Our Methodology

Download the OSHA/WHD enforcement extract cited on this page: osha-whd-enforcement-statistics.csv (DOL public records · CC BY 4.0).

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.

How we prepare the records

We download OSHA and WHD data from data.dol.gov and prepare those public records so that we:

• 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.

Corpus placement (where each page sits)

Entity, state, and industry pages state a computed corpus-relative placement derived from the same fields already shown on the page, never a fabricated composite score:

• Employer pages: among every non-placeholder employer with a nonzero current OSHA penalty, we count how many have a lower penalty (indexed COUNT). The page shows both the ordinal (#N of M) and a transparent tier band (top 1% / 5% / 10% / quarter / upper half / lower half) from that same percentile. Employers with $0 current penalty do not claim a national penalty rank.
• State pages: national rank by total OSHA penalties across all tracked U.S. jurisdictions (states and territories in the corpus), plus a live COUNT-derived percentile among jurisdictions with employers.
• Industry pages: national rank by average penalty per inspection across NAICS sectors with at least 50 inspections, the same cohort and sort order as Most Dangerous Industries. Exact ties break on sector code so each industry has a stable ordinal.

Thresholds and derivation live here so a reviewer can reproduce any #N of M from the published OSHA/WHD extracts without a proprietary black-box index.

Safety Record Labels

Each employer page carries a plain-language safety-record label (e.g. "concerning," "mixed," "relatively clean," "average"). This is a transparent derived label, not a proprietary or hidden score, computed from three inputs already shown on the page: violations per inspection, and whether the employer has any willful or repeat violations on record.

• Concerning: the employer has any willful violation, any repeat violation, or averages more than 3 violations per inspection.
• Mixed: averages more than 1.5 violations per inspection, or has more than 2 serious violations on record.
• Relatively clean: averages 1 or fewer violations per inspection.
• Average: falls between the "relatively clean" and "mixed" thresholds above.

This is a rule-based classification, not a weighted composite index. It is reproducible directly from the inspection and violation counts shown on the same page.

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 join them into 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.