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Last year, Washington's Department of Labor and Industries investigated nearly 8,000 wage theft complaints.

For a third of those, the agency found workers were owed money.

And when that happens, companies get a chance to settle paying back wages plus interest.

Most of the time, that's exactly what they do.

About three quarters of the cases wrap up that way.

What doesn't happen in those settlements is a requirement that the company pay penalties.

Ford oversees Seattle University's Workers Rights Clinic, which offers free consultations to low wage workers.

Employers don't get a strong signal that something bad will happen to them if they fail to comply with the law.

There isn't a strong incentive against breaking the law in the future.

The job of enforcing wage laws falls almost entirely to agencies like L&I because payouts are often too low to justify hiring a lawyer.

Ford says the sheer scale of wage theft pushes agencies like L&I towards clearing cases quickly.

So in order to manage the sort of massive need for enforcement of wage theft, agencies like Labor and Industries are triaging.

When they do that,they are sacrificing deterrents, which makes their job only harder because it means that there might be more cases of wage theft in the future.

An L&I spokesperson told us, the Wage Payment Act waives penalties when an employer pays the worker what they are owed, unless they are a repeat offender.

With the law being structured to motivate employers to pay quickly.

I'm Paris Jackson.

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