When the Labor Department ruled last week that 674 workers in the cafeteria of the United States Senate had been denied their full pay in recent years, the contractor that runs the cafeteria said it was an accident. The workers said it was deliberate.

The Labor Department, which didn’t rule on motive, has ordered the contractor, Restaurant Associates, and a subcontractor, Personnel Plus, to pay the workers over $1 million, about $1,500 per worker on average. But the story should not end there.

The Senate cafeteria workers won attention and redress in large part because they alerted senators, whom they see daily, to their plight. Meanwhile, other food servers, maintenance workers and salespeople who work for contractors at Union Station, the Smithsonian and other federal sites in Washington continue to protest regularly over poverty-level pay and subpar conditions.

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