The California Labor Commissioner’s Office ordered Rafael Rivas’ RDV Construction Inc. and RVR General Construction Inc. to pay $16.2 million for defrauding more than 1,100 workers in Southern California. But the agency, which issued the citations for back wages and penalties in 2018 and 2019, had recovered just 2% as of last month, according to a department spokesman.

KQED reviewed hundreds of pages of state documents and court records, knocked on doors of properties linked to Rivas and interviewed workers the construction contractor cheated to piece together an accounting of the stunning labor violations — and how an understaffed agency was unsuccessful in collecting most of what Rivas and his companies owe.

California has some of the nation’s strongest employee protections on the books, including against wage theft. Yet, Rivas’ case signals that the state is not prioritizing restitution for workers when their earnings are withheld, according to workers’ rights advocates and employment attorneys.

“It’s outrageous. It’s infuriating,” said Benjamin Wood, a former organizer with the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center who has helped dozens of workers file wage complaints with regulators, including against RDV. “The state has so much power to enforce laws. But when it comes to massive wage theft, it seems like they’re powerless.”

Javier Gonzalez and Saul Pedroza installed steel rods and wooden frames for RDV Construction in 2016 at an apartment complex in Glendale, north of Los Angeles. The crewmates, both Mexican immigrants, said the company never paid them for about a month of full-time work.

Supervisors “started telling us that the paychecks were coming next week, and then next week,” Pedroza, 51, said in Spanish. “That’s how they strung us along.”

The carpenters were given paychecks that bounced due to insufficient funds. After they quit, Pedroza and Gonzalez said they went to the worksite and RDV’s offices to demand their earnings, and they both filed wage claims with the Labor Commissioner’s Office.

The agency determined RDV owes $11,000 to Gonzalez and $12,500 to Pedroza.

“I see it as a mockery of all the people they defrauded and of the government,” Gonzalez, 61, said. “It was a robbery in broad daylight what they did to us.”

Pedroza said the theft of his salary meant he couldn’t buy enough food for his four children or pay rent for the family’s mobile home in Anaheim. He said he borrowed money from friends and desperately scrambled for other jobs to avoid eviction.

“It was a long time that we were doing badly, without any money,” Pedroza told KQED. “It was wrong.”