With 4.5 million employees quitting their jobs and one of the lowest job participation rates in decades, employers are struggling to fill the over 10 million open jobs reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month. Yet, two stealth developments at the Department of Labor are poised to make that struggle even worse.
First, on Jan. 4, President Biden renominated David Weil to serve as administrator of the wage and hour division, the agency responsible for enforcing the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Weil previously served in this position during the Obama administration and was nominated to reprise that performance in June 2021. His nomination stalled in the Senate, having failed to be voted favorably out of committee, but it’s now getting a do-over, with the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee again considering Weil’s nomination.
Second, the Labor Department quietly posted its enforcement statistics for the first year of the Biden administration. Last year, it recovered just $234.3 million in back wages. That is a decline of $23.5 million from 2020, when many businesses and Labor Department offices were closed due to the pandemic, and a decline of $98.2 million from the Trump administration’s record year in 2019. Weil fared no better during his previous tenure, as his high was $266.5 million in 2016 — less than every year in the Trump administration, including the lost year of 2020.
This poor...
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