A new joint report by Rutgers and Northwestern universities found that the staffing levels at the federal labor offices handling minimum wage and overtime laws are at their lowest levels in decades, which the authors of the study said open the door to wage theft and other workplace abuses.
The staffing decline is nothing new — the numbers have been declining since 2000 to reach their lowest levels since the 1970s, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank based in Washington.
But advocates say it’s a problem that could only worsen under the administration of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has enacted mass layoffs of federal workers.
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About 20% of workers at the federal labor department have taken up resignation offers, or 2,700 workers in the nearly 15,000-person agency, Bloomberg Law reported.
“When government is starved of enforcement resources, it is too easy for unscrupulous employers to commit flagrant violations of labor and employment laws," one of the study’s authors, Janice Fine, director of the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, said in a statement.
"Scapegoating immigrant workers won't solve the underlying problem,” Fine said.
Northwestern University and Rutgers reported in a...
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