Progress Illinois

Next Thursday, America's federal minimum wage will jump 70 cents to a total of $6.85 per hour. This boost is encouraging, especially after the wage remained at $5.15 for over nine years before the Democratic Congress initiated a raise in late 2006. But it's still well below what many consider a living wage.

According to the Living Wage Calculator, a Chicago adult working full-time as the sole provider of one child would need to earn $12.51 per hour to care for the family adequately. And two new reports released this week by the Government Accountability Office show that many minimum-wage earners have difficulty even obtaining all they are owed:

The Government Accountability Office sharply criticizes the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department in two reports to be issued on Tuesday, saying it mishandled many overtime and minimum-wage complaints and delayed investigating hundreds of cases for a year or more.

The G.A.O. also criticizes the division for greatly reducing the number of enforcement actions it takes each year and for not focusing on the low-wage industries where, one report said, it is most likely to find violations. [...]

The G.A.O., which will release its reports at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee, also faulted the wage division for reducing the number of enforcement actions it pursues each year to 29,584 in the 2007 fiscal year, down 37 percent from 46,758 10 years earlier.

The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the problem of wage theft. Testifying was Kim Bobo, the executive director of Chicago's Interfaith Worker Justice, an organization that mobilizes religious communities to improve wages, benefits, and working conditions for low-wage workers. Bobo, whose book on wage theft is set to be published this fall, says two million workers are paid less than the minimum wage, three million are mis-classified as independent contractors instead of employees, and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. You can watch her testimony here.

(H/T TPMCafe)