The Department of Labor is one of the few agencies that has its “/open” page up and running as part of the Open Government Directive. One of the datasets they have featured as a high value dataset is the “weekly reports of fatalities, catastrophes and other events.” The data, compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, briefly describes workplace accidents, identifies the company at which and the date when the accident occurred; the data can be downloaded as a csv file. Although this dataset is available on Labor’s Web site, it doesnt seem to be uploaded on the data.gov Web site yet.

Another dataset thats already available on data.gov is a repository of all research and evaluation studies that Labor has completed or plans on undertaking during the year. A third dataset that seemed promising at first was the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, but is probably the least useful. Its a PDF document that lists whether children are employed to produce certain goods in a particular country.  So we know that textiles from Bangladesh or tomatoes grown in Mexico could be produced by child laborers but the data adds little detail–for example, the names of the producers or U.S. outlets that sell such items. It’s not clear how Labor, any other federal agency or international non-profit uses this data.

Update: Data.gov just released the “high value datasets” and the ones listed under Dept. of Labor are not the ones on their /open page.