Watchdog: Labor Department Falling Down On Enforcing COVID-19 Sick Leave Law
At a time when workers around the country are increasingly desperate to hang on to their jobs, the Department of Labor, led by Eugene Scalia, is failing to enforce the benefits and protections they’re entitled to at work.
The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division has not done enough to raise awareness of ― or enforce ― a new paid sick leave law passed to deal with COVID-19, according to a report from the department’s Office of the Inspector General released publicly Tuesday.
The watchdog report, which was issued internally on Aug. 7, also seems to side with a recent court ruling that found the Labor Department left out too many workers when it wrote the rules around the paid sick leave law. And, the report says, the department is also doing less than usual to enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act, which covers minimum wage and overtime laws.
Part of the issue is that investigators at the Labor Department are working remotely and not able to go out into the field and inspect workplaces, according to the report. Before the pandemic, the Wage and Hour Division would investigate more than half of the complaints it got on overtime pay and minimum wage laws “on-site,” meaning investigators would visit workplaces. Now, only about 19% of such complaints are given this kind of attention.
But there are other problems: The department has not put together any kind of plan for how to deal with these limitations, for starters.
“The pandemic cannot be an excuse for lax enforcement of wage and hour laws or harm to workers,” said Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank New America, who calls the report a “wake-up call.”
The report is particularly critical of the way the department has implemented the new paid sick leave law, passed in March as part of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.
Under that law, workers at companies with fewer than 500 employees are entitled to two weeks of fully paid sick leave, up to $511...
