by Reid Maki, NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

Have you or a friend ever been cheated out of your pay? The most common wage violations in America involve employers who refuse to pay the minimum wage or refuse to pay the overtime wages that workers earn. Often, these violations affect the working poor—the very people who can least afford to lose the wages.

The Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor is supposed to protect American workers who don’t receive their proper pay, but the agency is not doing enough, according to testimony at a House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee hearing I attended on July 15th.

“As a nation, we face a crisis of wage theft,” testified Kim Bobo, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national network of 60 local affiliates that engage the religious community in efforts to help workers, especially low-wage workers. According to Bobo, two million U.S. workers aren’t paid the minimum wage, three million are misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees, and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. “The Wage and Hour division is failing to protect workers from wage theft because of its woefully inadequate enforcement of the federal wage and hour laws,” she complained.

One of the primary reasons for this lack of enforcement: Wage and Hour is grossly understaffed. Less than 750 investigators are available to go out into the field and look into workers’ complaints about being cheated. That translates to one investigator for every 10,000 businesses. Bobo noted that if the ratio of investigators to businesses that existed in 1941 held today, we would have 34,000 investigators.

Two officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified about Wage and Hour’s performance. Ann-Marie Lasowski, acting director of education, workforce and income security issues, testified that from fiscal year 1997 to 2007, the number of Wage and Hour enforcement actions decreased by more than a third, from approximately 47,000 in 1997 to just under 30,000 in 2007. Lasowski said that Wage and Hour did not allocate resources well. She said the division commissioned studies to help it identify industries where abuses were likely to occur—mostly in low-wage industries —but then failed to allocate extra resources to enforce violations in those industries.

Greg Kutz, GAO’s managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, told the House panel that when researchers looked at 15 Wage and Hour investigations they found frighteningly inadequate performance. Some complaints by workers were rejected simply because employers failed to provide accurate information. In some cases, Wage and Hour investigators could not locate employers even though GAO researchers found the same employers easily. In another case, Wage and Hour closed a complaint because the employer refused to pay back the lost wages that the investigator determined they owed the worker. In another instance, Wage and Hour delayed investigating a case for a year and then told the worker that they were dropping the complaint because the statute of limitations for assessing back wages was close to expiring.

Acting Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division Alexander Passantino denied GAO’s claims and attacked the GAO’s research methodology. Passantino noted that in fiscal year 2007, Wage and Hour collected $220 million in back wages, the highest total ever collected, despite a drop of over 220 investigators—23 percent—over the last seven years.

Democrats on the committee, including Chairman George Miller of California, did not accept his defense of the Department of Labor, suggesting that DOL was failing the American worker. “Although the Department of Labor has the necessary tools to fight wage theft, the GAO investigation suggests that the problem of wage theft is only getting worse because of weaker enforcement,” said Miller.

The National Consumers League is concerned about any system that asks a single federal investigator to enforce labor violations in over 10,000 work places. That’s just asking for failure. We hope the next president will take a step toward correcting this problem by pledging to double the number of investigators in his first term—that’s still not enough to solve the problem, but it’s a start. In the meantime, DOL should take a hard look at the GAO’s recommendations to see if Wage and Hour can do a better job of allocating resources to protect American’s most vulnerable workers.

by Sally Greenberg

In my years working as product safety counsel for Consumers Union, I spent a lot of time trying to improve product safety for consumers, especially kids. This week both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate supported truly historic reforms – reforms that seemed like mere pipe dreams only a few years ago. The bill, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, awaits the President’s signature.

One thing I have learned over the years, as well, is that a product safety crisis – like the one in 2000 when we learned that thousands of Firestone Tires were defective and separated off of (mostly) Ford Explorer at high speeds, killing hundreds of drivers and passengers – or the presence of excessive levels of lead in the toys our children are playing with – is a wakeup call for legislators and consumers alike. These crises can open the door to more close look at the laws that affect safety and ways to improve them.

To the credit of my fellow consumer advocates and members of congress from both parties, they rolled up their sleeves and worked together for reforms. The catalyzing event was high lead levels in toys discovered over the past two years – that opened the door to scrutiny of the federal agency charged with keeping our products safe, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Traditionally underfunded and under the radar screen, the CPSC was operating with half the employees it began with in the mid-1970s while the number of consumer products had increased exponentially. Worthy of note, as well, were the comments by the top guy at the Toy Industry of America, who said the bill was “the right thing to do.”

Among the bill’s provisions, it will:

• Effectively ban lead from children’s toys, a position NCL has long endorsed. Lead is a proven toxin for children’s development and can do lifelong damage. No object intended for use by children should contain anything but the most minute amounts of lead.

• Require toymakers to have independent labs to test products before they are sold; many consumers assumed this was happening already, but instead, too many toys and products intended for children were introduced into the marketplace without proper testing and analysis Consumers may eventually see labels certifying toys have been tested before being sold, and consumers buying online or through a catalog will be able to see the same warning label that appears on packaging to warn parents of small parts or other potential hazards.

