WHD Wage Theft Enforcement Actions by Employer

WHD Wage Theft Enforcement Actions by Employer What does federal wage theft enforcement actually look like in aggregate? This dataset answers that question with 323,514 US employers, $4.6 billion in total back wages owed, and 5.2 million affected employees from the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) enforcement records. What's in the data Each row represents a single US employer with one or more WHD enforcement cases. Fields include: employer identity (name, city, state, ZIP, NAICS, parent company where known), WHD enforcement metrics (case count, total back wages owed, employees violated, back wages per employee), and a cross-reference to OSHA enforcement where applicable. Why this dataset is unique Most public WHD data is case-level, which makes it hard to see the employer-level picture. This dataset aggregates 350,829 individual enforcement cases into a single row per employer, making it trivial to identify repeat offenders, calculate cumulative back wages, and filter by geography or industry. One finding to chew on: 20,880 employers have 2 or more WHD cases. These repeat offenders account for $1.0 billion — roughly 22% of all back wages in the dataset. Wage theft enforcement is not evenly distributed across employers.