With federal law requiring domestic workers in American Samoa to be paid at least the minimum wage, a federal labor investigator is working on getting the word out to the local community to ensure full compliance by employers, who are usually private home owners.

“Domestic workers being entitled to get paid in accordance with federal labor law is very new to a lot of us in the territory and it’s something that I am trying to get more information on from the federal government,” said a private homeowner, who asked not be identified by name, but who has two “domestic workers” at his home. He said, “I never knew this requirement.”

The homeowner says he has spoken to others in the community who are also surprised to learn that domestic workers are subject to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

Federal law requiring domestic workers to be paid at least the minimum wage only surfaced earlier this year, when the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) set up a local office.

In a February report to the federal Interagency Group on Insular Areas, WHD said it will continue to “educate the American Samoa community that all live-in domestic workers — foreign national and local — are entitled to... minimum wage [by law].”

And this message is being stressed by the local WHD investigator Siriporn Poondee as she reaches out to employers and employees who are not aware that domestic workers are entitled to minimum wage pay.

Individuals considered domestic workers include housekeepers, gardeners, cooks, maids or any person that does manual labor, she said.

“Anybody that performs work in a private home is entitled to minimum wage as well as overtime,” Poondee said. “However, a live-in domestic worker is not entitled to overtime under federal law.”

There have been reports of domestic workers — including live in workers — getting a flat weekly rate of between $30 to $50, while others receive only food as part of their compensation for living with a family (which is usually a Samoan family.)

“Again I stress that domestic workers are entitled to the minimum wage for all the hours they work. If the person is paid only $20 then we have to look at the number of hours worked,” was Poondee’s reply. “We need to see the records of the number of hours that the home owner, or employer, has kept, to show to us that the $20 for the week was sufficient.”

Samoa News notes the minimum wage for domestic labour falls under the Miscellaneous Activities Category: at $4.20 per hour.

OTHER ISSUES

On the issue of filing an employee complaint, she said the process is “confidential if you want to file a complaint, but we will need your name and the name remains confidential in the course of an investigation."

She emphasized that WHD conducts an investigation with the overall objective to ensure compliance with the federal labor law.

Poondee went on to point out that any employer or business owner can contact her for information regarding minimum wage. “Call me for publication or clarification on any particular area of the law, to see if you calculate the overtime, or minimum wage correctly applied, without identifying which company you’re calling from,” she said.

“Right now the Department of Labor is working with community leaders to try to reach out to business owners to set up a workshop” on complying with federal labor law, the DOL official said.

“Again our overall goal is that we want to make sure that employees, or workers, understand their rights under the [federal] Fair Labor Standards Act,” she said. “And employers, at the same time, we want to educate them on things that they need to know about.”

The next minimum wage increase for American Samoa, which is the only U.S. jurisdiction with 18 different industry and minimum wage levels, goes into effect Sept. 30, 2015.

USDOL provides full details of labor laws and local minimum wage posted on (www.dol.gov/whd/).

Poondee can be reached at 254-4585.