Back Wages Totaling More Than $5M Owed to Thousands of Illinois Worke…

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The U.S. Department of Labor is currently holding more than $5 million in wages owed to more than 7,000 Illinois workers, and the department has launched a new website in an effort to return it.

When an employee is underpaid for the work they do, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division can launch an investigation. If it finds that the employee is owed money, known as back pay, the department collects the unpaid wages and attempts to distribute it to the employee. 

The new Workers Owed Wages website attempts to connect workers with potential unclaimed back pay.

“As you can imagine, sometimes the workers have moved or their addresses aren’t known and therefore, those are the workers, we term unlocatables, that we search for based on the best information we can. But sometimes we are unable to locate them,” said Tom Gauza, district director of the U.S. Department of Labor. 

The Department of Labor can only hold employees’ back pay for three years. After…