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.
“If we really want to help U.S. workers, we should prioritize labor standards enforcement, not mass deportations,” they concluded.
Labor groups and worker advocates have long complained that insufficient resources are allocated to combating wage theft and workplace safety hazards.
Like the Wage and Hour Division, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is perpetually understaffed relative to the number of workplaces it oversees. A recent report from the AFL-CIO labor federation found that it would take OSHA 185 years to investigate every workplace in the U.S. under current staffing levels.
In all likelihood, the manpower is shrinking even further under Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, which was led by the billionaire Elon Musk.
The Trump administration has tried to fire tens of thousands of probationary employees and pushed many others into early retirement through its deferred resignation program. Bloomberg Law reported that 20% of the Labor Department employees had opted to resign their positions and receive payment through September.
The researchers noted that their figure of 611 wage-and-hour investigators would not include those who accepted the resignation offer, so the actual number is likely smaller.
Meanwhile, federal agencies are also facing more cuts through Trump’s looming “reduction-in-force” plans, the details of which should become clearer in the coming weeks. While unions are challenging those plans as an illegal end-run around Congress, any further layoffs mean those who remain will end up doing more work with fewer resources.
A smaller staff in the Wage and Hour Division could mean less money recouped for workers who got stiffed on their paychecks. The agency says it recovered $273 million in back wages and penalties on behalf of 152,000 workers last year.
It could also mean more child labor violations. The Wage and Hour Division is responsible for ensuring that firms aren’t employing children below the legal working age. The agency saw a significant rise in cases in the wake of the pandemic, as meatpackers and other companies hired migrant children from Latin America to perform dangerous tasks.