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fair labor standards act
Trump’s Brand of Law Enforcement: Deportation Yes, Worker Protection No
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Jul 19, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump claims to be all about law enforcement. But what laws he chooses to prioritize, and which get the back seat, or are ignored entirely, speak volumes about the heart and soul of this administration. Recent developments in immigration and labor law enforcement offer some trenchant examples.
I spent the entirety of my almost-40-year civil service career enforcing federal worker protection laws with the U.S. Department of Labor, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), whose purpose is to guarantee that the workers actually receive at least the minimum wage and overtime pay that Congress has mandated.
Enforcing laws like the FLSA for the benefit of workers in the U.S.—across the many millions of workplaces in this country, with very limited investigative and attorney staff—is no easy task. How closely any given federal agency can approach the goal of widespread compliance depends on many factors, most prominent being the level of resourcing Congress has made available, and the effectiveness of the strategies the agency chooses to deploy.
On the immigration front, the president has broadcast far and wide his intention to remove everyone who’s in this country without legal authority (a civil, not criminal violation) as his top enforcement priority. His just-signed budget bill massively increases the funds available for “building the wall” and ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency whose job will be to penetrate every community in the country, find those “without papers,” and arrest and deport them. And then there are prisons like “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades, and the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, designed to terrify as many as possible into self-deporting, and to detain indefinitely those who fail to comply.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now. Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too.
The flood of dollars slated to supercharge the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) enforcement capacity, along with its terror strategy designed to induce self-removal, will no doubt make serious headway toward the president’s goal. But there are so many reasons why this is both a cruel and foolish policy—including, because the U.S. will be left with fewer workers (citizen and noncitizen), fewer people spending money, and a smaller economy overall. But it’s an example, albeit a dark and nefarious one, of how enforcement results can be accomplished if the administration has both the will and the political power to get them done.
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Large numbers of workers in the U.S. are cheated out of the minimum wage or overtime they’re entitled to under the FLSA—an unlawful practice known colloquially as “wage theft”—to the tune of billions of dollars per year. A primary reason for this high rate of noncompliance by employers inclined to evade the law is the paltry level of funding the department’s enforcement divisions receive, relative to the millions of businesses they’re responsible to oversee. Given the size of their mission to protect workers, the Labor Department’s (DOL) ranks are tiny, have shrunk significantly due to the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal budget, and are slated to be cut 35% in the FY 2026 budget.
While staffing today is exceptionally bare-bones, the DOL has always needed to deploy its limited resources for maximum impact. Fifteen years ago, I was part of a team that developed a wage law compliance-enhancing strategy that wouldn’t depend on hiring more enforcement personnel. It was founded on FLSA’s mandate that when an employer commits wage theft, it will owe the worker both the amount of the underpayment and an equal amount in “liquidated damages,” with very limited exceptions.
The law’s requiring payment of double back wages makes sound enforcement sense. It compensates workers for costs they incurred on account of being underpaid, and it also incentivizes unscrupulous employers to comply. If an employer who shorted his workers is only required to pay back what he owed in the first place, he’s really getting an interest-free loan that the worker never agreed to. That’s hardly a recipe for encouraging compliance.
And yet, for too long, that’s how the vast majority of DOL investigations finding wage underpayments were resolved. So, 15 years ago DOL assembled a team to address this serious enforcement deficiency, and we conceived a new strategy. Employers who engaged in wage theft were given a choice: be sued for double back pay, or settle for that amount without having to go to court. If the employer believed they shouldn’t have to pay double, or shouldn’t have to pay at all, no gun was pointed to their head. They could go to court and challenge DOL’s claims. But if, recognizing they’d likely lose in court and that settlement was a better option, they’d need to pay the workers the double back wages the law says they owe.
The Labor Department began implementing this policy in 2010, and over the past decade and a half, workers in scores of cases have received millions of dollars in back wages and liquidated damages, DOL’s litigation resources have been spared, and U.S. district courts are less clogged than they would have been if these resolutions in lieu of litigation hadn’t happened. Since 2010, this enforcement strategy has been challenged only once, and the court found it to be reasonable. It also exemplifies sound enforcement strategy designed to spur compliance, and government efficiency, to boot.
And yet, on June 27, the acting administrator of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division saw fit to prohibit DOL staff from entering into any wage theft settlements in which workers receive double back pay, if the case hasn’t been filed in court. The clear impact will be that most workers who are victims of wage theft will once again become unwilling interest-free lenders to their employers, and corner-cutting employers will have no incentive to comply with the law. Regrettably, this isn’t the first such slap against workers, and undoubtedly won’t be the last.
To recap: On immigration enforcement, the Trump administration, and a compliant Republican-majority Congress, are pulling out all the stops to remove unauthorized immigrants—whether law-abiding, taxpaying, contributing members of our communities or not—as part of a dreadfully misguided but comprehensive DHS enforcement policy designed to intimidate and coerce.
The Trump Labor Department, meanwhile, just went out of its way to end a successful, court-approved enforcement strategy designed to make whole workers victimized by wage theft, and to deter unscrupulous employers from engaging in these types of violations.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now.
Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too. Suffice it to say: not exactly at the front of the line.
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As GOP Erodes Child Labor Laws, Alabama Roofer Fined Just $117K for Teen's Worksite Death
"It's unconscionable that roofing companies hire 15-year-olds," said one labor expert—but in state after state and even at the federal level, lawmakers are rolling back restrictions on teen workers.
Feb 07, 2024
Workers' rights advocates on Wednesday decried a meager fine for an Alabama contractor that illegally employed a 15-year-old boy who died on the job, a move that came amid a push by Republicans at the federal and state level to roll back child labor protections.
