Inside the perfect storm of rising child labor violations and the campaign to break down laws that have been on the books for 85 years.
When we think of child labor in the U.S., we tend to picture century-old archival photos of young children toiling in mines, factories, and tobacco fields. While it’s comforting to imagine that those days are behind us, child labor — dangerous work involving kids under the age of 17 — has never really gone away and is, in fact, making a big comeback in the U.S. The Department of Labor reported that the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws is dramatically on the rise, with a 37% jump last year alone. And while child labor violations are increasing, so are state-by-state efforts to weaken child labor laws, some of which have been on the books since the New Deal.
In recent years, at least 14 states have introduced legislation designed to weaken child labor laws — and some of those states have succeeded. As of June 2023, four states had officially rolled back laws designed to keep kids safe in the workplace. These rollbacks of longstanding protections for kids have been framed as “pro-family” — that the laws give parents more power to allow their kids to work earlier outside of the home as a character-building experience, and as cold economic pragmatism. We’re in a labor shortage, that argument goes, and the “red tape” around youth employment is a barrier to growing the economy.
But experts in youth employment and child...
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