The Department of Labor

OSHA sets and enforces workplace safety standards covering everything from fall protection on construction sites to chemical exposure limits in factories, conducting tens of thousands of workplace inspections each year and issuing citations and fines against employers who violate safety standards.

Since its creation in 1971, OSHA is widely credited with contributing to a dramatic long-term decline in workplace fatalities, from roughly 38 worker deaths per day in 1970 to about 15 per day today, even as the size of the American workforce has more than doubled over that same period.

The agency is small for its remit, with only about 1,800 federal and state-plan inspectors for more than 10 million workplaces; the AFL-CIO estimates it would take a federal inspector about 185 years to visit every site once. About half the states run their own OSHA-approved programs covering private employers; federal OSHA covers the rest.

OSHA generally cannot write a new standard quickly: rulemaking for a single hazard, such as its 2016 silica-dust rule, has taken years or decades. Most day-to-day enforcement relies instead on the "general duty clause," which requires employers to keep workplaces "free from recognized hazards."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the federal government's principal economic data agency, producing the monthly jobs report (officially the Employment Situation Summary), the Consumer Price Index that measures inflation, and detailed wage and occupational data used by businesses, researchers, and policymakers nationwide.

The bureau operates independently of political direction in how it calculates and reports its statistics, a deliberate design intended to preserve public and market confidence that economic data isn't being manipulated for political advantage regardless of which party controls the White House.

It gathers its numbers from two large surveys each month: a household survey of about 60,000 homes that yields the unemployment rate, and an establishment survey of hundreds of thousands of employers that yields the payroll job count. Under an OMB directive, the data is prepared under lockup and released to everyone at exactly 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

The CPI is compiled from roughly 80,000 prices collected every month across dozens of urban areas, and it directly sets the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, federal pensions, and parts of the tax code, so a small methodological change ripples across the federal budget.

The Wage and Hour Division enforces the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law setting the minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, and also enforces family and medical leave protections and rules against child labor violations, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars in back wages for workers each year.

The division has increasingly focused enforcement resources on industries with historically high violation rates, including agriculture, restaurants, and construction, where wage theft and misclassification of employees as independent contractors remain persistent problems.

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since it was created in 1938, though roughly 30 states plus many cities set higher local minimums that the division also helps enforce where they exceed the federal floor.

The division has fewer than 1,000 investigators nationwide and increasingly relies on "directed" investigations of whole industries and on worker complaints. It reported a rise in child-labor cases in the 2020s, including minors found working in meatpacking plants and auto-parts factories through staffing agencies.

EBSA oversees private-sector employee retirement and health benefit plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), protecting the retirement savings of roughly 150 million American workers and retirees held in employer-sponsored 401(k) and pension plans.

The agency investigates cases of retirement plan mismanagement and fraud, and its rules on fiduciary duty, the legal obligation for financial advisers managing retirement accounts to act in their clients' best interest, have been a recurring subject of regulatory and legal battles across multiple administrations.

EBSA oversees more than 700,000 retirement plans and millions of health and welfare plans holding tens of trillions of dollars in assets. It also administers the health-plan disclosure and appeal rules under ERISA and pieces of the Affordable Care Act that apply to employer coverage, and COBRA continuation-coverage rights.

A version of its "fiduciary rule," first proposed in 2010 and repeatedly revised, was vacated by a federal appeals court in 2018 and reproposed in 2023; the underlying question is whether a broker recommending a rollover from a 401(k) to an individual retirement account must put the saver's interest first.

Though it predates the department's creation by two years, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, which killed 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, trapped behind locked exit doors, became the defining tragedy that galvanized the workplace safety movement.

Frances Perkins, later the first Secretary of Labor, witnessed the fire firsthand and cited it throughout her career as the formative moment that drove her lifelong commitment to workplace safety regulation, a direct throughline from that tragedy to OSHA's creation nearly sixty years later.

The fire led New York State to create a Factory Investigating Commission, on which Perkins served, that produced dozens of new fire-safety, sanitation, and hours laws over the next few years and became a national model. The factory owners were acquitted of manslaughter but later lost a civil suit for a token sum per victim.

Perkins called the day of the fire "the day the New Deal began," arguing that the reform network built in its aftermath supplied both the ideas and the people for the federal labor and social-insurance programs of the 1930s.

Frances Perkins's 1933 appointment as Secretary of Labor made her the first woman ever to serve in a U.S. presidential Cabinet, a historic milestone that came only 13 years after the 19th Amendment recognized women's right to vote nationwide.

Perkins used her position to push through some of the most consequential labor legislation in American history, including Social Security and the federal minimum wage, cementing her legacy as one of the most influential Cabinet secretaries of the 20th century regardless of department.

