The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on Tuesday, July 15 to examine the U.S. Department of Labor's record of enforcing the nation's wage and hour laws. The Government Accountability Office highlighted the results of two separate investigations requested by the chairman of the committee, U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), into the Labor Department’s failures to fully investigate and properly address violations of the law.

Seventy years ago last month, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act into law. The law has provided generations of Americans with basic rights to minimum wages, overtime pay, and a ban on oppressive child labor. However, critics say that the Bush administration has failed to protect workers from a growing problem of "wage theft" by adopting weak approaches to enforcement and reducing funding and staffing levels of the Wage and Hour Division, the agency responsible for investigating complaints of wage, hour, and child labor violations.