Republicans love work requirements. Any semi-able-bodied adult seeking to qualify for Medicaid or food stamps needs to find work to qualify, and should rising unemployment rates (such as those expected to be just around the corner once President Trump’s tariffs take effect) make that difficult, well, that’s too damn bad.

But Republicans don’t pay much heed to work itself, particularly the kind of low-paid jobs that employ people poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or food stamps. Or to worker safety: Earlier today, Senate Republicans convened a confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), David Keeling, whose recent résumé features stints as the guy in charge of worker safety at UPS and Amazon. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, injuries at the company’s warehouses occurred at a rate 70 percent higher than that at other warehouses.

If Keeling’s nomination betrays the Republicans’ rather cavalier attitude to worker safety, it actually pales alongside their lack of concern for worker compensation. As I noted several weeks ago, Jonathan Berry, Trump’s nominee for the Department of Labor’s solicitor—its chief legal representative—was arguing in court as recently as this January (while still in private practice) that the 1974 congressional act that extended the minimum wage to domestic workers was unconstitutional. Trump’s key appointees to the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division—the division charged with making sure businesses don’t violate minimum-wage and overtime laws—appear to be strangers to the very idea of enforcing those laws.

In that, they are faithful representatives of their region’s indifference to wage and hour laws. The acting administrator of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, Donald Harrison, was the deputy secretary of Alabama’s Labor Department. Alabama is one of just five states never to have adopted a minimum-wage law of its own, as well as one of six states to have no wage and hour investigators. Caroline Brown, who is the new senior adviser of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, comes to the job from private practice in Atlanta, where she specialized in counseling employers on state wage and hour laws. Georgia is one of three states whose own minimum hourly wage law is actually lower than the federal $7.25, as well as one of the six states with no wage and hour investigators. The résumés these appointees bring to DOL’s division in charge of wage and hour law compliance, then, are not merely devoid of such experience, but reflect indifference, and perhaps opposition, to the very idea of compliance.

The data on what each of the 50 states is doing to ensure workers aren’t illegally cheated out of their wages comes from a new study by the Workplace Justice Lab, a joint initiative of scholars at Rutgers and Northwestern. The study reports that wage theft is a massive problem for American workers: In 2019, for instance, the FBI reported that total property theft for that year came to $15 billion, while wage theft—the failure to pay the legal minimums—came to $18 billion. The study also details the governments’ (federal and state) failures to enforce wage and hour laws.

At the federal level, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division employed 1,232 investigators in 1978 to cover a workforce of 57 million that was subject to wage and hour laws. In 2024, the number of investigators had shrunk by almost half, to 650 (and that’s before any second-term Trump cuts), while the size of the covered workforce had almost trebled, to 165 million. At the late level, the ratio of investigators to workers ranges from 1-to-36,981 in Alaska, to 1-to-1,633,797 in Indiana. And then there are the six states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee—for which no ratio can be calculated, because they have no investigators at all. In what loosely might be termed their defense, four of those states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee—have no minimum-wage laws of their own. (The fifth without such a law is South Carolina.) Florida and Georgia do have such laws, but nobody to enforce them.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the states where slavery once flourished have since accommodated themselves to the idea that work should be fairly and decently compensated. And whether Donald Trump’s Labor Department has accommodated itself to that idea as well.