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RED STATES EVISCERATING CHILD WORK PROTECTIONS  
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Michael Hiltzik
May 2, 2025
Los Angeles Times
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_ Florida is not the first state to loosen child labor protections,
or even the most aggressive in that effort. Last year eight states,
all led by Republicans, did so, according to a tracking by the
labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute. _

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, seen here with Donald Trump during a campaign
rally, signed the “most dangerous” rollback of child labor
protections in 2023. , CRAIG LASSIG/EPA-EFE/REX

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has discovered a problem with the
anti-immigration policies that once made him a GOP star. Luckily he
has a solution.

The problem is that chasing immigrant workers out of his state created
a labor shortage in some of its most important industries, such as
construction, agriculture and tourism.

DeSantis’ solution? Put more kids to work.

This is a coordinated effort being led by a constellation of business
lobbying groups and industry associations that would especially
benefit from changes in child labor laws.

— Nina Mast, Economic Policy Institute

“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be able to work
part-time?” DeSantis asked during a March 20 appearance with Donald
Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan
[[link removed]], at which he evoked a
candy-colored past in which youngsters earned life lessons in the
workplace. “That’s how it used to be when I was growing up. Why do
we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when
teenagers used to work at these resorts?”

Florida is not the first state to loosen child labor protections, or
even the most aggressive in that effort. Last year eight states, all
led by Republicans, did so, according to a tracking by the
labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute
[[link removed]].

The most dangerous rollback, by EPI’s reckoning, was enacted by Iowa
in 2023. The bill signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds allows teens
as young as 14 to work in previously prohibited hazardous jobs in
industrial laundries, and those as young as 15 to perform light
assembly work.

The measure also allows state agencies to waive restrictions on
hazardous work for 16– and 17-year-olds, including demolition,
roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation. Permissible
hours for teens as young as 14 were extended to 9 p.m. from 7 p.m.,
the federal standard, during the school year. State penalties for
violations were reduced.

The drive to reduce child labor restrictions has spread nationwide.

“This is a coordinated effort being led by a constellation of
business lobbying groups and industry associations that would
especially benefit from changes in child labor laws,” Nina Mast, a
child labor expert at the EPI, told an Illinois state senate
committee last year
[[link removed]].

Mast also attributed the effort to “right-wing think tanks and
advocacy groups that seek to weaken workers’ rights, erode our
social safety net, and threaten the progress we’ve made on equitable
access to public education.” (The Illinois Legislature was
considering a bill to _strengthen_ child labor protections; the
measure was signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker
[[link removed]].)

Mast was correct. The trend was endorsed by the authors of Project
2025, the right-wing road map for the current Trump administration
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“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,”
the document states. Federal rules prohibiting such employment result
in “worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages
otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous
job.” The authors advocated reducing hazard-work regulations to
admit teenage workers “with proper training and parental consent.”

In a 2016 article titled “Let the kids work,”
[[link removed]] the libertarian culture
warrior Jeffrey A. Tucker ridiculed the Washington Post for
publishing a gallery of work by the great photographer Lewis Hine of
child laborers
[[link removed]] from
100 years ago, including miners and sweatshop workers as young as 10.

Tucker wrote that those children were “working in the adult world,
surrounded by cool bustling things and new technology. They are on the
streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with peers,
learning and doing. They are being valued for what they do, which is
to say being valued as people.... Whatever else you want to say about
this, it’s an exciting life.”

Children’s advocates are rightfully nervous about the path that
child labor law enforcement will take during the Trump administration.
Elon Musk’s DOGE operation has moved to sharply cut back the
Department of Labor’s enforcement capacity, in part by shuttering 87
of the agency’s offices across the nation, including 37 offices of
the agency’s wage and hour division and its Occupational Safety and
Health Administration. Those are the two units with most jurisdiction
over child labor violations.

It’s also likely that we’ll see a push in Congress to reduce the
child labor protections embodied in the Fair Labor Standards Act of
1938. The act preempts state laws that are less stringent than federal
law; in those cases, the federal government retains enforcement
authority — if it chooses to use it.

“This administration may be more open to looking at Department of
Labor prohibitions on hazardous occupations for teens and to pull some
of those back,” says Jennifer Sherer, an EPI analyst. “That’s
what the weakening of state standards appears to be laying the
groundwork for.”

The evils of child labor long have been understood. Franklin Roosevelt
aptly referred to it as “this ancient atrocity” in 1933, when he
signed a textile industry code that outlawed the employment of
children younger than 16 in sweatshops.

