Then, last week, after finding the company and its owners to be in contempt for not paying the damages as ordered in the 2007 ruling, a federal judge smacked the cleaning company with another $277,791 in post-judgment interest, calculated at 4.44 percent from the original summary judgment’s date. Additionally, the judge ordered fines of $2,000 per day against the cleaning company and $200 each per day against Maldonado and Rubio for every day the back wages aren’t paid in full.

A district office of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in West Covina, Cal., first heard complaints about the way the cleaning company treated its employees when it took part in the Employment Education and Outreach (EMPLEO) – a coalition of private organizations and government agencies that helps Hispanic workers and employers with labor issues and concerns.

An investigation by the DOL turned up multiple minimum wage and overtime violations. Additionally, company managers did not keep accurate records of employee hours worked.

“The Department of Labor will not hesitate to take action to ensure workers receive the compensation they have worked hard for and earned,” U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said in a statement last Thursday.

Solis, who was born in California to immigrant working class parents from Nicaragua and Mexico, was named as the Plaintiff in the case, filed in July 2006 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Speaking at the Forum of the Workers of the Americas in Trinidad, Solis suggested her agency would finally be able to ramp up its investigations of companies that treat their employees unfairly and illegally.

Solis served eight years in Congress during the Bush Administration before President Obama nominated her as Labor Secretary. She told the assembly in Trinidad that she had battled injustice for too long. “For eight years I have struggled under hardship in an administration that was not for, in my opinion, putting people – working class people – first. That did not put education first,” Solis said.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › California maid company fined for ignoring 2007 ruling

According to the GAO report, the WHD “frequently responded inadequately to complaints, leaving low wage workers vulnerable to wage theft.” The GAO came to this conclusion after conducting a broad undercover investigation in which it filed 10 fictitious worker complaints in WHD district offices throughout the country.

“The undercover tests revealed sluggish response times, a poor complaint intake process, and failed conciliation attempts, among other problems,” the report states. The GAO also documented one case in which a WHD employee lied about investigating a claim when actually no work at all was done to investigate the fictitious claim.

One of the investigations was filed by a fictitious secretary in Virginia who complained that she was not being paid the minimum wage. The GAO’s fictitious employer did not refute the receptionist’s claim, but refused to pay the back wages owed anyway. The WHD investigator “accepted the refusal without question and informed the fictitious employee of his right to file a lawsuit.” The fictitious employee then asked why the WHD couldn’t be of more help and was told to contact his Congressman.

Another fictitious claim stated that children were using heavy machinery at a California meat packing facility. But 4 months later, the WHD still had not taken any action. In fact, the complaint was never recorded in the WHD’s database, even though the WDH claims that child labor complaints are its top priority.

It’s bad enough the workers in labor intensive jobs often find themselves preyed upon by unscrupulous employers. Add to that a bad economy in which some employers take desperate (and illegal) cost-cutting measures and top it off with an ineffective government bureaucracy, and you have to wonder:  why does the Fair Labor Standards Act exist if our Department of Labor won’t take even the smallest measures to enforce it? What recourse do workers have?

At the end of its undercover study, the GAO was still waiting for the WHD to begin investigating 3 of the fictitious claims, all of which had been delayed by months. During the course of the study, the GAO also exposed many real cases involving hundreds of workers whose employers the WHD never investigated.

According to the report, the “GAO found cases where it took over a year for WHD to respond to a complaint, cases closed based on unverified information provided by the employer, and cases dropped when the employer did not return phone calls.”

“GAO’s overall assessment of the WHD complaint intake, conciliation, and investigation processes found an ineffective system that discourages wage theft complaints,” the report states.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Department of Labor fails to uphold and enforce FLSA regulations

Hourly wage workers from Tyson’s slaughterhouses in Holcomb and Emporia, Kansas, originally filed the case in May 1006. Together, the Kansas operations employ some 3,300 hourly workers. The workers allege that Tyson owes them millions of dollars in back pay for all the time they spend on the job.

The key issue in the case is whether Tyson should have to compensate workers for all of the time they spend putting on and removing protective gear, cleaning equipment, waiting for production lines to start, walking to and from work, break, and changing quarters, and working on unpaid meal breaks.

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, the workers are seeking compensation for overtime. They are also seeking compensation for unpaid “straight time” at work under the Kansas Wage Payment Act.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, production workers must be compensated for doing anything that is “integral and indispensable” to the “principal activity” of the job they perform.

The ruling influenced Lungstrom’s decision last year to reject a motion by Tyson for summary judgment. In doing so, Lungstrum “ruled that whether standard protective clothing was ‘integral and indispensable’ to Tyson employees’ work was a factual question for a jury to decide,” according to a report in the Kansas City Star.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods will proceed

Ramales is one of many who are suing companies over unfair compensation of the amount overtime worked. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime to be paid to employees who work over the amount of hours prescribed in a week, which is usually 40 hours. Once an employee works more than his or her prescribed hours in a week, they should be compensated at time and one-half.

The FLSA was designed to help and protect employees from exploitation from their employers. However, employees are still being exploited by companies finding ways to get around paying overtime. Everybody is being hit hard by the failing economy, from big business to small businesses, but there is no excuse for companies to not compensate work that is earned.

One of the ways companies are getting around the rules of the FLSA is by giving employees the title of “manager.” The employees promoted to the title of “manager” are performing the same duties as hourly-paid workers and putting in the same amount of hours, yet on salary. At the end of the day, the salary that these “managers” are making is less than what they would be making at an hourly wage with time and a half overtime.

Beasley Allen has seen numerous cases in retail stores dealing with misclassifying of the “management” positions. But that is not the only industry that employes this tactic. Others include auto repair stores, service industry jobs, convenient stores and restaurant chains.

If you have been promoted to a “management” position and feel that you are still doing the same job and hours as just an employee, you might be an employee that has been wronged by your company. Research and get more detailed information at www.fairlabor-legal.com. You have rights and the privilege to get the pay you deserve.

SOURCE: Fair Labor Standards Act › Timberlake employee among growing number of FLSA abuses