PlainWorker

About PlainWorker

Our Mission

We believe every worker deserves to know whether their employer has a history of safety violations or wage theft — before accepting a job, not after getting hurt. Federal enforcement data exists precisely for this purpose: to hold employers accountable and inform the public. But buried in agency databases and bulk download files, it is effectively invisible to the people it is meant to protect.

PlainWorker closes that gap. We take raw OSHA inspection records and Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division enforcement cases and present them in a searchable, organized format — free, with no accounts or paywalls. Our goal is to make workplace safety and labor enforcement data accessible to anyone: workers evaluating a potential employer, journalists investigating industry patterns, researchers studying enforcement trends, and advocates pushing for stronger protections.

We present the data without editorializing or rating employers. The enforcement record speaks for itself. Our job is to make it findable and understandable.

Our Data Sources

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

The primary workplace safety data on PlainWorker comes from the OSHA Enforcement Database, published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the U.S. Department of Labor. OSHA conducts workplace inspections across all 50 states and U.S. territories, citing violations when safety or health standards are not met.

Our database includes inspection records, violation types (serious, willful, repeat, and other-than-serious), assessed penalty amounts, and abatement dates. This data is published through the DOL's public enforcement database at enforcedata.dol.gov and covers inspections from 2010 to the present.

Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

Labor enforcement data comes from the WHD Compliance Action Database, also published through the Department of Labor. The WHD enforces federal labor laws including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), covering minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor protections. Our data includes enforcement cases, back wages owed, and the number of employees affected by violations.

These are not self-reported or crowd-sourced figures. They come from federal investigations conducted by DOL compliance officers, making them independently verifiable at the source: DOL Enforcement Data.

How We Process the Data

We download bulk enforcement data files from the Department of Labor and process them through the following steps:

  • Parsing and normalization: OSHA inspection records and WHD compliance actions are parsed from their source formats, with employer names normalized and geographic identifiers (city, state, NAICS codes) standardized for consistent searching.
  • Employer profile construction: We join OSHA and WHD records into unified employer profiles, linking safety inspections with wage enforcement cases for the same establishment where identifiable.
  • Filtering: Employers are filtered to those with at least two OSHA inspections or $1,000 or more in WHD back wages, focusing the database on meaningful enforcement histories rather than single routine checks.
  • Geographic indexing: Records are indexed by city, state, and industry sector, enabling navigation across geographic and industry dimensions.
  • Derived metrics: We calculate aggregates like total penalties per city, inspection counts by industry sector, and repeat violation flags — all derived from the raw enforcement data.

Penalty amounts shown are current assessed values, which may differ from initial citations due to settlement, contest proceedings, or informal adjustments. We do not modify or editorialize the underlying numbers.

Data Currency

PlainWorker currently displays data from the DOL Enforcement Database, updated through Q1 2025. OSHA and WHD enforcement records are published on a rolling basis, with new inspections and compliance actions added as they are closed. We refresh our database quarterly to incorporate the latest available records.

There is typically a lag of several months between when an inspection or enforcement action is completed and when it appears in the public database. Active investigations and pending cases are not included until they reach a reportable status.

Editorial Independence

Content on PlainWorker is compiled by our editorial team. Raw data from the U.S. Department of Labor — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Wage and Hour Division — is transformed into readable profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, validated against the source before publication. The PlainWorker editorial team, operating under Kiznis Studio, is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from employers, agencies, or any labor-market entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense — advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

Limitations & Disclaimers

PlainWorker is an informational resource. Workplace safety and wage enforcement data should be one factor among many when evaluating an employer. Every workplace situation is different, and aggregate statistics cannot capture individual circumstances.

Known limitations of this dataset:

  • Penalty amounts may not be final: Assessed penalties shown in OSHA records may be reduced through informal settlement, contest proceedings, or the employer's participation in abatement programs. The amounts displayed are the most recently published figures.
  • Not all employers are inspected: OSHA inspects a fraction of American workplaces in any given year. The absence of an inspection record does not mean a workplace is safe — it may simply mean it has not been inspected.
  • Back wages may have been paid: WHD back wage amounts represent determinations of wages owed. In many cases, these amounts have been partially or fully recovered. The data does not distinguish between collected and uncollected amounts.
  • Industry classifications are as reported: NAICS sector codes come from the inspection records themselves and may not always reflect the employer's primary business activity.

PlainWorker does not provide legal or safety advice. Consult a qualified professional — an attorney for wage disputes, or OSHA directly for imminent safety hazards — before making decisions based on this data.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or feedback? Email us at hello@plainworker.com.

We welcome:

  • Questions about data sources or methodology
  • Reports of apparent data errors or anomalies
  • Suggestions for additional enforcement data or features
  • Media and research inquiries

PlainWorker is published by ", a data intelligence company that builds free, public-interest data portals.