Still One-Sided: Employer Compliance with Transparency Laws Hits a Record Low

A new report from LaborLab reveals that the compliance gap between unions and the employers and consultants hired to bust union drives is not just persisting, it is widening. The report, titled “Still One-Sided: OLMS Continues to Fail Workers, The Enforcement and Reporting Gap Benefiting Union-Busting Employers and Persuaders Keeps Widening,” documents the steepest year-over-year decline in employer reporting compliance LaborLab has recorded in four years of tracking, even as OLMS, the Department of Labor agency charged with enforcing the law, moved its enforcement attention aggressively toward unions rather than the employers and persuaders whose compliance was actually getting worse.

LaborLab’s analysis, which examines 2025 non-filing data as of August 8, 2026, builds on the agency’s own enforcement and budget data alongside two long-standing benchmarks: the 2024 Department of Labor Inspector General report and the 1984 U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee report, “The Forgotten Law.“ Together, this data shows a two-tiered enforcement system that has now persisted for more than forty years, and is, by several measures, getting worse.

Key Findings: A Widening, Two-Tiered System

The report uncovers several critical disparities:

• Employer Non-Filing Hit a New High. Of the 218 employers who owed a 2025 Form LM-10, the annual disclosure employers must file when they hire outside consultants to fight union organizing, 127, or 58.3 percent, had not filed as of early August, up more than fifteen percentage points from 2024’s already-troubling 43.1 percent non-filing rate. Over half of the employers legally required to disclose their anti-union spending simply did not.
• Persuader Compliance Held Flat, Not Improved. Persuader LM-21 compliance, the annual receipts-and-disbursements report persuader consultants must file every year they’re paid under an agreement with an employer, held at a dismally low level on every measure LaborLab can compare year over year: 57.4 percent of persuaders who owed a 2025 LM-21 failed to file, against 57 percent the year before, and timeliness among those who did file slipped slightly. Persuader compliance did not deteriorate the way employer compliance did, but “not worse” is not the same as acceptable.
• Enforcement Grew, But Not for Reporting Violations. OLMS’s own published data show criminal investigations climbing 28 percent over two years, from a decade low of 155 in FY2023 to 198 in FY2025. LaborLab reviewed every civil and criminal enforcement action OLMS publicly listed for 2024 and 2025. Not one, in either year, involved a charge for failing to file, or falsifying, an LM-10, LM-20, or LM-21.
• This Is a Staffing Choice, Not a Budget Constraint. OLMS staffing has fallen more than 30 percent since 2010, even as the agency’s appropriations grew by roughly 20 percent over the same period and appropriations per filer grew by more than half. OLMS has more money per filer today than it did fifteen years ago. It has fewer people, and by its own published statistics, it directs nearly all of them toward investigating unions.
• Employers Now Disclose Even Less Than the Numbers Suggest. Because more than half of employers who owe an LM-10 are not filing at all, and because persuaders filing under OLMS’s 2016 Special Enforcement Policy are not required to itemize what they received from employers, the public now has less visibility into actual employer spending on union avoidance than in prior years, even in the cases where a report does get filed.

“Our latest report shows that the two-tiered enforcement system we identified in previous years hasn’t just persisted, it’s gotten worse,” said Bob Funk, LaborLab Executive Director. “Employer non-filing hit the highest rate we’ve ever recorded, and OLMS’s response was to grow its enforcement activity against unions rather than the employers and persuaders who are actually falling further out of compliance. That’s not oversight. It’s a choice, and it’s one Congress and the public should be asking hard questions about.”

LaborLab’s Recommendations

To close this widening gap, LaborLab urges OLMS to:

• Reinstate proactive enforcement. Adapt OLMS’s successful Voluntary Compliance Agreement and Compliance Audit Program models, already used to drive union compliance, for employers and persuaders, rather than relying solely on complaints.
• Cross-match filings systematically. Use the EINs now required on Form LM-20 to routinely cross-reference LM-10, LM-20, and LM-21 filings and identify non-filers automatically, a methodology LaborLab has recommended, and demonstrated, since 2022.
• Hold substandard filings to the agency’s own standard. Reject or flag LM-20 filings with boilerplate disclosures that don’t meet OLMS’s own published guidance, and make EINs a mandatory field in OLMS’s Electronic Filing System so a report cannot be submitted without them, the same way the system already blocks incomplete union filings.
• Publish employer and persuader enforcement data separately. OLMS should report its Section 203 enforcement activity on its own, apart from its union-focused dockets, so the public can verify whether the agency is enforcing employer and persuader reporting at all.
• Direct real resources to the smaller population. With a few hundred employers and persuaders compared to more than 20,000 unions, any additional enforcement resources directed at Section 203 would have an outsized impact.