President's budget: Maintains Strong Support for Worker Protection.

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Maintains Strong Support for Worker Protection. The Budget includes nearly $1.8 billion for DOL’s worker protection agencies, putting them on sound footing to meet their responsibilities to protect the health, safety, wages, working conditions, and retirement security of American workers. The Budget preserves recent investments in rebuilding DOL’s enforcement capacity and makes strategic choices to ensure funding is used for the highest priority activities.

• Strengthens Enforcement of Wage and Hour and Family Leave Laws. The Budget provides an increase of $3.4 million for the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) for increased enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, which ensure that workers receive appropriate wages, overtime pay, and the right to take job-protected leave for family and medical purposes. The Budget also provides $5.8 million for WHD to develop a new integrated enforcement and case management system to allow investigators to capture higher quality and more timely data to analyze trends in labor law violations, target investigations and compliance assistance efforts, and evaluate the impact and quality of enforcement.

• Promotes Worker Health and Safety. The Budget provides $571 million for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), allowing OSHA to inspect hazardous workplaces and work with employers to help them understand and comply with safety and health regulations. The Budget includes an additional $5.9 million to bolster OSHA’s enforcement of the 21 whistleblower laws that protect workers and others who are retaliated against for reporting unsafe and unscrupulous practices.

• Protects the Health and Safety of the Nation’s Miners. The Budget provides $381 million for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), including additional funding for MSHA’s enforcement programs to enforce and promote mine safety and health laws and to implement recommendations from the Internal Review conducted in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

• Detects and Deters the Misclassification of Workers as Independent Contractors. When employees are misclassified as independent contractors, they are deprived of benefits and protections to which they are legally entitled, such as minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, and anti-discrimination protections. Misclassification, together with the underreporting of cash income for those paid as independent contractors, also costs taxpayers money in lost funds for the Treasury and in Social Security, Medicare, the Unemployment Trust Fund, and State programs. The Budget includes approximately $14 million to combat misclassification, including $10 million for grants to States to identify misclassification and recover unpaid taxes and $4 million for personnel at WHD to investigate misclassification.

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http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/labor.pdf

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