Labor Violations by Industry: Which Sectors Face the Most Federal Enforcement

Connecting Three Agencies for the First Time

Federal agencies don’t coordinate their enforcement data. OSHA tracks workplace safety. DOL’s Wage & Hour Division tracks wage theft. The NLRB tracks labor relations. Each publishes separately. Each database uses different identifiers.

We connected all three using Bayesian entity resolution across 2.3 million employers. The result: 5.2 million OSHA inspections, 363,000 WHD cases, and 500,000 NLRB filings—linked at the employer level for the first time.

The Gap Between Safety Risk and Wage Risk

Two things stand out immediately. First, the gap between safety risk and wage risk. Construction’s enforcement exposure is overwhelmingly OSHA-driven—$2.2 billion in penalties from 1.8 million violations across 613,000 inspections. But Accommodation & Food Services tells the opposite story: relatively low OSHA penalties ($67 million) masking $684 million in wage theft affecting 946,000 workers.

If you only checked OSHA records, hospitality would look ten times safer than it actually is. If you only checked WHD, construction would appear to be a moderate-risk sector. Neither view is complete without the other.

Industries That Hide Risk Between Agencies

Health Care is the clearest example. It ranks 12th in OSHA penalties ($79 million)—well below construction, manufacturing, and retail. But it ranks 3rd in WHD back wages ($596 million across 47,000 cases affecting 800,000 workers). A safety-only compliance check would miss the fact that healthcare has one of the largest wage enforcement exposures of any sector in the country.

Professional Services shows the same pattern in reverse. Only $27 million in OSHA penalties, but $277 million in WHD back wages—the highest average per case of any sector at $27,025. Wage violations in professional services are less frequent but far more costly per occurrence.

Agriculture presents a dual risk that neither agency captures alone: $79 million in OSHA penalties and $99 million in WHD back wages, but also some of the lowest average penalties per violation ($830)—suggesting chronic, low-level noncompliance rather than headline-grabbing incidents.

Multi-Agency Employers: The Compounding Risk

Most compliance tools check one agency at a time. The problem is structural. OSHA and WHD enforce different statutes, use different case numbering, and don’t share employer identifiers. An employer with 200 OSHA violations and 50 WHD cases looks like two unrelated data points in two unrelated databases—unless you resolve the entity.

• 2.3 million employers have at least one enforcement action on record
• 75,270 employers appear in two or more agencies
• 7,945 employers appear in all three (OSHA + WHD + NLRB)
• That last group accounts for a disproportionate share of total penalties, back wages, and labor filings

LERS Risk Scoring: Quantifying Cross-Agency Exposure

LaborAudit quantifies this with the LERS (Labor Enforcement Risk Score)—a 0-100 composite score that weights enforcement across all agencies. The employers at the top of this distribution aren’t necessarily the ones making headlines. They’re the ones with compounding patterns that only a cross-agency view makes visible.

Methodology

This analysis uses data from three federal sources aggregated in the LaborAudit enforcement database: 5.2 million OSHA inspections and 13.2 million violations, 363,000 WHD cases, and 500,000 NLRB filings. Industry classifications use 2-digit NAICS sector codes. Employers are linked across agencies using Bayesian entity resolution (Fellegi-Sunter model) at a 0.5 confidence threshold across 2.3 million employer entities.

LERS risk scores are computed from cross-agency enforcement history, weighted by recency, severity, and agency breadth. Scores are updated as new enforcement data enters the pipeline.