After 12 years of sorting and folding laundry for a billion-dollar company, Francisca Amaral earns $8.20 an hour, barely enough to cover the cost of care for her two young children.

Last month, in one of the first cases of its kind, Amaral, 33, of Oakland, and a co-worker filed a class-action lawsuit against Cintas Corp., a uniform rental business in Cincinnati, alleging that the company does not pay what is required under the living-wage law in Hayward, where Cintas has a city contract to clean workers’ uniforms.

“Gas is expensive, rent is expensive and $8.20 an hour doesn’t allow for much of a future,” said Amaral, speaking in Spanish. “If it’s true they should be paying us more, then we want them to do that.”

The suit raises questions about how well the laws are being enforced in the Bay Area, especially when local governments have few staffers to monitor compliance.

Enforcement of minimum-wage laws and other labor standards is woefully inadequate, said Carol Zabin, associate chair of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. Cities rarely have funding to enforce their living wage laws, she added.

Hayward and other small cities have no staff for enforcement.

“We rely on a lot of self-reporting,” said Jesus Armas, Hayward’s city manager.

But such enforcement is necessary, said Rich Waller, who supervises San Francisco’s four living wage compliance officers.

“It’s like a parking meter,” said Waller. “If there weren’t parking-control officers, do you think people would put money in the meter? It doesn’t work on the honor system.”

Under Hayward’s 1999 law, companies that do at least $25,000 in business with the city must pay their workers a minimum wage of $9.26 per hour plus health insurance, or $10.71 per hour for those who, like Amaral, don’t get health benefits.

In Northern California, similar laws have been passed in various places, including San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, Santa Cruz and Marin County.

“Cities are recognizing there’s a high cost of living and people in low- wage industries, like laundry and janitors, need to be ensured at least a decent standard of living for the Bay Area,” said San Francisco attorney Eileen Goldsmith, who is representing Amaral and co-plaintiff Nelva Hernandez.

Most of the 50 production employees at Cintas’ San Leandro plant, which does the work for Hayward, earn between $7 and $8.50 per hour, Goldsmith said.

A spokeswoman for Cintas, Karen Carnahan, said it was too early to comment on the merits of the complaint.

“The suit was just served recently and we’re still looking into the facts of the matter,” Carnahan said. “But we have a long-standing practice of complying with all laws and local ordinances, and we’re going to investigate this matter fully.”

Labor analysts say it is rare for low-wage workers to sue.

“Those who are working for firms that aren’t complying tend to be pretty vulnerable workers,” said Zabin. “Workers at the bottom of the labor market tend to be immigrants, people of color, people without a lot of education or resources.”

A Detroit security guard sued her employer last year for failing to comply with the city’s living wage law, but the suit was not a class action, as the Cintas case is.

Cintas’ $105,000 annual contract has expired, and Hayward mayor Roberta Cooper said the contract will not be renewed this month if the company can’t demonstrate it is paying a living wage.

“There are probably many other contractors with whom we can work who would take the living wage seriously,” said Cooper.

Amaral and Hernandez were aided in filing the suit by UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, which is trying to organize 17, 000 Cintas workers across the country.

Jason Oringer, a researcher for UNITE, said regardless of whether Cintas loses its Hayward contract or agrees to pay workers the living wage, the case is strengthening the resolve of Latina laundry workers in San Leandro.

“Either way is a victory,” he said. “But I would love to see these women get a $2.50 raise.”

While living wage laws can be a useful tool for improving living standards, it usually takes a union or a community-based organization to act as the watchdog for workers’ rights, Zabin said.

Los Angeles has an enforcement staff of 10, but it has also deputized a nonprofit group to keep an eye on companies that do business with the city, she said.

Oakland has one living-wage expert on staff who, when a city contract is awarded, requests documentation of the pay rates for all of a company’s employees.

Deborah Barnes, Oakland’s contract compliance manager, said she is confident companies are on the right side of the law “because there’s a local group called ACORN that keeps our feet to the fire.”

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, tracks living-wage campaigns around the country and has counted 107 cities and counties that have such laws, from Minneapolis to Miami and Boston to Bellingham, Wash.

The laws have helped tens of thousands of Bay Area workers, including skycaps and home-health aides, according to Amaha Kassa, co-director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.

“They also have a ripple effect,” he said. “Other businesses have to raise standards if they want to compete for the same workers. And they have been used as a benchmark” in other contract negotiations.

Although the Hayward contract is small for Cintas, which had $2.3 billion in revenues last year, the workers’ lawsuit may help bring visibility to living-wage laws, said Goldsmith, the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

“We’d like to make sure that employers understand these ordinances are out there and are enforceable,” she said. “You can’t just sign the contract, say you’re going to comply and then ignore it.”

Amaral, who is out on disability with hand and shoulder injuries from the repetitive strain of her job, said she had little to lose in filing the suit.

“I hope we get justice,” she said. “There might be other workers in the same situation who don’t know about the contracts that govern their companies. Mostly we just know that we’re here to fold laundry.”