Not Our Department

When you call the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the woefully understaffed body tasked with enforcing the nation's labor laws, you are likely to be channeled to voicemail. You're lucky if you ever get a call back. The Government Accountability Office recently completed an investigation of the division's efficacy in processing and investigating complaints, in which the GAO called in fictional complaints of labor law violations and observed the responses. The results were shocking. In one case, a caller in Miami left seven messages complaining that his employer had failed to give him his last paycheck, and was never called back. In several other cases WHD investigators lied about having followed up on complaints, entering them in the database as resolved, without ever having pursued them.

But the call that best sums up the current state of enforcement was a tip alerting investigators in a California office that children were working at a meatpacking plant. In the hierarchy of labor law violations, child labor occupies a category all its own. A ban on the practice was one of the first laws passed to protect workers, and to this day the prohibition serves as a marker of the developed world, the minimum threshold of decency. So when a GAO investigator called the San Jose branch office in October and left an anonymous message that children were operating "circular saws and the machine that makes hamburger meat"--during school hours, no less!--you'd think it would have triggered whatever the WHD's version of DEFCON 3 is. Instead, the tip languished in voicemail limbo. No investigation was opened; the call was never returned.

For Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, none of this was surprising. Bobo, the author of Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid--And What We Can Do About It, is one of the nation's leading crusaders against labor law violations. Her testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor, in July, helped prompt committee chair George Miller to commission further GAO study, the results of which were released March 25 at a follow-up hearing. The report, Bobo said, "confirmed everything my folks around the country have been saying the last few years, and people looked at us like we were nuts."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.