Labor Department to host free compliance forum for employers, workers, stakeholders

A free online forum from the U.S. Department of Labor put wage rules, heat safety, benefits compliance and worker-rights questions under one roof, a format that mattered for nonprofits like A Simple Gesture that juggle volunteers, pickup routes and paid staff.

The two-day event, Protecting America’s Workforce, was scheduled for May 6-7 and opened with remarks from Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling. The department said the program brought together officials from the Wage and Hour Division, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, with additional participation from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

For employers and nonprofit operators, the most useful part was the compliance-assistance format. The Small Business Administration’s event listing said the forum would include DOL experts, panel discussions, self-audit programs, the Beat the Heat campaign and cross-departmental initiatives. The Wage and Hour Division described its compliance work as offering free guidance, posters, forms, toolkits and other resources to help organizations understand federal labor laws.

That combination lined up closely with the realities of A Simple Gesture in Guilford County, where volunteers drive green bags, help with food drives and support recurring pickup routes in Greensboro, High Point and surrounding areas. The organization’s office is at 3505 Redington Drive in Greensboro, and its work crosses into the same operational questions many small nonprofits face: who is a volunteer, who is an employee, how time gets tracked when one person handles pickups and office work, and when a route helper needs an accommodation.

The timing also intersected with a bigger safety push. OSHA updated its National Emphasis Program on heat hazards on April 10, 2026, directing attention to outdoor and indoor heat risks in general industry, construction, maritime and agriculture. OSHA says millions of U.S. workers are exposed to workplace heat and that thousands become sick each year from occupational heat exposure, making summer a practical checkpoint for route-based operations, warehouse sorting and outdoor food drives.

The forum also pulled in other legal tripwires that can affect nonprofits. DOL guidance says the Fair Labor Standards Act does not automatically treat all unpaid helpers as employees, but volunteer status is limited by legal standards. The IRS says tax-exempt organizations can still owe employment taxes, interest and penalties if workers are misclassified as independent contractors. And the EEOC says Title VII requires reasonable accommodation for sincerely held religious beliefs unless undue hardship applies.

For a group like A Simple Gesture, the lesson was straightforward: compliance was not a back-office issue. It touched driver recruitment, summer volunteer use, route planning, heat safety and the way a small nonprofit scales without turning mission work into a labor-law problem.