With year-end approaching, the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor is working to return $4,737,110 in wages it recovered to almost 7,500 Florida workers who earned them, agency officials said.
In the Southwest Florida counties of Charlotte, Collier, Lee and Hendry, the total owed to 1,043 employees by 32 employers is $437,357.21. There were no owed wages reported from Glades County.
Wages are recovered by the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division following investigations into employers who are found to owe wages to current or former employees. After an investigation, it’s incumbent upon the employers to pay the employees who are owed wages. If the employers are not able to locate former employees owed wages, they are required to turn the wages over to DOL, where they are kept in a lockbox for up to three years while the Wage and Hour Division attempts to locate them.
If the employees are not found within three years, the funds go to the general U.S. Treasury, said Nicolas Ratmiroff, district director of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division.
Nicolas Ratmiroff
Ratmiroff said the Wage and Hour Division enforces labor laws related to areas, including payment of wages, overtime, record keeping, child labor, the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Agricultural Workers Protection Act.
Ratmiroff said that in Florida, traditionally low-wage industries, including food service and tourism, construction and agriculture, are the “most prevalent” when it comes to wage violations.
“Of course, we investigate every industry, including government contracts, where we find violations,” Ratmiroff said. “But primarily, those types of businesses in Florida would be where we find the most problems.”
He said wage violations in these industries and others can occur for a variety of reasons that would prompt an investigation when a complaint is filed.
“When the employers fail to count certain times as hours worked, for example, when they tell the employee to come in before their shift and do some preliminary activity, that is work, but they don’t count it as work,” he said. “Or they tell them to take a lunch break, but the employee doesn’t take a lunch break and they deduct those lunch breaks, or they fail to pay for certain travel times or call their employee a salaried-exempt employee. And that means that they’re not entitled to overtime when they’re in fact entitled to overtime.”
When it comes to finding workers that employers have not been able to locate, Ratmiroff said the DOL has personnel hired specifically to find them.
“The employer is asked to provide the last known contact information for the individual, and we use several databases of the government, including civil and criminal databases, Social Security offices, Departments of Motor Vehicles and so on to see if we can hit on that name with the same information to try to locate [the individual],” he said.
Ratmiroff said DOL also encourages use of its Workers Owed Wages online tool by anyone who believes they may be owed wages or knows someone who may be owed wages. He said the WOW page can help these workers “get the money that they work hard to obtain.”
“These wages are the property of those workers, and we want to get [it] into their hands,” he said. “Our goal is to get all of that money that we have in that lockbox in the hands of the workers who are owed.”
Last year, according to DOL, publicizing the WOW website resulted in a “significant increase” in the number of individuals accessing the tool. In Florida, the number increased from 12,607 to nearly 45,500, or more than 260%.
Recovered wages owed in SWFL by county
Charlotte: $3503.17 to 10 employees by two employers
Collier: $127,787.37 to 164 employees by eight employers
Hendry: $253,472.64 to 780 employees by 11 employers
Lee: $90,645.94 to 89 employees by 16 employers
