Wage and Hour Staff Crunch May Hinder DOL Child Labor Crackdown

An effort by the Biden administration to target a growing number of child labor violations is being weighed down by long-term staffing woes at the agency in charge of investigating such cases.

Since November, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour division lost 16 more investigators, leaving the agency with 794 to police more than 9.8 million workplaces across the US.

One current and one former official, as well as a former staffer at the division, say investigators are so mired in a backlog of cases because of a years-long struggle to retain employees that the agency may not ...