Pay for Phila.-area landscape workers to be monitored

The Philadelphia district office of the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division says it will be checking to make sure local landscapers are properly paying their employees.

The local effort, led by director Stewart Bostic, is included in a national compliance initiative aimed at enforcing child labor, overtime, minimum wage and record-keeping laws.

As of May 2007, the district's most recent year for statistics, there were 12,620 landscaping and groundskeeping workers in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware Counties.

Of the companies investigated by the local office in the last five years, only 25 percent were in compliance with wage laws.

A total of $152,992 in back wages was found to be due to 139 employees, for an average of $1,101 per employee, the office said.    - Jane M. Von Bergen