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FastDOL

Datasets · v2026.05

WHD Wage Theft Enforcement Actions by Employer

Employer-level wage theft enforcement records from the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division — back-wages assessed, employees affected, and case counts joined to OSHA enforcement context.

Published May 2026 · Refreshed May 2026 · Covers 2005–present · 323,514 employers · CC-BY-4.0

Download CSVQuery this data via the FastDOL API →

Also available on: Hugging Face · Kaggle · Zenodo

Methodology

Overview

This dataset is an employer-level rollup of every Wage and Hour Division (WHD) enforcement case in the U.S. Department of Labor's public WHD Compliance Action data, joined to OSHA enforcement context for the same resolved employer entity. The unit of observation is the employer — not the individual case — so each row represents one employer's full federal wage-and-hour footprint.

WHD enforces the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and several immigration-related labor statutes. The "back-wages" column reflects amounts WHD found employers owed to workers; "employees violated" reflects how many workers each case touched.

Data sources

  • U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division — Compliance Action Database (Enforcement Database). Public-records data refreshed at FastDOL on a monthly cadence.
  • U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA — Inspection and Violation Records (Establishment Search / public OIS extracts). Joined for the same resolved employer entity to provide cross-agency context.

Both datasets are public records released by the Department of Labor under the Freedom of Information Act and posted by the agencies in machine-readable form.

Methodology

Raw enforcement records are normalized through FastDOL's employer-resolution pipeline, which assigns a stable cluster identifier (employer_id) to each employer name across federal agencies. This allows WHD case totals and OSHA violation counts to be joined for the same legal entity even when the agencies record the name with slight variations. Corporate-parent resolution uses SEC EDGAR Exhibit 21 subsidiary disclosures and a hand-curated parent override list.

Per-employer aggregates are computed in the FastDOL gold-layer employer_profile_latest table. The backwages_per_employee column is derived as backwages_total / employees_violated and is reported as 0 where the denominator is zero. The osha_violations and osha_penalties columns are joined from federal-OSHA records for the same resolved employer identity to give cross-agency context alongside each WHD row.

Known limitations

  • WHD case identifiers in the public extract are de-identified at the individual-employee level. The "employees violated" count is reported as an aggregate per case; this dataset sums those aggregates per employer.
  • OSHA columns reflect federal-OSHA inspections only. State-plan state enforcement (about half of all U.S. states) is reported separately by each state and is not joined here. State-plan coverage is a known gap.
  • Employer resolution is high-confidence but not perfect. False positives (two distinct employers folded into one cluster) and false negatives (one employer split across two clusters) both occur and are most common for generic LLC names and DBAs.
  • Back-wages amounts reflect what WHD assessed, not what was actually paid. Collection records are not part of the public extract.
  • "0" in whd_cases does not mean an employer had no wage-and-hour issues — only that none reached a WHD enforcement action.

Use cases

  • Journalism and policy research on employers with the largest assessed back-wages, repeat WHD activity, or per-worker recovery patterns.
  • Underwriting and procurement diligence — pairing WHD activity with the same employer's OSHA record yields a more complete labor-compliance signal than either source alone.
  • Academic study of FLSA enforcement patterns by industry, geography, or employer size.
  • Cross-walking WHD activity with corporate-parent disclosures (via the parent_name column) to surface enterprise-level patterns hidden by per-establishment reporting.

Schema

13 columns. Types as serialized in the Parquet file.

ColumnTypeDescription
employer_namestringLegal name of the employer as recorded by WHD.
citystringCity of the establishment associated with the case.
statestringUSPS two-letter state code (includes territories).
zipnumberZIP code of the establishment, stored as float64; nulls preserved.
naics_codenumberNAICS industry classification code, stored as float64; nulls preserved.
naics_descriptionstringHuman-readable NAICS industry description.
parent_namestringResolved corporate parent (FastDOL entity resolution); null when no parent is identified.
whd_casesintegerTotal number of WHD enforcement cases on record for the employer.
backwages_totalnumberTotal back-wages assessed across all WHD cases, in U.S. dollars.
employees_violatedintegerTotal number of employees recorded as affected across all WHD cases.
backwages_per_employeenumberbackwages_total divided by employees_violated; 0 when the denominator is 0.
osha_violationsintegerOSHA violations on record for the same employer (joined for cross-agency context).
osha_penaltiesintegerOSHA penalties assessed against the same employer, in U.S. dollars.

Cite this dataset

Plain text

Turner, Ben (2026). WHD Wage Theft Enforcement Actions by Employer (Version 2026.05) [Data set]. FastDOL. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20031761

BibTeX

@dataset{turner_federalenforcement_2026,
  author    = {Turner, Ben},
  title     = {WHD Wage Theft Enforcement Actions by Employer},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {2026.05},
  publisher = {FastDOL},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20031761},
  url       = {https://www.fastdol.com/datasets/whd-wage-theft-enforcement-actions-by-employer}
}

Changelog

2026.05 — 2026-05-01

  • Initial public release on FastDOL.
  • Mirrored to Hugging Face at FastDOLz/WHD_Wage_Theft_Enforcement_Actions_by_Employer.
  • Source data covers WHD compliance actions from 2005-01-01 through 2026-04-30.
  • OSHA join columns reflect federal-OSHA records as of the same refresh date.

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