She chaired the Cabinet committee that drafted the Social Security Act and personally lobbied it through Congress in 1935. She also faced repeated attempts to remove her, including a 1939 move by a House member to impeach her for declining to deport the West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges; the Judiciary Committee dismissed it.

No woman held another Cabinet department until Oveta Culp Hobby became Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953. Perkins remained in government afterward, serving on the Civil Service Commission until 1953, and later taught at Cornell.

The rise of app-based gig work platforms over the past decade has forced the department to repeatedly revisit how it defines who counts as an 'employee' entitled to minimum wage and overtime protections versus an 'independent contractor' who isn't, a classification question with enormous financial stakes for both workers and companies.

The department has issued and revised its independent contractor classification rule multiple times across successive administrations since 2021, reflecting one of the most actively contested and litigated areas of federal labor policy in recent memory.

The legal test turns on the "economic reality" of the relationship, how much control the company exerts, whether the worker's investment and skill create real independence, and how permanent the arrangement is. A stricter test brings more workers under the FLSA and payroll taxes; a looser one leaves more classified as contractors.

States have gone their own way: California's 2019 "ABC test" law was largely undone for ride-hail and delivery drivers by Proposition 22 in 2020, which classified them as contractors but added limited benefits. The federal rule governs FLSA wage and overtime coverage only, not tax status or eligibility for unemployment insurance, which follow separate tests.

The federal-state unemployment insurance system, created under the Social Security Act of 1935, provides temporary weekly payments to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own, funded through payroll taxes and administered jointly by the Labor Department and individual state workforce agencies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress temporarily expanded the program to cover gig workers and the self-employed and added supplemental federal payments, an emergency expansion that demonstrated both the system's flexibility and the strain aging state unemployment insurance computer systems faced under sudden, unprecedented claim volumes.

States set their own benefit levels, durations, and eligibility rules within federal guidelines, so a laid-off worker in one state might receive roughly half their prior wage for 26 weeks while a neighboring state pays less for fewer weeks. The Labor Department certifies state programs, funds administration, and steps in with extended benefits when a state's unemployment rate is high.

The pandemic programs paid out hundreds of billions of dollars quickly but also drew large-scale fraud, much of it organized and international, that the Labor Department inspector general later estimated in the tens of billions, prompting new identity-verification requirements and a push to modernize the 1970s-era state systems.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly Employment Situation Summary, released on the first Friday of each month, reports the national unemployment rate and the number of jobs added or lost in the prior month, and is one of the single most market-moving pieces of economic data the federal government publishes.

Financial markets, the Federal Reserve, and news coverage all treat the jobs report as a critical real-time gauge of economic health, and even modest surprises relative to economist forecasts can trigger significant swings in stock and bond markets within minutes of release.

The headline job number is an early estimate that BLS revises twice as more employer responses come in, and once a year the whole payroll series is "benchmarked" to near-complete tax records, revisions that can run into the hundreds of thousands of jobs and occasionally change the economic narrative after the fact.

The unemployment rate counts only people who are jobless and actively looking, so BLS also publishes broader measures (the "U-6") that include discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers, and a labor-force-participation rate that tracks how many working-age people are in the job market at all.

The Labor Department's Office of Apprenticeship oversees registered apprenticeship programs that combine paid on-the-job training with classroom instruction, primarily in skilled trades like electrical work, plumbing, and construction, giving workers a debt-free path to a skilled career without a traditional four-year college degree.

Registered apprenticeships have grown significantly in recent years as policymakers across the political spectrum have promoted them as an alternative to college for workers seeking stable, well-paying careers, with the department reporting hundreds of thousands of active apprentices nationwide.

The system dates to the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937 (the "Fitzgerald Act"). A registered program must meet federal standards for wages that rise with skill, a written training plan, and a nationally recognized credential at completion; the department reports that most completers keep a job in their field.

Building-trades unions and their employers run many of the largest programs jointly, and recent policy has pushed to extend the model into health care, information technology, and advanced manufacturing, sectors where registered apprenticeship has historically been rare.

The Office of Workers' Compensation Programs administers federal workers' compensation benefits for injured federal employees, coal miners with black lung disease, and, notably, for the responders and survivors of the September 11, 2001 attacks through the World Trade Center Health Program.

These programs provide medical treatment and wage replacement benefits to workers injured on the job in categories where state workers' compensation systems don't apply, filling a gap for specific federal and federally regulated worker populations.

The Federal Employees' Compensation Act program covers about 2.6 million federal and postal workers and pays out roughly $3 billion a year. The Black Lung program, funded by an excise tax on coal, has paid tens of billions of dollars to miners and survivors since the 1970s, and claims rose again with a resurgence of severe disease in Appalachia.

The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, also run by the office, compensates workers who built the nation's nuclear weapons and were exposed to radiation and toxic materials; it has paid more than $25 billion since 2001.