When Lev Kaliuzhnyi was 16 he got his first job, at a clothing store in Plymouth Meeting. He worked as many hours as he could get — sometimes as many as 36 in a week.
“I was working eight-hour shifts, and even one time I picked up a double shift where I was working 11 hours in one day,” recalled Kaliuzhnyi, a Roxborough resident who’s now 18 and a first year student at Thomas Jefferson University.
At some point, however, his hours were reduced to no more than 4.5 hours per day, roughly the amount of time a teenager can legally work in Pa. without taking a mandated meal break.
“I heard from other co-workers that our manager was giving too many hours to underage kids, and management came in and was like, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ So she cut down and started giving less hours,” he said.
In fact, under state law, 16 and 17 year olds generally can’t work more than 8 hours a day or 28 hours during a regular school week.
The store where Kaliuzhnyi stocked shelves and rang up sales apparently never got in legal trouble for giving its teenage workers excessively long shifts, as far he knows. However, many other employers across the state have been hit with thousands of dollars in fines for doing the same thing, or for violating other child labor laws, especially in recent months.
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