Companies nationwide are engaging in an "epidemic" of wage and hour violations, denying their workers overtime pay and sometimes even the minimum wage, the Labor Department's top lawyer says.

And as if to underline the point that DOL Solicitor Patricia Smith made at a New York University Law School symposium on June 6, her old agency, the New York Labor Department, said on June 12 that it’s stepping up its wage-and-hour probes, too.

Wage and hour violations are important to workers because they directly cost them money. They’re mostly in non-unionized, low-wage industries and especially among firms that exploit undocumented workers.

But not always: DOL’s Wage and Hour Division said on June 12 it won $603,237 for 700 present and former Florida state correctional officers, after Teamsters Council 75 sued for two years’ worth of illegally denied overtime pay and comp time.

Wage and hour violations are out of hand, Smith told the NYU seminar on the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the minimum wage and overtime pay. "Workers around the country, especially low-wage workers, are being denied minimum wage and overtime. Right now I think what we see is nothing short of an epidemic," she said.

Rather than probe cases one by one, Smith said DOL now focuses on industries or geographic areas with a pattern of violations. In Wage Theft in America, Kim Bobo of Interfaith Worker Justice reported wage and hour violation rates of more than 50% in Los Angeles and New York City garment factories, 60% in nursing homes and poultry plants, of up to 62% in agriculture, and 78% in New Orleans restaurants, among others.

But even one by one, Smith told the NYU crowd, DOL found wage and hour violations 79% of the time. Meanwhile, Smith’s former agency, the New York State Labor Department, decided on the same course of industry-wide investigations, and for the same reason, an Atlanta law firm reported in an employment law blog.

“The Labor Department is increasing enterprise-wide enforcement, according to one spokesperson,” the blog said. “In the past, the department would stick to investi-gating one company facility that was the subject of a complaint. Now it is looking into systemic violations at multiple facilities, indicating sweeping efforts to end unfair trends in violation of the New York Labor Law. Violations of overtime and wage law are not the only issues. In several cases, the department found other infractions, including worker misclassification, weak labor laws and lack of trained staff in fair labor practices.”

This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.