After a nine-month undercover investigation into the Department of Labor’s (DOL) ability to enforce and investigate violations of federal minimum wage, overtime, and child labor laws, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports serious failures.
The report, which was released March 25, was prompted by a request from the House Education and Labor Committee. The investigation used undercover agents posing as workers making complaints about possible wage and hour violations. The GAO found that the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) mishandled nine of the 10 cases investigators reported, according to an account in The New York Times.
As an example of the report’s contents, The Times article tells of the WHD’s failure to investigate a complaint that under-age children in Modesto, California, were working with dangerous machinery at a meatpacking plant during school hours. In another case, an undercover agent reported that he hadn’t been paid overtime in 19 weeks, and his calls weren’t returned for four months.
The New York Times article quotes the Obama administration’s Labor secretary, Hilda L. Solis, as saying she plans to increase staff by hiring 250 investigators “to refocus the agency on these enforcement responsibilities.”
In addition to requesting the GAO investigation, the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing in July that detailed what it called failures by the Bush administration to properly protect workers from the problem of “wage theft” by adopting weak enforcement strategies and reducing funding and staffing levels of the Wage and Hour Division. That hearing followed another GAO report on failures within the WHD that concluded that the agency “does not sufficiently leverage its existing tools to increase compliance.”
The July GAO report calculated that actions initiated by the Wage and Hour Division had dropped from approximately 47,000 in 1997 to fewer than 30,000 in 2007 and the use of fines that punish repeat or egregious offenders declined by nearly 50 percent from 2001 to 2007.
In one case detailed in the July report, the GAO said 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 employers to issue back pay, the agency refused to do so in most cases.