A report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, the federal agency charged with enforcing minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws, "is failing in that role, leaving millions of workers vulnerable," according to an article in today's New York Times.
One of the reports concerned the Division's office in Miami:
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.
The report concludes that "Labor has left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn."
Nowhere to turn? In Florida that's simply not true. As anyone who pays attention to court filings can tell you, dozens of workers each week, many on the low end of the pay scale, file claims for overtime and minimum wage violations in Florida state and federal courts. Indeed, as previously reported here, according to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, for the past five years the Southern District of Florida alone has averaged 28.7% of all Fair Labor Standards Act cases filed in the United States. The notion that workers have "nowhere to turn" is absurd. They need only turn to one of Florida's many wage-hour lawyers, who have turned wage-hour litigation into a cottage industry in the sunshine state. Does the GAO not realize that the FLSA permits private lawsuits, and in fact encourages them through its fee-shifting provisions? Why would an employee need the Wage and Hour Division when he has the Shavitz Law Firm or The Celler Legal Group in his corner?