As the bipartisan immigration reform bill and its path to citizenship work through the Senate, California lawmakers are trying to pass bills to protect workers, including undocumented ones, from intimidation by business owners.

Under current law, businesses have plenty of opportunities to pressure their workers into working longer hours for less pay. Workers who try to unionize or who complain about unsafe working conditions or unpaid overtime can be subject to retaliation from employers, ranging from lost shifts to reduced pay or even outright firing.

The situation is even worse for undocumented workers, who often have no recourse if an employer treats them poorly. Managers often withhold wages and threaten to call immigration services if workers demand to be paid what they are owed.

That's exactly what happened to Jose Arias, who spent a decade milking cows for 15 hours a day in California's Central Valley.

When Arias finally took his employer to court for wage violations, they called immigration.

"I felt nervous. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even eat because I was thinking about what could happen," Arias said. As an undocumented worker, Arias is afraid of being deported to Mexico and forced to leave behind his wife and four children, who are in the United States legally.

That would leave his family without his income and force Arias to move to a country he hasn't lived or worked in for many years.

Lawyers for Arias' employer say there was no retaliation. Now new proposed laws would make particular actions, no matter their intent, illegal if they follow directly after employee complaints.

"Engaging in an unfair immigration-related practice against a person within 90 days of the person's exercise of rights protected under this code or local ordinance applicable to employees shall raise a rebuttable presumption of having done so in retaliation for the exercise of those rights," says the proposed bill, SB 263.

That would mean employers reporting workers for immigration violations after a complaint would be automatically assumed to be retaliating against that worker. Employers are still expected to vet the immigration status of their employees before hiring them, but would no longer be able to look the other way as long as employees "behave" while turning them in as soon as they demand fair treatment.

Initially, the bill requires a company that violated employee rights two times to have its license permanently revoked. Amid protests from businesses, that has been changed to four violations, but the measure may keep the bill from being adopted.

Business leaders say the punishment is too harsh. "If one of our very, very large employers, who may have tens of thousands of employees in California, and thousands of supervisors, if you have one rogue supervisor who engages in these practices twice, every license possessed by that business must be permanently revoked," says Mike Belote, a lobbyist for the California Employment Law Council, a lobbying group that represents large private businesses.

Debate is likely to continue for some time, but there's a good chance these bills will prevent some abuses while undocumented immigrants wait for their federal path to citizenship.