The Uneven Scales of Justice

The NY Times has an article by Steven Greenhouse that points out that the federal government is failing to provide justice to low wage workers. Here is the key bit:

The federal agency charged with enforcing minimum wage, overtime and many other labor laws is failing in that role, leaving millions of workers vulnerable, Congressional auditors have found.

In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office found that the agency, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers.

...

When an undercover agent posing as a dishwasher called four times to complain about not being paid overtime for 19 weeks, the division’s office in Miami failed to return his calls for four months, and when it did, the report said, an official told him it would take 8 to 10 months to begin investigating his case.

“This investigation clearly shows that Labor has left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn,” the report said. “Unfortunately, far too often the result is unscrupulous employers’ taking advantage of our country’s low-wage workers.”

The report pointed to a cavalier attitude by many Wage and Hour Division investigators, saying they often dropped cases when employers did not return calls and sometimes told complaining workers that they should file lawsuits, an often expensive and arduous process, especially for low-wage workers.

During the nine-month investigation, the report said, 5 of the 10 labor complaints that undercover agents filed were not recorded in the Wage and Hour Division’s database, and three were not investigated. In two cases, officials recorded that employers had paid back wages, even though they had not.

It is interesting to contrast this with the opposite view that the US federal government has taken about excessive compensation for the Wall Street high flyers who collapsed the economy. In the case of the big shots "contracts are sacred". In the case of the underclass, they are out of luck when their employers ignore their contracts and systematically cheat them. Of course there is nothing new here. Lots of people have already pointed out how eager the Republicans were to tie Detroit bailouts to wage and benefit rollbacks for union workers without a word about the "sacredness" of those contracts. The hypocrisy of the rich and powerful is just too much to bear!