When she first came to San Francisco roughly a decade ago, Ermei Wu landed a job in a Chinatown restaurant to support her three kids. Like many monolingual immigrants, she didn’t have anyone explaining wage laws to her in the language she speaks, Cantonese. 

She never knew to challenge her boss for what she later discovered was wage theft, until she joined the Chinese Progressive Association’s program, the Workers Rights Community Collaborative. 

“I knew I had rights as a worker, that I had paid sick leave, that there was minimum wage, that there was overtime,” Wu said through a translator. She pays it forward: “I tell all the people around me about what rights they have as a worker.”

In her next restaurant job, Wu was paid what she was owed. Last year, however, the Office of Labor and Standards Enforcement scaled back the workers’ rights program by nearly $400,000, roughly half its budget. This year, the program is set to lose the other half and shutter entirely.

It’s not the only one. The pot of money funding San Francisco’s legion of do-good organizations is about to shrink.