With watchdogs like this...

WHOSE SIDE is the Labor Department on, anyway?

You might have thought the side of workers, given the name--but a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows otherwise.

According to the GAO report, the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division (WHD)--the federal agency charged with enforcing provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, including ensuring that millions of workers in the U.S. are paid the federal minimum wage and overtime pay--has been negligent in investigating reports of abuse.

The report found that the WHD mishandled nine of 10 cases brought by a team of undercover GAO investigators posing as workers with common problems. The report noted:

The undercover tests revealed sluggish response times, a poor complaint intake process, and failed conciliation attempts, among other problems. In one case, a WHD investigator lied about investigative work performed and did not investigate GAO's fictitious complaint. At the end of the undercover tests, GAO was still waiting for WHD to begin investigating three cases--a delay of nearly five, four and two months, respectively.

In one case, a fictitious California meatpacker made a complaint about underage children working during school hours and operating heavy machinery in a packing facility. But the complaint was never recorded in the WHD's database or followed up.

In another instance, a fictitious laundromat clerk and undocumented immigrant reported being paid less than minimum wage for more than a year. Not only did the WHD delay investigating the complaint, but the investigator later inaccurately reported that the clerk had received back wages--even after the clerk had called to report that she still hadn't been paid.

Audio clips of some of the undercover calls are equally infuriating. In one, a fictitious employee is discouraged by a WHD employee from filing a complaint:

WHD employee: "You're sure you don't want to just have a nice conversation with him [the employer] yourself?"

Undercover investigator: "No, no, I don't want to, because he gets very loud and angry."

WHD employee: "Okay, well, here's another avenue that you can pursue. Okay, do you have another job lined up?"

Investigator: "No."

WHD employee: "Okay, you might want to do that before you file a complaint with us, because I can't guarantee that he's not going to fire you."

With "protection" like this, it's a wonder that any worker would bother to file a complaint.

In another instance, a WHD investigator speaks with a fictitious employer, who admits that that she hasn't been paying a fictitious worker the minimum wage, but says she will not give back pay. When the worker calls back to check on the status of the complaint, the WHD investigator says, "Once the employer tells me that they're not going to pay and they can't, my ability to, you know, force payment has ended."

The worker asks, "So you really have no power to do any...all you did was just call her and ask her to pay me...I mean, she's just..."

The WHD employee responds:

Well, the thing is that I explained the law to her...It's just that she's saying she doesn't have the money to [pay]. I can't wring blood from a stone...I am bound by the laws I'm able to enforce, the money that Congress gives us, and all of that lovely stuff. If you are having a problem with what our office is capable of achieving, based on the laws that were written, then you need to write your congressman. Okay, do you know who your congressmen are? I mean, we can use all the help we can get.

SUCH attitudes aren't helpful to workers facing dire straights. The difference between just getting by and financial ruin is little more than a paycheck for many families, particularly those working in minimum- and low-wage jobs.

And although the complaints that the GAO filed were fictitious, its review of actual complaints handled by the WHD found similarly shoddy work. The report notes that the GAO:

identified 20 cases affecting at least 1,160 real employees whose employers were inadequately investigated. For example, 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.

According to the GAO, the Wage and Hour Division mishandled serious cases 19 percent of the time.

In one case, the WHD waited nearly two years before investigating a complaint made by restaurant workers who had been forced by management to work off the clock and whose tips had been stolen. Investigators finally found that the workers were owed $230,000 in back wages and tips, but when the restaurant agreed to pay back wages but not tips, the WHD investigators simply closed the case.

"This investigation clearly shows that [the Department of] 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."

As Kim Bobo of the Interfaith Workers Center and author of Wage Theft in America, wrote in In These Times in November, wage theft is rampant across the U.S.:

Billions of dollars in wages are being illegally stolen from millions of workers each and every year. The employers range from small neighborhood businesses to some of the nation's largest employers--Wal-Mart, Tyson, McDonald's, Target, Pulte Homes, federal, state, and local governments and many more...

Wage theft is widespread and pervasive across all types of companies. Various surveys have found that:

60 percent of nursing homes stole workers' wages.

89 percent of non-monitored garment factories in Los Angeles and 67 percent of non-monitored garment factories in New York City stole workers' wages.

25 percent of tomato producers, 35 percent of lettuce producers, 51 percent of cucumber producers, 58 percent of onion producers, and 62 percent of garlic producers hiring farmworkers stole workers' wages.

78 percent of restaurants in New Orleans stole workers' wages.

Almost half of day laborers, who tend to focus on construction work, have had their wages stolen.

100 percent of poultry plants steal workers' wages.

According to Bobo, as many as 3 million U.S. workers are having their wages stolen by employers by not being paid the minimum wage. Another 3 million workers are wrongly classified by their employers as "independent contractors," meaning bosses don't have to pay payroll taxes or overtime.

Millions more are being stiffed on overtime pay or are not being paid for breaks that are required under law. Some $19 billion dollars in unpaid overtime is stolen each year in the U.S., according to the Economic Policy Foundation--a pro-business think tank.

THE SITUATION has gotten worse in the past decade. Bobo writes that according to court records, lawsuits filed under the Fair Labo Standards Act more than quadrupled between 1997 and 2007. And as Bobo writes:

These figures account for only the federal lawsuits and do not include wage cases filed under state wage laws. Most of those lawsuits were filed for groups of workers, which means that these cases are recovering wages for several hundred thousand workers. The number of workers recovering wages would be much higher if workers didn't have to "opt-in" to the suits.

In December alone, for example, Wal-Mart agreed to pay as much as $54.25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by four Minnesota employees who were forced to work through their breaks without pay. As many as 100,000 current and former Wal-Mart and Sam's Club employees in the state may be compensated as part of the ruling.

But that's a drop in the bucket for Wal-Mart, the country's largest private employer, which just recorded its strongest sales result in its history, with $108 billion in sales in the three-month period ending January 31.

Debbie Simonson, one of four women who initiated the suit, told Workday Minnesota that she finally quit her job at the Brooklyn Park Wal-Mart store because "I was tired of all the stress...of being told I couldn't go to the bathroom."

Simonson says that the final straw came when, on one of her last days of work, she forgot to punch the time clock at the end of her shift. A supervisor marked the log for 6:59 a.m.--one minute after she started. Instead of getting paid for eight hours of work, Simonson, who made just $7.25 an hour, was paid for only one minute of work.

While Simonson took action with a lawsuit, many workers, unaware of the intricacies of federal labor law, aren't even aware that they are being ripped off. Others, especially undocumented immigrants, are threatened with retaliation, like calls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, if they make a complaint. Still others, facing costly and time-consuming legal battles, will never press forward with individual complaints for back pay or a missing check--fearing that it's just not worth the time and energy.

While incoming Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has pledged to take the GAO report seriously and is planning on hiring another 250 WHD investigators, the truth is that most workers in the U.S., particularly low-wage workers, have little actual protection on the job.

With unionization levels at near-historic lows, the vast majority of workers in the U.S. are considered "at will" employees, meaning that, without a contract, they can be terminated for nearly any reason at an employer's discretion, without warning. And if a worker wants to contest his or her treatment, they face an uphill--and usually lengthy--battle in proving that they were wronged.

With labor laws and courts weighted in favor of employers and oversight agencies like the Wage and Hour Division ineffectual and underfunded, workers will continue to be at the mercy of their employers--and employers will continue to get away with stealing workers' wages.