Wage Theft Is A Huge Problem. Trump’s Cuts Could Make It Worse.
HuffPost
Staffing for wage theft enforcement was already at a historic low before DOGE came along, according to a new analysis.
The number of federal investigators combating wage theft has plummeted in recent years and is expected to decline even further under President Donald Trump, according to a new analysis.
Researchers at Rutgers and Northwestern universities found that the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which enforces minimum wage and overtime laws, employs just 611 investigators nationwide. That’s the lowest staffing level since at least 1973, the earliest year for which researchers had reliable data.
The agency now has half the investigators it had in 1978, even though it’s now tasked with safeguarding nearly three times as many employees, the report notes. The meager staffing means there is just one wage-and-hour investigator for every 278,000 workers.
Researchers compared wage theft enforcement to immigration enforcement, finding that the latter receives 15 times the budget of the former.
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“These are serious charges, and that’s the reason we’re going to have special oversight,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.