Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Labor Report, in “Labor Agency Won More Wage-Hour Penalties on Less Enforcement,” by Rebecca Rainey. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
The US Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division closed fewer cases against employers in 2024 but levied nearly $10 million more in penalties. …
“The Wage and Hour Division is overall handling fewer and fewer cases each year. It is also trying to recover more per case,” said Paul DeCamp, former wage and hour administrator during the George W. Bush administration. …
DeCamp, who is now a management-side attorney at Epstein Becker & Green PC, said that if you look longer-term over the past 10 years, the number of concluded compliance actions at the agency have trended downward. For example, since FY 2014, agency compliance actions have hovered in the mid- 20,000 range up until the pandemic.
A number of factors like state laws outpacing federal protections, higher levels of compliance from employers, or increased private litigation could have contributed to the drop in cases, DeCamp said.
“The agency has been somewhat less active in terms of getting results for workers over the course of the past few years,” he said. “I don’t think that’s from lack of effort, certainly not.”
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