Recently, the North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL) released a statement that they will be focusing on its new “Struck-By Special Emphasis” program as a result of the 50% surge of impact injuries across North Carolina’s workplaces since 2023. This pronouncement arrives not long after Commissioner Luke Farley proclaimed that North Carolina’s elevators had been restored to greatness, an assertion accompanied by the curious spectacle of his photograph affixed within the very conveyances whose regulation has yielded approximately $6.5 million in extracted assessments upon private enterprise, all in the service of supervising a mode of transportation that, on a national scale, accounts for fewer than thirty fatalities annually. It is difficult to avoid the observation that elevators, owned and operated by private firms with every incentive to prevent liability and reputational harm, are entirely capable of being inspected and maintained through market discipline and contractual obligation rather than by a centralized administrative apparatus. Yet this pattern reflects a broader disposition within the department, wherein public relations gestures are elevated above substantive worker protection, and the accumulation of easily advertised metrics is preferred to the quieter, more demanding labor of securing tangible improvements in human safety.

One prime example was on display in August 2025 when the NCDOL issued a press release celebrating the recovery of over $2.5 million in wages for workers across 87 counties. The tone was triumphant. The agency portrayed itself as a vigilant protector of labor rights, responding to more than 1,600 complaints and delivering results for workers statewide.

But read the fine print…literally. The attached dataset wasn’t a full picture of complaints filed, as the press release suggested. It was labeled “# of Complaints w/ Wage Paid,” a carefully curated subset. The agency published only resolved cases with successful payouts. In doing so, it erased the denominator: the total number of complaints received.

What happened to complaints that were withdrawn, dismissed, or deemed outside NCDOL’s jurisdiction? How many were denied because they involved minimum wage issues that NCDOL says it can’t investigate? How many were rejected outright because the wage claim was under $50, or more than a year old?

These omissions matter. They aren’t just technical details. They reflect a deliberate communications strategy, a form of taxpayer-funded self-congratulation that props up the illusion of effective enforcement while sidelining the truth: the state’s labor enforcement system is riddled with carve-outs, constraints, and discretionary drop-offs. Justice, in practice, is conditional, bureaucratic, and optionally decided by the state.

Even the numbers presented raise red flags. The report includes 80 “Out-of-State” complaints and 57 with “No County Entry”; these cases collectively represent 7.3% of total dollars recovered. No explanation is provided, despite NCDOL’s own rule stating it cannot investigate work performed outside North Carolina.

There’s also a data consistency problem: the industry breakdown in the report accounts for 1,683 complaints. But the same dataset shows 1,687. This isn’t nitpicking. It’s evidence of poor internal controls, and more importantly, it’s a reminder that the state isn’t even tracking its own enforcement pipeline cleanly. How then should we trust its self-published scorecards?

This isn’t just about NCDOL. It’s about how the government justifies its existence through selective storytelling. When agencies with monopoly power over enforcement can spin cherry-picked data into PR triumphs, the public is left with no check on whether real accountability is taking place. All of this begs some questions that the NCDOL will likely never answer:

  1. What if the government is the bottleneck, not the bulwark?
  2. What if workers were actually free to associate among each other by organizing and bargaining collectively against employers, without having to beg the state to intervene on their behalf?
  3. What if wage theft could be challenged directly by workers through private rights of action, rather than filtered through a single agency’s narrow definitions and backlogs?
  4. What if enforcement was decentralized so that power didn’t flow only through political appointees and annual reports, but through empowered individuals who could challenge abuse without waiting for permission?

The state wants credit for recovering $2.5 million in stolen wages. But that’s not generosity. That’s delayed restitution. It’s almost certainly a fraction of what’s likely owed. And it only happened in cases the agency found palatable enough to publish.

There’s no transparency without full denominators. No justice without options. And no accountability when the state gets to grade its own performance, and put out the press release.

Until we build structures that allow workers to defend themselves rather than rely on the state to do it for them, the NCDOL will continue to substitute propaganda for protection.