The White House’s request for the Department of Labor includes about $1.8 billion for Labor’s worker protection agencies. Reflecting a politically fraught push by the President to require more employers to pay more overtime, the budget would add $41 million for Labor’s Wage and Hour Division to increase enforcement of wage and overtime laws, as well as taking job-protected leave for family and medical pur-poses.
According to the budget request, the division would be able to hire 300 new in-vestigators across the US to help in this effort, and use risk-based approaches to target industries and employers most likely to break the law.
The budget provides $565 million for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including an additional $4 million to bolster OSHA’s enforcement of 21 whistleblower laws that protect work¬ers and others who are retaliated against for reporting unsafe and unscrupulous practices.
The budget includes nearly $14 million to combat misclassification of employees as independent contractors, in¬cluding $10 million for grants to States to identify misclassification and recover unpaid taxes and $4 million for personnel at WHD to investigate misclassification.
