Drafter
Clerk 08/28/2025
Title
A RULE AND REGULATION intended to help prevent food-borne illnesses and increase compliance with the King County food code by conducting more frequent inspections based on notification of noncompliance with financial obligations resulting from employment-related enforcement actions; amending R&R 17-01, Section 5, as amended, and BOH 5.15.010, adding a new section to BOH chapter 5.04, and adding new sections to BOH chapter 5.60; enacted pursuant to RCW 43.20.050 and 70.05.060, including the latest amendments or revisions thereto.
Body
PREAMBLE:
1. According to the seminal 2009 study, Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America's Cities, conducted by sociologists at UCLA, University of Illinois, and Rutgers, in any given week as many as twenty-five percent of workers in low wage jobs are paid less than minimum wage. These results were replicated in 2018 by David Cooper & Teresa Kroeger who together published Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year, which found if low wage workers were paid in compliance with minimum wage laws, 159,000 families in the top ten most populous states would be lifted out of poverty. Likewise, according to a 2022 wage theft study conducted by Neil Damron, Martin Garfinkel, Danielle Alvarado, and Daniel Galvin, those trends are the same in King County where an estimated three in ten low wage workers suffered minimum wage violations depriving them of almost 20 percent of their earned wages.
2. The most vulnerable workers are most in need of protection from wage theft. In Deterring Wage Theft: Alt Labor, State Politics, and the Policy Determinants of Minimum Wage Compliance, Daniel Galvin, Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, concluded that the more vulnerable the worker, the more likely an employer will engage in wage theft. This is because, as further des...

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