Comment from Anonymous

I am writing to urge the Department of Labor to finalize a strict, comprehensive joint employment standard. The final rule must explicitly address how primary employers utilize third-party staffing structures to manipulate wage data and avoid paying the actual, prevailing market wage.In high-skill engineering and manufacturing environments (such as Tier-1 and OEM companies), a severe dual-market wage disparity has emerged. For example, a direct-hire full-time Engineer may earn a total compensation package of $100,000/year, supported by robust healthcare and retirement benefits. The primary client determines this compensation using highly accurate, comprehensive private wage surveys to remain competitive in the market. However, for the exact same job role, the primary client contracts the work out to a third-party staffing agency for roughly $110,000/year. The staffing agency then files a Labor Condition Application (LCA) utilizing generic, lower-tiered OFLC/OEWS government data. The agency ultimately passes down an in-hand salary of only $80,000 to the contracted Engineer, paired with subpar benefits that carry high out-of-pocket insurance costs. This creates a real economic disparity of $40,000 to $45,000 per year between two engineers doing identical work side-by-side. This practice allows primary client companies to hide behind the staffing agency's legal compliance. The agency legally justifies the lower salary by using generalized public databases, while the client shields itself from paying the true "actual wage" dictated by the private market data they use internally. This intentional data asymmetry weaponizes the staffing structure to depress contractor wages. Because the primary client company controls the operational budget, dictates the project scope, and benefits directly from the engineer's daily labor, they must be recognized as a vertical joint employer. If the DOL does not implement a strict joint employer standard that forces both entities to share wage and benefit liability, companies will continue to exploit these overlapping data loopholes to artificially depress wages, shift health insurance burdens onto vulnerable contractors, and evade employer responsibilities. Thank you for considering these comments.