• Allow the CPSC to post information about products that have consumers have reported to the agency as being dangerous or defective; other federal agencies allow consumers to go to their websites to check on products before they purchase them. A provision of CPSC’s law prevented it from posting this information until the agency checked in with the manufacturer. That will change under the new law.

• State attorneys general will have the authority to help enforce federal product safety laws and take manufacturers to court to keep dangerous products off the market.

• This beleaguered agency will finally get the funding it needs to carry out its many and growing responsibilities. The CPSC budget will nearly double to $136 million, from $80 million for this fiscal year; the agency has already hired additional inspectors for the nation’s largest ports, where dangerous imports can enter the country currently unnoticed because of weak enforcement.

Finally, while at Consumers Union I had the honor of working with Linda Ginzel and Boaz Keysar after their toddler son died in a recalled and defective portable crib that killed other children as well. They have been heroic in their fight for safer kids’ products and better regulations to protect them. I am so happy that after many years of working to get these reforms into the Consumer Product Safety Act, there will finally be a requirement for mandatory standards and testing for specific infant and toddler products, we will see a ban on the sale, lease or use in commercial settings of cribs that do not meet current safety standards, and product registration cards will be required with new products to facilitate notice of recalled products.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 includes many of the proposals consumer groups have worked to get enacted for a decade. It took a wake-up call like high levels of lead in toys to get Congress’ attention to the sad state of product safety regulation – and hats off to the members and their staffs in both parties for their support – but with the enactment of this bill we will see a far better safety environment, and most important, vastly safer toys and products for the most precious and vulnerable consumers, our kids.

by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I love tomatoes. Home grown, store bought, on the vine, off the vine, grape and cherry tomatoes, doesn’t matter, I love them all. But over the past few months, as the Food and Drug Administration suspected tomatoes as the source of a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,300 consumers in the United States and Canada, I’ve begun to worry that tomatoes could go the way of the Edsel. The industry has lost an estimated $250 million, with the fruit rotting on the vine. (Yes, tomatoes are a fruit!) You have to feel terrible for tomato producers as the FDA has struggled to pin down the source of the foodborne pathogen.

Tracing what fruit or vegetable is the source of an outbreak like salmonella, even with advances in technology, is still dependent on local health officials and a poor or nonexistent trace-back system. Some local health departments are better than others. In the case of tomatoes, in mid-May the FDA announced a Salmonella outbreak and focused on tomatoes alone, but it wasn’t until July 9 that FDA’s warnings were expanded to include jalapeños. A bioterrorism law passed in 2002 was supposed to set up systems to enable tracing back through the food supply to find the source of microbes like Salmonella. In this recent outbreak, however, investigators were rifling through paper invoices instead of computer records. The system is so laborious that many times investigators don’t learn what made people sick, or by the time they do, the outbreak is over. Meanwhile, when tomatoes or peppers or other foods are implicated, consumers steer clear, restaurants steer clear, and the growers and everyone in the chain of production lose millions.

Trace-back systems with identifying information on each piece of produce would help solve this problem. I’ve seen infrared technologies designed to do just that. The FDA says that three key components are needed for trace back systems to work: a unique identifier that follows each food item from field to consumer, electronic record keeping and a common framework for sharing information among all the players.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich) is working on legislation that would incorporate a tracing system, and he hopes to bring it to a floor vote this year. Dingell’s House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing today on the salmonella investigation.

And though the produce industry has resisted trace back systems because of the expense and fear that their products might receive negative attention, a quarter of a billion dollars in losses might make produce growers more receptive to change that will save them money in the long run.

Another move in the right direction is the federal law—supported by the National Consumers League—that becomes effective later this year requiring a country-of-origin label for all food, even if it’s U.S.-grown. Those labels provide an opportunity to add extra information, such as a unique tracking number. State and local heath departments need to coordinate their food safety efforts, while the federal government adds to the mix a far more accurate traceability system. This will not only protect consumers but it will protect the industries that produce the vegetables and fruits we love, like tomatoes.

Attention pepper lovers: step away from the jalapeños.

Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration think they’ve found the *true culprit in the current Salmonella outbreak, which up until now had been associated entirely with tomatoes. The FDA *announced yesterday that its officials matched the strain on a single jalapeño pepper at a distributing center in McAllen, Texas.

According to the FDA, “since a recall will not immediately remove all potentially contaminated peppers from the food supply, FDA is also asking consumers to avoid eating raw jalapeño peppers or foods made from raw jalapeño apeno peppers until further notice in order to prevent additional cases of illness. This recommendation does not include cooked or pickled jalapeño peppers.”

If you simply can’t resist the spicy, at least avoid raw jalapeños, or foods prepared with jalapeños. If they are cooked or picked, they are considered safe.

The Salmonella outbreak that started in April of this year has resulted in more than 1,200 infections and 229 hospitalizations, according to the *Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.