Labor Department Not Effectively Fighting Wage Theft

By Betsy Miller Kittredge on 07-15-2008, 05:50 PM in

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), testified at a hearing today that findings from two separate investigations indicate that the U.S. Department of Labor is failing to effectively enforce the nation’s wage and hour laws. The two investigations found that the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department -– the agency responsible for investigating complaints of wage, hour, and child labor violations -– is failing to fully investigate and properly address violations of the law. The GAO calculated that actions initiated by the Department on wage and hour violations have dropped from approximately 47,000 in 1997 to fewer than 30,000 in 2007. Also, the use of fines that punish repeat or egregious offenders declined by nearly 50 percent from 2001 to 2007.

Other findings:

- Thousands of cases may have been mishandled by the agency over the past decade, which may have resulted in workers receiving reduced or no back pay at all. In one case, the GAO uncovered that the Wage and Hour Division dropped investigations when employers refused to pay or claimed no funds to pay back wages, even though the business was still in operation. Although the agency has the ability to take employers to court in order to force recalcitrant employers to issue back pay, the agency refused to do so in most cases.

- Hundreds of cases where the agency did not assign an investigator for more than a year after the initial complaint. It cited one example where a truck driver who was not paid for overtime had to wait for 17 months to be assigned an investigator. The case against the truck driver’s employer was dropped because the agency could no longer locate the truck driver.

The investigations were conducted by the GAO at the request of Chairman George Miller.