Speaking Dec. 4 at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., Secretary Tom Perez told attendees that the Department of Labor (DOL) now has 1,000 Wage and Hour (WHD) investigators aggressively enforcing the nation’s pay, overtime and worker classification laws. That figure is up from the 730 investigators the Obama administration inherited.
The DOL is “back in the enforcement business, putting more cops on the beat and giving them more resources to protect working families who bear the greatest burden when labor standards are violated,” Perez said.
The DOL secretary, citing a study by the Eastern Research Group, said there are hundreds of thousands of workers in California and New York, largely in the restaurant and hotel industries, who are victims of minimum wage violations.
“That translates into a total of between $20 [million] and $29 million in lost weekly income for those workers, which represents 40 percent or more of their total pay,” Perez said. “Imagine that. Forty cents out of every dollar you earned doesn’t show up in your paycheck but in your employer’s pocket.”
To better understand wage and overtime rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), order a copy of Personnel Concepts’ FLSA Compliance Program.