Unscrupulous employers, sometimes abetted by state regulators looking
the other way, haven’t ceased trying to circumvent the rules. The
number of minors that regulators found working under conditions that
breached federal law rose by 88%, to 5,792, in fiscal 2023 compared
with 2015, according to Labor Department figures,
[[link removed]] but fell
back to 4,030 last year, possibly due to what Sherer called
the “proactive approach” to federal enforcement
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President Biden. Penalties levied by the agency increased more than
tenfold to $15.2 million from 2015 to 2024.

Yet the figures on children working in illegal conditions is likely
“the tip of the iceberg,” Sherer told me. Notwithstanding the
Biden administration’s efforts, even most federal enforcement was
reactive — responses to complaints filed with government
authorities. “It’s very clear that most violations don’t get
reported.”

The Biden-era Department of Labor pursued some shocking cases of child
labor violations, including third-party cleaning contractors that had
minors working on overnight shifts
[[link removed]] at meat and
poultry processing plants
[[link removed]]. From 2019
through 2023, according to government statistics
[[link removed]], 49 youths aged 15 or
younger and 77 aged 16 or 17 died from workplace injuries.

Pressure to employ minors increased during the pandemic emergency,
when labor shortages spread nationwide. An influx of young migrants,
unaccompanied or otherwise, may also have exacerbated the problem,
because their unfamiliarity with the law and their rights — and
their quest for paid jobs — makes them especially vulnerable to
unscrupulous employers.

The proponents of loosened child labor laws don’t cite only the need
to meet labor demand as a rationale for loosening the rules. They also
wrap their proposals in the mantle of parental rights. That was the
justification for a law signed in 2023 by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, repealing a rule that required children under the age of 16
to verify their age and obtain the written consent of a parent or
guardian before obtaining a work permit. Employers had to provide
state officials with a job description and schedule.

Sanders’ office defended the law
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stating that obtaining a permit was “an arbitrary burden on parents
to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.”

Yet eliminating the requirement for a work permit also eliminates an
important source of information for parents about their children’s
working conditions. According to a paper published last year,
researchers at the University of Maryland found that states with work
permit requirements had 15.5% fewer child labor violation cases per
million population
[[link removed]] and
35.2% fewer minors working under illegal conditions than states
without such rules.

That brings us back to DeSantis’ Florida.

Last year, Florida loosened restrictions on child labor by dropping a
30-hour-per-week limit on work by 16- and 17-year-olds who are
home-schooled or have signed permission from a parent or school
superintendent; allowing those 16 and 17 to work more than eight hours
a day on holidays and Sundays, even if they have school the next day;
and allowing them to work more than six days in a row.

A second measure removed a ban on employing those youths on
construction sites, though it prohibited allowing them to work on
roofs or other structures more than six feet off the ground.

That wasn’t enough for DeSantis, who proposed a further loosening of
the rules this year because last year’s measures “did not go far
enough to relieve the burdens of employment for this group,” as
DeSantis aide Mary Clare Futch told legislative leaders in an email
obtained by the Orlando Weekly
[[link removed]].
The new measure, which is still under consideration by the state
Legislature, would eliminate a requirement that those 16 and 17 be
given a 30-minute meal break after four hours of work, though it
leaves in place the same rule for workers 15 or younger.

The measure would also remove a rule limiting work by 16- and
17-year-olds to the hours between 6:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. or for more
than eight hours a day when school is in session and for more than 8
hours a day when school is not in session.

DeSantis’ office explained that its purpose is to align Florida law
with federal rules, in order to “provide minors with more
flexibility in working” and allow families “to decide what is in
the best interest of their child.” Further, the governor’s office
said, “working allows children to learn valuable soft skills that
will help them be successful.”

In Florida, where almost 28% of all jobs are held by immigrants, the
industry with the highest concentration of immigrant labor isn’t the
resort industry but construction, in which 11.1% of employees are
foreign-born.

I asked DeSantis’ office if he wasn’t sugarcoating the employment
demand for young workers by referring to resorts rather than
construction. I also asked what jobs he held when he was “growing
up.” I didn’t receive a reply to either question.

As I’ve written before, the rollback of child labor protections
isn’t a matter of streamlining unnecessary regulations. It’s a
moral test for America
[[link removed]].
Some states have already flunked, but unfortunately they may not be
the last to bring this ancient atrocity back to life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist MICHAEL HILTZIK has written for the
Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years. His business column appears
in print every Sunday and Wednesday, and occasionally on other days.
Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for
articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. His
seventh book, “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the
Making of Modern America,” was published in 2020. His latest book,
“The Golden State,” is a history of California. Follow him on
Bluesky at hiltzikm.bsky.social, on X at twitter.com/hiltzikm and on
Facebook at facebook.com/hiltzik.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES [[link removed]] is the largest
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unique latimes.com visitors monthly, Sunday print readership of 1.6
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million. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Times
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* Labor
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* child labor
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* Florida
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* Iowa
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* Labor Law
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* big business
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* lobbyists
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* Project 2025
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* Donald Trump
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