During Lilia Garcia-Brower’s six-year tenure as California’s Labor Commissioner, her office has processed over 70,000 wage claims and recovered millions of dollars for workers affected by wage theft and other labor violations.
But her dedication to defending workers’ rights — evident in recent legal victories, including a $5.9 million fine against Amazon for labor violations at its Moreno Valley and Redlands warehouses — was shaped decades earlier in her native East Los Angeles, where she grew up “surrounded by love and by pride.”
“Too often, you hear East L.A. and you hear negative things, right? But my East L.A. was beautiful,” said Garcia-Brower, 52.
She also saw how social injustice and limited resources afflicted the working-class community, including her parents. Her mother worked at a small East Los Angeles garment shop where her paychecks bounced, and her boss would blame the manufacturer. Her father, an active union member and factory shop steward, felt the harsh realities of workplace retaliation. The stress weighed heavily on the household.
Garcia-Brower’s first job as a college counselor in South Central Los Angeles gave her a front-row seat to the challenges that first-generation Latino and Black students faced. She remembered that they were met with suspicion when they stepped onto campus—security checks at the door. Instead of feeling welcomed, the youth were made to feel like problems to be managed.
Almost all of the families that she worked with “were overwhelmed by poverty,” she said. With a caseload of nearly 300 students, it was her responsibility to help them become college-ready, but she quickly learned that a flyer or workshop alone wouldn’t cut it.
So, she went door to door, visiting homes, speaking with parents, and encouraging them to learn about financial aid and scholarships. Some parents turned her away— “We don’t have time for this. Go have your own kids,” they told her.
It wasn’t until 2000, when she started working at the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund (MCTF), a watchdog group for janitorial labor rights, that she learned about all-too-common management abuses like wage theft, workplace retaliation, and the systemic exclusion of low-wage workers from labor protections.
“With my students, I saw why their parents didn’t have time for me,” she said. “They were fast food workers, construction workers, they were home health care workers, right, that were very low-paid jobs, underappreciated, undervalued, and then struggling with all the social issues that you face.”
Joining the MCTF – at the time, a small and emerging organization – as executive director, Garcia-Brower turned her role into more than a job by becoming a transformation agent. The team empowered workers with knowledge of their rights, investigated labor violations, and built strong legal cases to combat workplace exploitation. “We recovered millions, over $80 million for workers,” she said. “We brought in 1000s of jobs from the informal economy to the formal economy.”
California Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, who began working with Garcia-Brower two decades ago, said in an email to Boyle Heights Beat that she watched her friend “rise from grassroots leadership to her appointment as the California Labor Commissioner because of her deep commitment to equity and our collective for justice for all workers.”
In 2005, an MCTF investigation of immigrant janitorial contractors cleaning California supermarket chains like Albertsons, Ralphs, and Vons uncovered rampant wage theft and labor abuse. The findings led to a class-action lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which ultimately resulted in a $22.4 million settlement for 2,100 janitors, mostly Mexican.
In 2014, Garcia-Brower launched the “Ya Basta” campaign to combat sexual violence in the janitorial industry. Her instinct was to focus on providing workers with physical defense tools, like pepper spray. However, a pivotal conversation with two women who would later become long-time collaborators, Barbara Kappos, executive director of the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, and Sandra Henriquez, chief executive officer of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CALCASA), now known as ValorUS, changed her point of view.
Henriquez explained that shooting pepper spray could easily be turned against the women that Garcia-Brower was trying to protect. What women needed most, Henriquez said, was a holistic approach to help them learn to trust the strength of their own minds and bodies. That revelation sparked a new vision: to offer female janitors self-defense classes in Spanish on Saturdays.
What began as a single class soon grew into a larger movement, building certified trainers and local groups in every chapter throughout the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund.
“I’ve seen her […] with women who’ve been harassed and sexually assaulted on the job,” Kappos said of her friend, “and she doesn’t just take a report, she cares about this person.”
Her collaboration with the East Los Angeles Women’s Center remains strong. Early in her tenure at the Labor Commissioner’s Office, Garcia-Brower launched the “Reaching Every Californian” outreach campaign that includes the Workplace Rights Ambassador Project (WRAP). Her first partner was the East L.A. Women’s Center. The goal: to equip staff at non-labor-focused organizations to recognize potential labor violations and connect exploited workers to the Labor Commissioner’s Office.
“I don’t want them to be on hold in our information line, I want them to call a live body to have a relationship with somebody in our agency who could talk to them and respond to their issue,” Garcia-Brower explained.
Longtime collaborators say that Garcia-Brower listens empathetically, then acts decisively.
“A lot of times, people can feel overwhelmed,” Henriquez said, “but one of the things that’s different about Lilia is that she is going to do something.”
Although Garcia-Brower now lives closer to downtown Los Angeles, her ties to East Los Angeles remain strong. She and her wife have built a family with their daughter and stepson, and they chose to enroll their daughter in school there. “I wanted her to walk the streets my grandparents did,” she explained.
“To this day, in every worker, I see my father’s calloused hands,” she said.
“I’m not here to make fancy promises,” she continued. “[I’m] going to leave this world while we still continue to heal the generations of slavery and exploitation. Somos curanderas, curanderas del alma, de la mente para la trabajadora el trabajador.”
