Salary theft is a big problem. Trump will get worse.

The number of federal researchers who combine wages theft has collapsed in recent years and is expected to decrease even more under President Donald Trump, according to a new analysis.

Rutgers researchers and Northwest universities discovered that the Division of Salaries and Hours of the Department of Labor, which enforces the minimum salary laws and overtime, uses only 611 researchers throughout the country. That is the lowest personnel level since at least 1973, the first year for which the researchers had reliable data.

The agency now has half of the researchers in 1978, although it now has the task of safeguarding almost three times more employees, the report points out. The scarce personnel means that there is only one salary and hours researcher for every 278,000 workers.

The researchers compared the application of wages theft with the application of immigration, discovering that the latter receives the budget of the first 15 times.

“If we really want to help US workers, we should prioritize the application of labor standards, not mass deportations,” they concluded.

Labor groups and workers’ defenders have complained for a long time that insufficient resources are assigned to combat salary theft and security risks in the workplace.

Like the Division of Salaries and Hours, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has little personal in relation to the number of workplaces it supervises. A recent report from the AFL-CIO Labor Federation found that Osha would be needed 185 years Investigate each workplace in the USA. According to current personnel levels.

All probability, the labor is reduced even lower Trump and its government efficiency department, which was directed by billionaire Elon Musk.

Via News

The Trump administration has tried to fire tens of thousands of test employees and has pushed many others to early retirement through their Deferred resignation program. Bloomberg Law reported That 20% of employees of the Labor Department had chosen to give up their positions and receive payment until September.

The researchers pointed out that their figure of 611 salary and hours researchers would not include those who accepted the renunciation offer, so the real number is probably lower.

Meanwhile, federal agencies also face more cuts through Trump Imminent plans of “Force Reduction”whose details should become clearer in the coming weeks. While unions are challenging those plans as an illegal ending throughout Congress, any additional dismissal means that those who remain will end up doing more work with less resources.

A smaller staff in the salary and hours division could mean less recovered money for workers who got rigid in their payment checks. The agency says it recovered $ 273 million in subsequent salaries and sanctions on behalf of 152,000 workers last year.

It could also mean more child labor violations. The salary and hours division is responsible for ensuring that companies do not use children below the legal work age. The agency saw a significant increase in cases following the pandemic, since meat and other companies hired migrant children from Latin America to perform dangerous tasks.