"People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

 —George Orwell

Since the COVID-19 era, I have been teaching virtual webinars on various wage and hour topics. As part of that process to insure active attendance and credentialing credit, the seminar sponsor periodically surveys the class by asking some polling questions. One of my go to polling questions is how many investigators does the Wage & Hour Division (WHD) of the US Department of Labor (DOL) employ? I give the attendees four choices ranging from over 1,000 to about 700.

Of course, like many subjects, the numbers change and over the years I have been forced to admit that I don’t know exactly how many WHD investigators are at work at any time. But a snapshot in time answer just recently surfaced. The number of investigators employed by WHD has fluctuated over the years. After the enactment of the stimulus bill in the Obama Administration, and the resultant increase in public works programs, the number of investigators was expanded to over 1,000. But since that time there has been a slow attrition, down to just over 720 investigators today.

The other day Bloomberg sagely reported that:

The White House budget blueprint released last week—which is typically a wishlist that never resembles the agency’s final appropriation—requested 187 new full time staff at the wage division for FY 2025, less than half of the enforcement staff sought in the agency’s budget request for FY 2024.

The request noted that “over the last decade, WHD enforcement capacity has decreased from more than 1,000 on-board investigators to just over 720 investigators—one of the lowest levels in fifty years.”

In the proposed budget for fiscal 2024, the DOL requested 389 new full-time employees for enforcement purposes at the wage division. The agency had roughly 810 investigative staff on board before it made that request last March.

Punching In: Senators Weigh Whether AI Can Shorten the Workweek (bloomberglaw.com). Bloomberg went on to note the knee-capping of the WHD enforcement efforts.  

Notwithstanding the diminished funding request made by the Biden Administration, the budgetary reality, of course, is much leaner. The Republican party dogma is to starve the beast, and just like the case at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the party wants to constrain the enforcement efforts related to wage laws. The Republicans feel it is important to get the Government regulators off the backs of the people.

In an era of relatively low taxes and large military assistance needs, just maintaining existing domestic funding is a challenge. We the people lack the will to either tax ourselves for our public service needs or to cut away the government services we don’t want to pay for. The result is deficit funding, higher interest rates, and paralysis. As I said before, there is no free lunch. At least through the current budget cycle, however, it is clear that WHD is likely not getting any more investigators, and they remain fortunate to hold on to what they have, albeit eroded by the very inflation that they are a contributing cause of.

Personally, I come down on the side of sufficiently funding DOL to do its job. The investigators perform a public service, helping both compliant employers avoid unfair competition, and labor to collect wages and benefits required by law. To starve WHD of resources, and rely on overworking the existing staff, is to reward those employers who refuse to play by the rules. Sure, one can complain about the one-sided nature of some of the wage rules, but that is no reason to offer refuge to those who would exploit children and unskilled labor. If you are going to have a rule-based economy, and not a capitalist free for all with survival of the fittest, then you need an enforcer. And WHD is the enforcement tool and it needs to be adequately funded.

Of course, to a certain extent, I am just talking my own book, since I make my living in part on helping employers deal with DOL investigations. The more investigators, the more work they create for lawyers.  So perhaps it isn’t surprising that I come down on the side of reasonable funding and adequate enforcement of the laws. But there is also a principled position here -- to allow bad apples to skirt child labor laws and violate minimum wage and overtime laws with impunity, undermines the civil society and rewards law breakers. Better that we adequately fund the wage police rather than defund our enforcement efforts.