House GOP’s Proposed Budget Would Gut Labor Enforcement

On June 26, House Republicans released a Labor–Health and Human Services (HHS) budget that, if enacted, would gut the U.S. Department of Labor’s ability to enforce the labor laws that guarantee basic rights and protections for workers nationwide.

The heart of this proposal is a devastating 23 percent cut for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) from the previous fiscal year. Congress must reject these cuts, which would jeopardize the enforcement of labor rights for all workers, but especially Black people and people of color— including immigrants, disabled workers, and children that are vulnerable to child labor exploitation.

Instead, Congress should look to the Biden administration’s FY2025 budget request for DOL’s worker protection agencies, which requested an investment of $2.0 billion in discretionary resources—an increase of $121 million over the FY2023-enacted level—as a minimum baseline.

Starved for Resources But Facing Growing Need

The agencies and programs tasked with protecting the health and safety of workers and enforcing our foundational labor rights—like the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division—have been operating with anemic and flat funding levels for many years. This has resulted in severe understaffing and underfunding of programs at a time of ever-growing need.

• The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division had only 733 investigators at the end of 2023. This is nearly 500 fewer investigators than the Division had at its peak in 1978.
• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), responsible for workplace safety and health, is also starved for resources: in 2019, it would have taken OSHA 162 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once.

The agencies and programs tasked with protecting workers’ rights are facing severe understaffing and underfunding at a time of ever-growing need.

Child Labor Violations on the Rise

Over the past decade, child labor law violations have tripled by some accounts. Since 2019, the DOL has reported a staggering 88 percent increase in child labor law violations. In FY2023, the Wage and Hour division of DOL was able to close 955 cases with child labor violations and found that 5,800 children were employed in violation of child labor laws in FY2023.

One such investigation came after a 16-year-old child lost both legs at a construction site in Vancouver, Washington while operating dangerous machinery. That employer was shown to have repeatedly put minors in harm’s way by allowing them to use or work perilously close to heavy machinery. Alarmingly, despite the rise in children being exploited for cheap illegal labor, many state legislatures across the country are taking steps to weaken child labor laws. This makes the DOL’s ability to enforce federal labor laws all the more critical and proposed House Republican cuts all the more dangerous and irresponsible.

Wage Theft Epidemic

Every year, corporations cheat their workers out of billions of dollars of unpaid wages, wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and law-abiding businesses. Wage theft is most often found in industries with high concentrations of low-paid jobs where workers live paycheck to paycheck and fear retaliation.

Many workers in these labor-intensive jobs get employment via temp and staffing agencies that are used by some companies to evade workplace accountability. A stunning 24 percent of workers in the temp industry say they have had their wages stolen from them by their employers, according to a 2022 survey that examines cycles of poverty and precarity for the temp industry’s disproportionately Black and Brown workers.

Without the resources to properly enforce wage laws, bad employers are incentivized to continue their illegal practices.

Hazardous Working Conditions

Distressingly, at least 345 workers are killed every day because of unsafe and hazardous working conditions, with Black and Latino workers more likely to die on the job. Of those workers killed on the job, approximately 60 percent are immigrants.

The monetary costs of injuries and illnesses on the job are massive, estimated to be between $174 and $348 billion each year, and is an undercount of the real and far-reaching impacts to workers, families, and communities when workers are put in harm’s way.

Although the Biden administration has tried to increase enforcement, OSHA’s resources only allow for around one inspector for every 80,014 workers. This translates to just 1,875 inspectors tasked with inspecting 11.5 million workplaces under OSHA’s jurisdiction.

Need to Invest in DOL Solicitor’s Office

Despite the ongoing need for more robust investment in labor enforcement, the DOL’s Wage and Hour division successfully recovered over $274 million in back wages and damages for more than 163,000 workers across industries nationwide in 2023.

None of this would be possible without the DOL Solicitor’s Office (SOL), which is solely charged with bringing labor law enforcement actions on behalf of DOL’s agencies. The SOL functions as the lynchpin of federal enforcement efforts, and like OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division, is hampered by thin staffing and inadequate funding. Congress should support this critical enforcement and investigative work by adopting the Biden administration’s FY2024 proposal of increasing SOL funding by $15 million.

Oppose Funding Cuts, Invest in DOL’s Mission

NELP strongly urges Congress to oppose funding cuts to the DOL, worker protection agencies, and the DOL Solicitor’s Office and to firmly reject all harmful policy riders that are bad for workers and simply have no place in appropriations bills. We urge Congress to instead make much needed investments to the DOL so that it can continue to fulfill its core mission of improving workplace conditions and enforcing labor rights for workers. Please call your members of Congress and ask them to support robust funding for the Department of Labor and the Solicitor’s Office.