When states and local governments can’t agree on worker protections, what’s the way forward?

State control over local governments has accelerated, affecting everything from guns to public health to housing to police reform. Local governments have stepped up their efforts to advance workers’ rights in recent years, and they face preemptive obstacles, both established and newly created.

Laws in Texas and Florida, for example, have denied cities the right to enact workplace heat safety ordinances. A new report from the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative and the progressive advocacy organization Local Progress examines strategies that can help localities circumvent these restrictions.

Local leaders have been pushing for a $15 federal minimum wage for more than a decade, says LuJia Gong, policy and legal director at Local Progress. But that hasn’t happened yet, and only seven states have achieved it.

No matter what happens at the state level, local leaders have their own power, says Terri Gerstein, co-author of the report and director of the Wagner Labor Initiative. “Localities have ways to fight back, and they’ve already responded in many states.”

Gerstein and Lujia Gong, co-author and director of policy and legal affairs at Local Progress, agree that the first step is to appoint a person in each jurisdiction whose mission is to listen to the needs of local workers — even part-time workers — and assess what the government can do to help them. It’s not clear that such a person will exist.

In the last decade, a few local governments have gone further and created offices to do this work. It’s a new phenomenon that extends support to workers and employers in ways that go well beyond wage standards.

Supply power

Jodi Sugerman-Brozan leads a new worker protection office in Boston Mayor Michele Wu’s office. “We don’t have a lot of power because of preemption,” she says. “Our power is focused on our contracting and procurement processes.”

Service providers that sign a contract with the city must commit to paying their lowest-paid workers an hourly wage of $18.20. Companies hired to do construction work in Boston must commit to having 51 percent of the workers they hire be Boston residents, 40 percent be people of color, and 12 percent be women. A history of wage theft is a factor in licensing restaurants.

One reason the new office was created was because the city had seen a spike in construction fatalities. Federal regulations limited what the city could do, so it passed an ordinance requiring anyone applying for a permit for a construction or demolition project to provide a site safety plan. It also provided free OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) training to contractors.

The search for ways to encourage best practices is ongoing. The labor compliance office cannot, for example, fine contractors who fail to follow hiring guidelines or deny a permit to a contractor who violates wage theft rules. “We don’t have the freedom to do whatever we want, no municipality does,” Sugerman-Broznan says. “It requires us to think about where we have slots and how we can use them.”

Labor standards have traditionally been considered a national issue, but conditions aren’t uniform across local jurisdictions, says Steven Marchese, director of Seattle’s labor standards office. The city’s wage policies are a prime example.

Seattle was the first major city to impose a $15 minimum wage. It was a nonpartisan response to the fact that the minimum wage had increased by 25% due to the proliferation of tech companies, Marchese says. The cost of living had become too high for average workers, and they were the ones who convinced policymakers that an increase was necessary.

Having a labor enforcement office gives a local government the ability to look beyond wages and into areas that state policies may not address, such as paid leave, work schedules and protections for domestic workers and independent contractors. Every time an investigation is completed or a settlement is announced, it builds trust in local government, Marchese said.

Typically, the state government doesn’t oppose Seattle’s efforts, but Marchese recently experienced one. The city created its own minimum wage standard for Uber and Lyft drivers.

Resistance from app-based ride-hailing companies forced the legislature to address the issue, which created a statewide standard that preempted what Seattle had done. While it fell short of its goal, local activism helped win better wages for workers in cities across the state, Marchese says.

Stay close

The San Diego County Labor Standards Director position was created in response to community demand, Butler said. State government can’t make that connection with local workers and employers, he said.

The county has taken on a responsibility that the state doesn’t have the resources to meet. It created a Workplace Justice Fund to help workers who are waiting for unpaid wages even after state court judgments. The fund, the first of its kind in the nation, provides up to $3,000 to cover living expenses. The judgment is assigned to the county, and it is seeking to recover the money.

San Diego County’s $2 billion contracts give it additional powers to prevent wage theft. An unpaid settlement can be held as a condition of a new contract. Contracts for janitorial, security and landscaping, involving workers most likely to be harmed, withhold a percentage for a wage retention fund.

In addition to these types of protections, city-funded construction contracts can include provisions to circumvent state preemptions. These are particularly powerful tools right now, Gong says.

Local governments are getting unprecedented levels of federal funding, and they have the ability to impose standards on contractors. “It’s a really exciting opportunity to make sure that public dollars are going toward quality jobs in a community,” she says.