Jobs in home care are expected to grow by 40 percent in the next decade to meet demand from older adults and people with disabilities. Despite being part of one of the fastest growing industries, many home care workers did not have federal minimum wage and overtime protections until 2015. The Department of Labor extended these protections through a regulation known as the Home Care Rule. We compar...

Forced labor is a global problem affecting millions of people, according to the United Nations. U.S. law prohibits imports produced with forced labor, including seafood. Customs and Border Protection, responsible for enforcement, established a forced labor division in 2018 to focus on identifying such imports. CBP uses information from external sources to help identify seafood imports produced w...

We looked at federal agencies’ efforts to hire and retain individuals with disabilities. Agencies hired about 143,600 persons with disabilities from 2011-2015—exceeding the federal target of 100,000. Agencies made an additional 79,600 hires in 2016 and 2017. About 39% of those with disabilities hired in 2011-2017 stayed less than a year, compared to about 43% of those without disabilities. A...

Federal law prohibits employers from employment discrimination based on race and gender (among other things). The U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) are the primary agencies that enforce these laws. We testified about challenges these agencies face in ensuring that employers meet equal employment...

Federal agencies administer employment and training programs to help job seekers find and get work. While we identified 47 such programs in 2011, there are 43 now. Spending for these programs has decreased as well. Multiple programs provide similar services, often to similar groups of people. While agencies have tried to manage this overlap by trying to coordinate their programs, they generally d...

According to GAO's nationwide survey of school district special education directors, GAO estimates that about 85 percent of districts in school year 2015-16, provided youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) services such as instruction on life, social, and behavioral skills, as they transition from high school to adulthood. ASD is a group of complex developmental disorders characterized by diffi...

Federal agencies made limited use of special government employees (SGE) not serving on federal boards. As of December 2014, approximately 3 percent of SGEs (1,138 of 40,424) were working as experts or consultants and not serving on federal boards, according to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Over a 10-year period (2005 to 2014), GAO found that agencies used an annual average of approximatel...

According to data from three federal datasets GAO reviewed, workers in health care facilities experience substantially higher estimated rates of nonfatal injury due to workplace violence compared to workers overall. However, the full extent of the problem and its associated costs are unknown. For example, in 2013, the most recent year that data were available, private-sector health care workers in...

More than 250,000 foreign workers entered the United States through the H-2A (agricultural) and H-2B (nonagricultural) visa programs in fiscal years 2009 through 2013. U.S. employers use a process that involves multiple federal agencies to petition for and employ temporary foreign workers through these visa programs. The Department of State (State) reported that most workers using these visas were...

The Department of Labor's (DOL) Home Care Rule is expected to increase the number of home care workers who qualify for minimum wage and overtime protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended (FLSA). The Home Care Rule narrows the definition of companionship services and limits who may claim the companionship services exemption, among other changes. It is scheduled to go into e...