DOL’s Su Plans Focused Enforcement Approach Amid Budget Woes

Facing budget caps and Congressional roadblocks, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su plans to do more with less and use the agency’s enforcement funding and staff in a more calculated and targeted approach.

Factors like an employer’s history with compliance, geography, and industry will be part of the consideration, she said. The US Labor Department under the Biden administration has focused its work towards the most vulnerable workers in areas of the country where labor rights are the weakest, like the South.

“I don’t think we have to inspect every employer,” Su said in an exclusive interview. “If employers are doing what they should be doing, they’re following the law, we shouldn’t inspect them. It’s bad for government. It’s bad for the employer. It’s even bad for workers.”

After talking about the importance of equity in the green energy transition to nearly three dozen people packed into a brewery in Grand Rapids, Mich., Su sat down with Bloomberg Law to discuss how the US Labor Department plans to maintain its enforcement work despite new spending cuts. The caps were enacted as part of debt-limit bill last year that has forced the agency to ask Congress for less cash and investigative staff.

“It can’t just be a numbers game, it can’t be about ‘we do as many inspections as possible.’ That’s not my approach,” said Su, who before joining the Biden administration served as California’s labor secretary. Being strategic about enforcement “is the name of the game” she added. “Especially with limited resources.”

Su’s more intentional strategy comes as DOL enforcement agencies are working to reverse high turnover among investigators while at the same time grappling with new demands, like containing a surge in illegal child labor and mitigating potential artificial intelligence risks to workers.

Policy changes and strict enforcement of federal labor law from the DOL have also been a key part of President Joe Biden’s branding as the most “pro-labor” president in modern history.

As part of that agenda, Su also discussed plans to scale up worker training programs in emerging sectors, while also ensuring workers don’t face negative consequences from technological advances, like artificial intelligence.

Targeted Enforcement

The Wage and Hour Division, the DOL arm charged with enforcing minimum wage, overtime, and child labor laws, along with several other statutes, currently has just over 720 investigators on board to oversee roughly 10 million workplaces, one of the lowest levels in 50 years, according to the agency’s fiscal 2025 budget request.

And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the subagency that oversees workplace safety rules, lost 14 inspectors in FY 2023 in a nearly 2% decline from the previous year.

“So that means that every investigation we do we want it to have a real impact,” Su said. “I want to not just put wages in those workers’ pockets, but make them more able to defend their rights in the workplace, even after we’re gone.”

Su cautioned that employers should still be on alert, however. Just because the DOL isn’t able to be in every workplace, doesn’t mean the agency’s work will be less effective, she said.

“We want to have a ripple effect,” Su said. “So the other employers in a certain geographical region or in a certain industry see that it is costly to break the law, the consequences of getting caught are real.”

That approach has led to some agency success with enforcement initiatives targeted at child labor and in the South.

Throughout fiscal 2023, DOL investigators discovered nearly 6,000 minors working in illegal conditions across the US, a nearly 50% jump from the prior year that the agency attributed to its aggressive enforcement work.

And a DOL strikeforce deployed to the Mississippi Delta in 2022 uncovered that 11 companies there were discriminating against Black US workers in violation of the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program.

Infrastructure Training

In the past year since she became acting leader of the agency, Su has hit the road to tout the department’s work at the center of two important Biden initiatives: Jobs and climate change.

Earlier in the week, from a United Auto Workers hall in Lansing, Su announced that the administration was releasing a new battery manufacturing training model to complement the infrastructure and green energy projects fueled by tax credits, grant funding, and other incentives included in several major laws signed by President Biden throughout his term.

The goal of the model is to give employers the standards they need to quickly scale up apprenticeships in the emerging field, and receive expedited approval from the DOL’s training administration, which helps administer the agency’s registered apprenticeship system. The administration will pick six training sponsors to pilot the model before employers, unions, and other training providers can start using the guidelines to launch their own programs.

Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su speaks about job training in the green energy sector at an event in Lansing, Mich., on March 26, 2024. (Photo by Rebecca Rainey/Bloomberg Law)

Photographer: Rebecca Rainey/Bloomberg Law

“We want to signal to the field that we’re paying attention here. And we believe that the battery jobs can be good jobs, with real standards, and apprenticeship programs,” Su said. “I don’t want to make a promise on these particular programs, but we have been really working to expedite approval of apprenticeships, it doesn’t make sense if employer wants to do it, and it takes forever.”

Su pointed to an early effort from the administration to bolster job training programs in trucking as supply chain issues snarled the economy in 2021. The pilot effort ultimately reduced the time to get a trucking apprenticeship approved by the DOL from months to as little as 48 hours, Su said.

“So we know what’s possible. Now that we’ve got these standards, we have to pilot them, we have to see how they work. And then continue to refine them,” she said.

Artificial Intelligence

As the DOL works to prepare the future green energy and manufacturing workforce, the agency is also weighing policies to ensure new and emerging technology doesn’t disadvantage workers.

“My position is no AI is responsible or secure if it doesn’t do right by workers,” Su said of the strategy the agency is taking to deliver on Biden’s October executive order on artificial intelligence.

Biden directed the DOL specifically to release guidelines by April covering best practices for employers to mitigate job-displacement and data collection risks to workers from AI, guidance that Su says is “soon to come.”

However, the agency isn’t just viewing AI through the lens of protecting workers, but also how the technology can make workers safer on the job, ensure they’re paid accurately, and connect them to training programs and “good jobs.”

And while the acting secretary says there’s concerns about whether AI could take jobs away from workers, massive job loss caused by adopting the technology is “not a given.”

“I think there’s going to be choices we make to determine whether there’s massive job loss or not. But I think it’s safe to say there will be job changes,” Su said. “So we’re looking at what are those job changes? What new opportunities are being created? And therefore, how do we think about trying to address transition from workers in some jobs to those jobs?”