The form of direct action against abusive employers that I personally find the most tempting (this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or anything, just that I daydream about it):

Employees often don’t file legal complaints about wage fraud and illegal conditions because they can’t afford to lose the job because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I expect that many people in this situation would quit their horrible job and file a legal complaint if they would be given like $1200 to tide them and their family over while they found a new job. 

So here’s what I’d be tempted to do: ask people online to tell you about a business that’s engaging in wage and hours violations/otherwise really shitty but still its employees’ best option. Find one with like 10-15 employees. Fundraise money within your activist group and online to get enough money for every single employee to walk away. 

Then the employees go to their boss and say ‘the next time you take half our tips even though you’re not legally allowed to take any/make us come in when we’re really sick/deduct damaged merchandise from our paychecks/etc, we all walk away. We have filed a wage claim in court. If you retaliate for that, we all walk away.’

And then, you know, next time the employer breaks the law, any employee who wants to follow through on the threat gets $1200 to support them once they’ve quit. And then you publicize the heck out of it, and scare other shitty employers, and hopefully the wage claim is successful and your employees get recompensed the money they were owed. And you open online applications for the next place.

You’d have to be very careful to go after places with real, documented, verified workplace conditions violations, because most of the benefit is in the publicity and the scaring other employers into shaping up. And you can’t scare people into shaping up if they don’t know exactly what they need to do (meet their legal obligations). You could only go after small places, because you need most of the employees on the same page and because fundraising larger sums of money would be harder. 

But with the right fundraising and PR team, I bet you could create conditions under which employers are way more scared to cheat their employees.