A surefire way to suppress already low levels of youth employment is to raise the cost of employing younger workers. Some proposals in the Legislature would do that, in the name of helping these same workers.
One proposal, House Bill 125, would make it illegal to employ 16-and 17-year-olds after 9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and after midnight Friday and Saturday during the school year.
Were this to become law, employers would be subject to fines of up to $2,500 each time a high school student clocks out a minute late. (These fines are seldom imposed, according to the state.)
State law currently caps at 35 the number of hours older teens can work during a five-day school week. HB 125 was intended to fix an oversight in a previous revision of youth employment law that inadvertently let teens ages 16 and 17 work up to 48 hours during shortened school weeks. But this particular attempt at a fix would inevitably trigger unintentional violations of state child labor laws.
The predictable effect of such a law would be to discourage the hiring of high school students, and to reduce the hours of those who are hired.
New Hampshire already limits youth under the age of 16 to working between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. Adding a 9 p.m. curfew for older teens would further depress employment in this age group. Teen employment was declining sharply before the pandemic and fell again in 2020. It has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
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