Our Methodology

Data Sources

PlainWorker aggregates data from two U.S. Department of Labor public enforcement databases:

• OSHA Enforcement Data (data.dol.gov): All workplace safety inspections conducted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2010 to the present. Includes inspection date, violation types, cited standards, and assessed penalty amounts.
• Wage and Hour Division (WHD) Enforcement Data (data.dol.gov): Federal labor law enforcement cases from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and other wage laws. Includes back wages owed, employee counts affected, and the laws violated.

Processing Pipeline

We download OSHA and WHD data from data.dol.gov and run an ETL pipeline that:

• Normalizes employer names: Strips punctuation, standardizes legal suffixes (Inc, LLC, Corp, Ltd), and normalizes whitespace to enable consistent aggregation across multiple inspections or cases for the same employer.
• Builds employer profiles: All OSHA inspections and WHD cases for a normalized employer are joined into a single profile showing enforcement history, total penalties, violation types, and industry context.
• Applies minimum thresholds: Employers are filtered to those with at least 2 OSHA inspections or $1,000 or more in WHD back wages to focus the database on meaningful enforcement histories and exclude one-time minor interactions.
• Computes industry aggregates: NAICS sector-level summaries show which industries have the highest enforcement activity, penalty totals, and back wage recovery.

OSHA Enforcement Data Details

OSHA inspections are classified by type (programmed/unprogrammed) and violations by severity:

• Serious violations: Conditions that could cause death or serious physical harm and that the employer knew or should have known about.
• Willful violations: Violations committed with intentional disregard or plain indifference to OSHA requirements.
• Repeat violations: Previously cited violations that were not corrected.
• Other violations: Lower-severity violations.

Penalty amounts shown are current assessed penalties, which may differ from initial citations due to informal or formal settlement, withdrawal, or contest proceedings.

WHD Enforcement Data Details

WHD enforcement covers the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, overtime, child labor), the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Davis-Bacon Act (prevailing wages on federal contracts), and other labor laws. Back wages shown represent amounts determined to be owed — they may have been partially or fully paid following enforcement.

Limitations

• OSHA inspects only a fraction of US workplaces — absence from this database does not mean a workplace is safe.
• Employer name normalization is imperfect; large employers with many subsidiaries or name variations may appear under multiple entries.
• Back wages may have been subsequently paid or partially collected — the database shows amounts determined to be owed at the time of enforcement.
• OSHA and WHD jurisdiction does not cover all workers — agricultural workers, domestic workers, and federal employees have separate systems.

Data Collection Method

OSHA enforcement data originates from OSHA's Integrated Management Information System (IMIS), which tracks every inspection conducted by federal OSHA and state plan OSHA agencies. Each inspection record includes the establishment inspected, violations cited, standards violated, and penalties assessed. WHD enforcement data comes from DOL's Wage and Hour Investigative Support and Reporting Database (WHISARD), which records case-level information for every investigation conducted by WHD compliance officers. Both datasets are published on data.dol.gov as public records. We download these datasets and process them through our ETL pipeline to build employer-centric profiles.

Update Schedule

OSHA and WHD enforcement data on data.dol.gov is updated periodically, typically monthly or quarterly. We refresh our database when new data becomes available. Between updates, recently concluded inspections and investigations may not be reflected. Penalty amounts and case dispositions can change after initial citation due to settlement, contest, or informal conferences — our database reflects the most recent data available at the time of our last refresh.

Not Affiliated

PlainWorker is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA, or any government agency. Data is sourced from data.dol.gov public records.