In an unlikely team-up, impartial investigators from the Government Accountability Office joined a low-income workers’ advocate at Congressional hearings July 15 to tell lawmakers that President Bush’s Labor Department has failed to enforce minimum wage and overtime laws and that low-wage workers are routinely being robbed of their earnings.

Enforcement of laws that require employers to pay at least the minimum wage and overtime rates has sunk to record lows under the Bush administration, they said.

Investigators for the GAO described for members of the House Education and Labor Committee how the Wage and Hours Division of the Labor Department routinely fails to count complaints, refers workers with legitimate complaints to private lawyers and closes half its cases with perfunctory calls simply requesting employers to settle the matters. Workers lose most of the cases, they said.

Kim Bobo, executive director of the Interfaith Worker Justice program in Chicago, joined GAO investigators at the hearing. Her group operates counseling centers and sponsors activities, including assistance with union organizing, for low income workers around the country. “The wage and hour division is so understaffed,” she said, “that it is actually now doing fewer investigations of wage and hour complaints than it did in 1941, the year it was founded. Wages are simply being stolen.”