As pinko commies it is our duty to share with you the latest socialist blastfax from the New York Times about the evil and terrible Elaine Chao and how she has screwed up the Department of Labor for ever and ever:

The federal agency charged with enforcing minimum wage, overtime and many other labor laws is failing in that role, leaving millions of workers vulnerable, Congressional auditors have found.

In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office found that the agency, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers.

In one case, the division failed to investigate a complaint that under-age children in Modesto, Calif., were working during school hours at a meatpacking plant with dangerous machinery, the G.A.O., the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress, found.

-SNIP-

The accountability office also investigated hundreds of cases that it said the Wage and Hour Division had mishandled. In one, the division waited 22 months to investigate a complaint from a group of restaurant workers. Ultimately, investigators found that the workers were owed $230,000 because managers had made them work off the clock and had misappropriated tips. When the restaurant agreed to pay back wages but not the tips, investigators simply closed the case.

In another case, the accountability office found that workers at a boarding school in Montana were not paid more than $200,000 in overtime. But when the employer offered to pay only $1,000 in back wages as the two-year statute of limitations approached, the division dropped the case.

“We have a crisis in wage theft, and the Department of Labor has not been aggressive enough in recent years,” said Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a group that advocates for low-wage workers. “The new secretary of labor says she’s the new sheriff in town, but I’m concerned she’s facing the wild, wild West of wage theft.”

-SNIP-

Elaine L. Chao, often defended the Wage and Hour Division, saying it had concentrated on larger, tougher cases, and secured back wages for more than 300,000 workers a year and collected more than twice as much annually as the division had done in the final years of the Clinton administration.

The report concluded that the Wage and Hour Division had mishandled more serious cases 19 percent of the time. In such cases, the accountability office said, the division did not begin an investigation for six months, did not complete an investigation for a year, did not assess back wages when violations were clearly identified and did not refer cases to litigation when warranted.

Click here to read the rest.

Yay America and Elaine Chao for being awesome.