriguez may now be at higher risk of exploitation. The Trump administration is leading a crackdown on undocumented immigrants that many say is threatening immigrant communities more broadly. They say raising awareness about existing worker protections may provide the best defense against a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment and workplace abuses.
Early last year, an organizer with the California Fast Food Workers Union visited the Subway where Rodriguez works and invited her to join the union, a moment she described as “a light from God that appeared on my path.” That encounter made her aware of her rights in the workplace.
Formed last February, the California Fast Food Workers Union is the first statewide fast-food workers union in the country, and is focused on raising wages and improving working conditions for the more than 750,000 fast-food workers employed in the state.
Although Rodriguez has the backing of the union, she hasn’t had an easy time challenging her employer. She alleges that after she delivered a letter to her managers demanding proper pay and an end to the violations, Singh retaliated by reducing her hours dramatically. Rodriguez detailed her claims in the complaint she filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Subway, Singh, and Singh’s company, Guardashan & Happy Inc.
Over the course of three years, Rodriguez claims that she was denied nearly $54,000 in wages, most of which she attributed to thousands of hours of unpaid overtime. Though Rodriguez claims the wage theft has been ongoing for most of her time working at Subway, she is only seeking to reclaim three years of lost wages because the statute of limitations on earlier alleged violations has expired.
But Rodriguez finds some of the violations that she alleges occurred before then to be particularly galling. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singh allegedly convinced Rodriguez to work more than 1,400 hours without compensation, saying the shop might otherwise close due to low traffic. During that same time, Singh’s Guardashan & Happy Inc. received more than $850,000 in paycheck protection loans, restaurant revitalization fund grants, and employee retention tax credits—all designed to keep her business open and workers paid, according to the complaint Rodriguez filed with the California labor commissioner last August. Upwards of $300,000 of Singh’s PPP loans have since been forgiven.
Some of the alleged violations highlight the way in which even immigrants with legal residency are vulnerable to exploitation. After injuring her foot and back during a fall inside Subway’s freezer in 2023, Rodriguez filed a workers’ compensation claim to cover the costs of treatment. When Singh learned of the filing, Rodriguez was pressured to drop the claim, according to the complaint she filed with the California labor commissioner. Singh allegedly warned her that the federal government would investigate her, and once officials discovered she had worked under two names, her legal residency would be at risk, the complaint stated.
Rodriguez eventually dropped the claim after Singh also allegedly offered to pay her $30,000 and arrange for her to have medical care. But after weeks without the promised treatment or funds, Rodriguez found a workers’ compensation lawyer and resubmitted the claim to the state.
Millions of workers across the country regularly experience similar violations, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in illegally withheld wages every year, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. The average minimum wage violation in California as of 2015 amounted to about $3,400, a small fraction of Rodriguez’s claim. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank also found that the country’s 32 million foreign-born workers were especially likely to be the victims of that crime.
Kent Wong, project director for Labor and Community Partnerships at the UCLA Labor Center, said foreign-born workers are particularly vulnerable to wage theft because they are often “unaware of their rights, either as workers or as immigrants.”
“When workers are informed of their rights as workers, their rights as immigrants, they’re in a better position to exercise those rights. In nonunion workplaces where exploitation is rampant, they are much more vulnerable because they are unaware of their rights,” Wong said.
The California Fast Food Workers Union, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, has pushed for cities across the state to adopt mandatory know-your-rights training. In 2024, Los Angeles City councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced a motion to direct the city attorney to draft an ordinance requiring employers to provide paid time off for fast-food workers to attend such training. The union has pushed for similar measures in Santa Clara County by launching strikes with the support of local lawmakers. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
For more than a decade, SEIU has been seeking to organize fast-food workers into a union, securing significant victories along the way. Last year, it successfully pushed California lawmakers to establish a fast food council tasked with setting workplace standards and wages. The formation of the California Fast Food Workers Union earlier that year marked another milestone. But despite those gains, CAFFWU lacks the collective bargaining power of more traditional unions.
With Trump as president, many fear working conditions for immigrant workers may become even more perilous. In early January, scores of farmworkers were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents during immigration raids in Bakersfield, California, sending shockwaves of fear through immigrant communities. Tom Homan, Trump’s choice for “border czar,” has pledged to launch similar raids across the country and has directly criticized know-your-rights training. The Trump administration is now also seeking to expedite deportations for more than a million migrants who arrived during the Biden administration by denying them court hearings.
“We are entering a very dangerous period for immigrant workers, their families, and communities. . . . Many, many millions will be negatively impacted if Trump makes good on his promise to launch the largest mass deportations in U.S. history,” Wong said.
In the meantime, Rodriguez’s newfound understanding of her rights and experience of working with the California Fast Food Workers Union have emboldened her.
“I’m not afraid anymore because I have a union that defends me. . . . I am not fighting to win some money, I am fighting for my rights and the rights of all other workers,” Rodriguez said.
—By Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main
This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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