Fresno city attorney’s wage theft unit gets more teeth, higher fines as complaints surge

Reporting a spike in wage theft complaints, the Fresno City Attorney’s Office is expanding its investigations unit to bolster a program it launched in 2024.

It’s adding a new investigator for its Criminal and Special Prosecutions unit and a new paralegal for its Wage Protection Program.

The Fresno City Council OK’d the two additional grant-funded roles during its final meeting of 2025. It also added a new ordinance that clarifies City Attorney Andrew Janz’s power to prosecute wage theft criminally and establishes penalties for employers found guilty.

The move is the council’s latest expansion of Janz’s prosecution capabilities. In recent years, the council has also authorized him to criminally prosecute misdemeanor graffiti crimes, scrap metal theft and unhoused people for camping outside.

Janz was not available to comment for this story, but his office’s report to the council says the city initially experienced challenges enforcing wage law and prosecuting violators. Workers require ample support, and immigration arrests “caused a chilling effect on workers advocating for their rights,” the report says.

Now, the program is starting to show “promising results” and has seen “a dramatic increase in referrals and new complaints,” the report says.

Though he could not comment specifically on the number of new complaints, District 4 Councilmember Tyler Maxwell told The Bee on Friday that the city has worked with community groups and nonprofits over the past year to get the word out about the program. Maxwell sponsored the council’s February 2024 resolution directing Janz to begin pursuing wage theft cases in the city.

“We knew it was going to take some time to get this program off the ground,” he said, “but I think we’re starting to see a little bit of that return on investment from a year’s work.”

Overwhelmed with cases, the State of California in passed a law in 2023 authorizing local public attorneys to prosecute civil and criminal wage theft actions within their jurisdictions. In the years since, the state has awarded Janz’s office a $720,000 grant and a $750,000 grant to administer its anti-wage theft program.

Janz announced in July 2024 that he would investigate whether Valley Children’s Hospital — which has dealt with multiple employee pay-related lawsuits in Madera County in recent years — committed wage theft at any of its Fresno operations.

In May 2025, he announced his office’s first civil wage theft case against the operator of a local Holiday Inn hotel accused of failing to pay at least nine workers a total of $58,000. That case has yet to be resolved in Fresno County Superior Court.

Heavy potential fines introduced

The City Attorney’s Office will add a full-time investigator who will process wage theft complaints, interview complainants and witnesses, and analyze cases for violations of California’s Labor Code, according to the report to the council.

It will also add a senior paralegal who will draft subpoenas, research records and conduct wage theft calculations, the report says.

A new ordinance says the city attorney is authorized to prosecute “in a civil or criminal action” for wage and hour violations of California’s Labor Code.

The city can charge labor code violators with misdemeanors punishable with a fine of up to $1,000 and one year in jail.

Employers who knowingly misclassify employees as independent contractors could be subjected to additional civil fines of between $5,000-$10,000 per violation, the ordinance says. Those who are found to have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of violations could be subjected to fines of up to $25,000, the ordinance says.

Any money recovered by the City Attorney’s Office is required to first be used to repay workers. Civil penalty amounts that are not used to repay workers could go to California’s General Fund, the ordinance says.

“There could be opportunity in the future, where the line gets crossed, where it’s more than just a civil matter and it becomes a criminal matter,” Maxwell said. “We just want to make sure that we’re well-equipped when and if that time comes.”

Erik Galicia

The Fresno Bee

Erik is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, where he helped launch an effort to better meet the news needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief of his community college student newspaper, Riverside City College Viewpoints, where he covered the impacts of the Salton Sea’s decline on its adjacent farm worker communities in the Southern California desert.