The U.S. Department of Labor fined Pelham, Alabama-based Apex Roofing & Restoration $117,175 in civil penalties for violation of child labor laws resulting in the July 1, 2019 death of a 15-year-old Guatemalan worker during his first day on the job in Cullman, 50 miles north of Birmingham.
The teen—who could not be identified because he was a minor—fell through insulation and plunged 35-50 feet to his death on a concrete floor inside the building on which he was working,
according to a Cullman Tribune report at the time.
The Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division found that the company's employment of the teen violated a provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act that prohibits workers under the age of 18 from doing dangerous jobs including roofing or construction.
"Apex Roofing risked the life of a child by employing him to work on a roof in violation of federal child labor laws, leaving relatives and friends to grieve an unnecessary and preventable tragedy," Wage and Hour Administrator Jessica Looman said in a statement.
The Labor Department action came shortly after the Alabama Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank, published its annual agenda. The document advocates rolling back limits on 14- and 15-year-olds in the workplace.
An Apex Roofing spokesperson told Common Dreams:
We at Apex Roofing & Restoration are truly heartbroken by the senseless death of a minor at a job site in 2019. The tragic incident occurred when a subcontractor's worker brought his sibling to a worksite without Apex's knowledge or permission.
Apex has a long-standing policy prohibiting any form of child labor. In addition, since that accident, Apex has implemented a number of measures to further strengthen job site security and safety. Our hearts are with this family and any family who suffers a loss.
Common Dreams reported last year that congressional Democrats implored the Labor Department to act following a Reuters investigation that found dozens of chidren as young as 12 years old—most of them Central American migrants—working in Alabama and Georgia factories supplying the Korean auto giant Hyundai.
Across the country, Republican state lawmakers have been advancing legislation to remove restrictions on child labor, despite several high-profile workplace deaths of minors.
At the federal level, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) last year introduced a bill that would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work in the logging industry.
Major corporations including McDonald's, Costco, Starbucks, Amazon-owned Whole Foods, and PepsiCo have said they're taking steps to tackle child labor in their supply chains, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Whole Foods said in a statement that it has "been actively evolving our focus on the risk of migrant child labor domestically."
According to Labor Department data, the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws soared by 283% from 2015 to 2022. Over that same period, the number of minors employed in violation of hazardous occupation orders rose 94%.
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California Public School Students Will Learn About Labor Rights Under First-of-Its-Kind Law
"A.B. 800 empowers young people with the information and tools they need to understand their rights as workers," said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher of the California Labor Federation.
Oct 03, 2023
While Republican-controlled state legislatures have rolled back child labor protections this year, Democratic lawmakers and rights advocates in California on Monday celebrated Gov. Gavin Newsom's signing of a first-of-its-kind law that they say will make young people less vulnerable to workplace abuses by teaching them about labor protections.
Assemblymember Liz Ortega (D-20) told the Contra Costa News that Assembly Bill 800 is aimed at "giving kids the tools to stand up for themselves" as Republican lawmakers attack unions as well as making it easier for companies to employ children as young as 14 to work in industrial facilities.
"I am so proud to announce the passage of this first-of-its-kind law requiring schools to teach our kids about their workplace rights," said Ortega. "We are seeing headlines about children abused at workplaces across the country―wage theft, violations of labor law, and even serious life-changing injuries."
Under A.B. 800, all public high schools in California will hold "Workplace Readiness Week" as part of their curriculum.
Students will gain a "strong understanding of their rights as workers, as well as their explicit rights as employed minors" and learn about their right to join or organize a union in their workplace.
The law intends "to equip pupils with this knowledge to protect them from retaliation and discrimination, to ensure that these young workers receive all wages and benefits to which they are entitled, to empower them to refuse unsafe work when necessary, and to prepare them to assert their labor rights whenever these rights are threatened," according to the bill text.
Newsom announced the bill's signing on Saturday.
The California Labor Federation, which helped develop the legislation, noted that the law was approved shortly after a federal court ordered the owners of 14 Subway franchise stores in the San Francisco Bay Area to pay employees nearly $1 million in back pay and damages.
An investigation found that the owners assigned minors to work hours that are illegal under California law and required children as young as 14 to operate dangerous equipment, as well as illegally keeping tips instead of distributing them among workers and failing to pay employees regularly.
Such reports are "why we worked on A.B. 800," said the federation.
"Too often, young workers face wage theft, unsafe conditions, sexual harassment, or other abuses at work," Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, chief officer of the California Labor Federation, told the Contra Costa News. "By requiring that high school students be taught their rights as employees, A.B. 800 empowers young people with the information and tools they need to understand their rights as workers and protects them against workplace abuses."
Republicans in a number of states and in Congress have claimed to want to prioritize "workforce development"—making education about workplace rights "a commonsense no-brainer," according to the operator of the Daily Union Election account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In 2021, 109 workers aged 19 or younger died from work-related injuries in the United States, and more than 33,000 teenagers were hospitalized for serious injuries sustained at work.
In July, a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala named Duvan Pérez died from injuries he got while cleaning equipment at a poultry plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are barred from hiring anyone under the age of 18 to work in slaughtering, meat processing, or packing facilities, with limited exceptions. The law bans workers from operating or cleaning meat processing equipment.
Minors are disproportionately employed in sectors that account for nearly half of all wage theft claims, which totaled more than $338 million in stolen wages in 2021, and in industries where sexual harassment, discrimination, and abuse from clientele or management is reported at high rates.
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