“Furthermore, the agents and investigators at labor agencies who actually police the labor market, who are a subset of the total personnel employed, have seen their workloads reach unrealistic levels because hiring has failed to keep up. As a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy and EPI highlights, the number of workers that each Wage and Hour Division investigator at DOL was responsible for in 1978 was just over 69,000. By 2018, that had more than doubled, to 175,000 workers per investigator on average. It’s a similar story at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): there were just over 60,000 workers for every OSHA compliance officer in 1978; the number in 2018 had roughly tripled to nearly 180,000.

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