Workers Deserve a Rescue Too

Once again the taxpayer comes to the rescue of investors.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quickly fashioned a plan to keep mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac liquid and solvent by using billions in taxpayer loans and guarantees.

It was similar to treatment given the major Wall Street investment banks when they teetered due to their irresponsible bets on subprime mortgages. The Fed jumped to open its discount window allowing them to borrow money using their toxic securities as collateral.

Investment interests falter and our government is nimble and responsive.

But when the lowest paid workers in our nation are cheated out of their modest wages, the lifeboat, it seems, is full.

A scathing review of the way workers' complaints have been mishandled and ignored by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department has just been issued by the Government Accountability Office -- Congress' investigative arm. The two reports (first and second) released Tuesday highlight the way the division has failed to follow through on valid complaints, particularly for low-wage workers, leaving some cheated out of thousands of dollars in earned wages.

More than 130-million workers in America rely on the Wage and Hour Division to enforce laws that mandate overtime pay and minimum wages. But they shouldn't count on it.

Over the last 10 years, the number of enforcement actions has been reduced by more than a third, which GAO partly attributes to a declining number of investigators on the job.

Just to give you a sense of how uninterested government has become to the plight of underpaid workers, Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, unearthed these statistics: In 1941 the division conducted 48,000 on-site investigations of businesses in industries known to slight worker pay. Fifteen hundred investigators visited one in every 10 businesses annually, helping to keep things honest. Today, the division has just 732 enforcement staffers who conduct fewer than 30,000 investigations per year. They are able to contact about one-third of 1 percent of businesses, mostly by phone.

"There is a crisis in the quantity of wages being stolen and an inability of the department to respond," Bobo says.

At her group's 19 worker centers around the country, 90 percent of the employees who come in seeking help have suffered wage theft. "They were either not paid for all their hours worked, not paid for valid overtime or, in the case of day laborers, not paid at all," Bobo says.

The GAO reports document some of these cases.

In one, rather than assist a homeless employee owed thousands of dollars in back wages for work at an assisted living facility, she was told to find a private attorney to file suit. The agency dropped the complaint because the employer said in August 2006 that it was unable to pay the wages owed. Yet the GAO found that the facility was still operating as of June 2008.

In another case, a delivery driver for an alcohol distributor with $25-million in annual net sales was not paid overtime. It took 17 months for the agency to assign an investigator to the complaint that was dropped six months later for possibly having passed the two-year statute of limitations.

When the division does follow through on complaints, Bobo says, it will often obtain only a portion of what's owed the employee as a "settlement." That means an employer who gets caught stealing wages suffers no downsides.

The low-wage folks who work in construction, home health care, hotels and restaurants, and such, can't feasibly hire a lawyer to get back the few hundred or thousand dollars owed them. The government has to do it.

And there's the glitch. There always seems to be plenty of money and will to rescue financial giants whose investments (gambles) turn sour, but when the working stiffs of America need help to get paid, our government doesn't have enough resources to help. Something's amiss here, deeply amiss.

Originally published in the St. Petersburg Times

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Comments

[itolduso]

I just want them to quit running it like a 'Ponzi Scheme' and holding 'homesteader's on the bottom.

[SisterAnn]

Today, they talk like they are going to help some home owners in the new bill that is passing to bail out Wall Street. They are even going to reduce the principal and interest. Some will not be helped.

[Chavez08]

Robyn,

Thank you very, very much for your work!!

[Chavez08]

How about some REAL working-class representation in Washington?:

"Senate Majority Leader - Bernie Sanders"

[Chavez08]

We American workers are too stupid and/or apathetic to our neighbors to organize and rebel against this systematic consolidation of wealth so we're going to continue to suffer.

ALL OF US, me included, continue to buy Asian slave labor produced goods saying "..but we have to!" No we don't, we could start right now boycotting anything and everything produced outside the U.S. and

~Guess what!?~

WE"LL SURVIVE!!!

...Or I suppose we could go on buying dirt-cheap shirts, cars and furniture shoes and further impoverishing our own neighbors.....It's OUR choice!

[TiaGal]

Please everyone....read The Shock Doctrine!!! It's our future if we don't wake up!

[SisterAnn]

Don't get me started.

They send American jobs overseas and our only choice is to buy Chinese goods, then we are accused of buying cheap Chinese goods.

They don't increase wages then say we charge too much and don't save.

Funny thing is when it started the Chinese were riding bikes and we were driving cars. Now many here are riding bides and the Chinese are driving cars.

All the programs that worked, until this republican administration, no longer work. Especially any program that was part of FDR's new deal. Fannie Mae was created by FDR because banks wouldn't loan for housing. It was so the middle class could get affordable loans. When the government let it go public, the guarantee ended, but now the banks want the guarantee since they are losing money.

[mamacat]

Workers don't have rich lobbyists paying off corrupt politicians (from the President on down) to do their bidding. Clinton said it at the beginning of his presidency, that we need to do something to shackle lobbyists. He badly underestimated the difficulty he would have getting that done. Besides, as evidenced by the GOP's K Street project attempt, the GOP was demanding payoffs from lobbyists, not trying to restrict them.

[swift goat pet for truth]

Capitalism for workers. Socialism for corporations.

Welcome to the GOP.

[vippy]

Yet Glenn Beck yesterday on the tube said that Bush's Tax Cuts were working. We have now
more millionaires and yes, the middle class is shrinking because some of them joined the
very rich category. DEMS want to tax and regulate everything yet the Republicans are more
successful. Can you even fathom this kind of thinking, the whole US financial industry is crumbling under Bush due to his leadership and yet FOX and Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, O'Reilly
spew these lies still. If people don't get by now they never will and we, who see the light,
will have to suffer, too.

[Cathexis]

There is a set core of these people who are so ideologically fixated that they are immune to Reality. Denial and Selective Perception provide insulation.

But some can be reached. I know -- I used to be one.

But we must never let up in confronting the lies. Every lie uncontested becomes a Truth, to them.

[Cathexis]

Well, that pretty much summed it up, sgpft.

How fortunate for Republicans that they seem immune to levels of Cognitive Dissonance that would make the head of a principled man explode.

[takenawalk]

i'm a northern cal. person - i worked for a health organization here for 6 yrs. they did not pay the penalties that ca. law required ..... those penalties alone for me over a 6 year period is over 50k!!!
the state of ca. did an audit of their own at tax payers cost ... and found the health organization
at fault .... after they paid their employees at their ( home base) hospital all other audits and payments came to a halt ..... it cost them some 10mil to pay back 2 facilties.( there are some 20-30 facilities they have here in norcal)... not for profit company w/600mil in profits for 07...wait till they audit the pay checks and find out how much they have been scamming out of their employees with the standard deductions.....---- it sure would be nice to know if there are lawyers out there that would have the balls to go up against big business's that have a long history of doing this...think if they treat their employees this way / what happens if your a patient and the business is self insured .... the truth is always covered up --- gee i'm a lawyer we don't get dirty..!!!!!!

[dogman44]

And now the republicants will accuse YOU of waging class war, although that's what they've
been doing since Reagan!

[WIpatriot]

LOL...yuppers!

[DallasMike]

I don'tget you guys,
You want Gov't run Health care.
You want Gov't run Energy.
You want Gov't to run every thing
All of those things will be paid for by the tax payers.
So why not the housing market/
You should be happy that the Gov't is now running the housing market.

[Chavez08]

OK, so we're in a classs-war. Isn't it time for our own "Surge"?