Housekeeper cleaning a hotel room. Credit: Adobe

As higher grocery and retail prices leave many families feeling cash-strapped ahead of the holidays — with the worst yet potentially to come under President-elect Trump’s proposed tariffs — the Biden administration’s labor cops are asking workers in Florida who were underpaid or unpaid by their employers to claim money they are lawfully owed.

No, this is not a scam. The feds recover unpaid wages for workers while the state sits on its hands.

As of Nov. 1, the U.S. Department of Labor is holding onto roughly $4.7 million in back-wages for 7,484 workers in Florida who were either underpaid or unpaid in violation of federal wage and hour laws over the last three to five years. This includes 428 workers in Orange County alone who are owed nearly $400,000 in unpaid wages altogether.

According to Les Rodriguez, assistant division director of the federal Wage and Hour Division in Central Florida, workers in the restaurant, service, construction, and agricultural industries in Florida are disproportionately represented.

“[In] Florida, we are known for hospitality,” Rodriguez explained. “That’s where most of our violations are found.”

Notably, the same goes for violations of child labor law — which industry groups enthusiastically (and successfully) urged Florida lawmakers to weaken earlier this year.

Unpaid wages are collected by federal investigators in the Wage and Hour Division following investigations into an employer’s pay practices. Investigations generally stem from complaints filed with their department, alleging an employer has either underpaid or failed to pay them in compliance with federal law, including overtime and minimum wage requirements. Complaints are confidential, and employers can face repercussions if they retaliate against workers who file them.

If the feds identify violations, employers are legally required to directly pay employees themselves, and to provide proof of payment to the Wage and Hour Division. If they are unable to locate employees who have since left the job, they provide the division with the money owed, which the division holds onto as staff work to locate the employees and provide the money they’re lawfully entitled to.

The problem, Rodriguez explained, is that “in many instances, the workers may be transient, especially if they are in an industry that is common for them to move.”

So what do they do? According to Rodriguez, the division will ask the employer for employees’ contact information (including email, phone, and addresses), use government databases, and sometimes even ask former coworkers or friends to try and find a way to reach employees. “We use any database that we may have at our disposal to find them,” Rodriguez stressed.

“The back wages that we collect belong to the worker,” she added. “We hold those funds for them, to locate them for up to three years.” After that, any remaining funds are deposited into the U.S. Treasury.

For Rodriguez, the importance of their job — investigating complaints, recovering wages for workers cheated of pay, and ensuring workers actually receive the money they’re owed — can’t be overstated. “It could mean the possibility of someone having electricity today or not having electricity today,” she shared, candidly. “The efforts that we do are immense, with the resources that we have.”

You can check if you’re owed wages by visiting Workers Owed Wages (a tool available in English and Spanish). From there, you can search for your current/former employer to see if you are owed money that they should have paid you in the first place.

You can also reach the department by phone at 1-866-487-9243.

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Picking up the slack

Federal investigators don’t receive much help from the state on this issue. While most states in the U.S. have their own state divisions, agencies, or departments to enforce wage laws for their residents, Florida notably does not.

The only state official authorized to investigate allegations of minimum wage violations in Florida is the State Attorney General — currently Republican Ashley Moody — and as Orlando Weekly has extensively reported, there’s little to no evidence this actually happens.

As of September, the Attorney General’s office told Orlando Weekly they had received just nine complaints of minimum wage violations for all of 2024 — despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of minimum wage earners in Florida, and historically, up to 25 percent of them have reported being paid less than the bare minimum.

Four of the nine cases the AG’s office received this year had already been closed, a spokesperson confirmed, and five were under active review.

“There are no enforcement actions for violations relating to the allegations in these complaints at this time; however, we have escalated eight of the complaints to the business,” Kylie Mason, communications director for the AG’s office, told Orlando Weekly in an email.

You could say it’s a pattern.

A 2022 research article published in the University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy states that Florida has taken no formal action to enforce Florida’s minimum wage since 2004, the same year that Florida residents voted to first establish a state minimum wage separate from the federal wage floor.

Outside the Attorney General’s Office, there is no state entity authorized to investigate allegations of overtime violations, misclassification, or other forms of wage theft in Florida, and state legislators have shown no appetite in recent memory for addressing the issue.

In the absence of state action, some local governments in Florida (including Osceola County) have created their own wage recovery programs. The feds also work with community-based organizations like the Farmworker Association, the Ironworkers Local 808 labor union, and the Mexican Consulate to identify occurrences of wage theft on-the-ground in local communities.

But they face an uncertain road ahead. During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the number of federal investigators in the U.S. Wage and Hour Division took a nosedive, dropping from 912 investigators in 2017 to a near-record-low 780 investigators in 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While that number rose slightly the following year, staffing levels declined again during the Biden administration, with the division staffing just 730 investigators as of last December.

The department nonetheless recovered more than $273 million in back wages and damages for nearly 152,000 workers nationwide this last fiscal year. In Florida alone, the department recovered $16.8 million in back-wages  and damages for more than 11,000 workers, including a motel housekeeper in Florida, deli workers in North Miami Beach, and ambulance workers in Lake City, among others.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, tapped by Trump to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, has seen his own companies investigated for wage violations before, and will be teaming up with biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to potentially oversee a mass firing of federal employees. Their plan would likely result in court battles, but Trump’s team appears prepared to test these legal boundaries even so, Politico’s E&E News reports.

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This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.

General news reporter for Orlando Weekly, with a focus on state and local government and workers' rights. You can find her bylines in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, In These Times, and Facing South.