The Department of Labor has recently implemented an online program aimed at distributing money that belongs to workers who may, or may not, know they’ve earned it.
The Wage and Hour division of the U.S. Labor Department is currently holding over $1 million in back wages in Virginia that they say belongs to 2,800 workers throughout the state. Mary Doughty is the Director of Operations for the division, she says that money is left behind for a variety of reasons:
“They could have not been paid proper overtime by their employer for hours worked – over 40 in a week. Or, they weren’t paid a minimum wage for all of the hours they would have worked.”
So the Wage and Hour division has recently launched a website that allows workers to search by name and location to see if they have some extra cash with their name on it.
“It’s our priority to collect these back wages and get them into the employee’s hands who earn them, and this is one of the new ways we’ve launched to try to locate what we call ‘unlocated’ employees.”
Those unlocated Employees include harder-to-track transient or seasonal workers. The website, called Wages Owed Workers, or WOW, is available in English and Spanish through the Department of Labor’s page.
