Many "right-to-work" states have already passed laws that chip away at workplace protections for children. It is not coincidental that those states have also successfully diminished union influence.
From before the founding of this country and up to 1938, child labor had been a constant in America. The data we have from this time is scant and the complete scope of the problem of child labor has never been fully expressed. But the data we do have implies that the number of children doing adult jobs was vast.
Researchers looking at the turn of the 20th century say that in 1904, 25 percent of all mill workers were children, and almost half were under the age of 12. They reported that in Pennsylvania, 14,000 children used machines to sort coal and that 75 percent of those who were killed doing this job were children under 16. Mine workers under age 16 were three times more likely to die than were adults.
And there are the horror stories that illustrate the harm of child labor. In 1911 a fire swept through the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City where a crew of workers had been locked inside a 10th floor workplace. Of the 146 people who died in the fire, 29 of them were children.
Unions Put and End to a Travesty
These stories and data pinpoint the travesty: Children, the most vulnerable of all Americans, were easily and commonly exploited for the sake of commerce.
During the early decades of that century, newly formed worker unions lobbied for rules to better define the jobs that children should be allowed to do and the number of hours they should be allowed to do them. Finally in 1938, emboldened by the growing strength of organized labor and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed. The FLSA adopted the child labor positions put forth by unions. And the unjust exploitation of child labor was virtually ended.
Abusive child labor was ended by the FLSA act in 1938. It's making a comeback.
What’s in the FLSA
The FLSA defined when, where, and how minors could work. The legislation prevents children under age 18 from working in nonagricultural occupations declared hazardous by the U.S. secretary of labor. This requirement keeps young workers from having to perform functions such as handling explosives or working in places where they may be exposed to radioactive substances.
In addition to receiving at least a minimum wage, children under 16 are not to work more than 3 hours per day between Monday and Friday and no more than 18 hours in a week. These rules are in place to make education every child’s primary focus.
Project 2025 Seeks to Exploit Child Labor Again
The proposed governing playbook called Project 2025 now proposes eliminating these protections against hazardous work for children. It challenges the U.S. Department of Labor to “amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.” In other words, let kids work in dangerous jobs.
Even before Project 2025 can be put in place, its abusive sentiment is already at work in the “right-to-work” (RTW) states where unions have been thwarted by lopsided law making. In these 26 states, legislatures have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 of those states have enacted them. In Iowa it is now legal to hire a 14-year-old to perform assembly line work in factories and meatpacking facilities.
These proposals are a direct result of lobbying by powerful, monied interests, who see children as inexpensive labor that benefits the corporate bottom line. Project 2025 seeks to make these changes on a national scale.
New Data: More Kids Are Already Endangered
The Department of Labor says that 2019 there has been an 88 percent increase in cases where children were found to be employed in violation of child labor laws. In 2023 the DOL “assessed more than $8 million in penalties, an 83% increase from the previous year.”
And as more children are forced into dangerous jobs more wrenching stories of their harm emerge. In Pennsylvania a teenage boy died after getting pulled into a woodchipper on a worksite. In Wisconsin a 16-year-old boy died working in a sawmill after he became entangled in a machine. In RTW states children work in slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities.
The DOL also says that dangerous child labor leads to impaired mental health, harmfully impacts educational development, and interferes with proper social acclimation. Meanwhile, reports of employers pressuring kids to work longer hours are legion.
This is not the right direction.
The best way to stop the ideas espoused in the Project 2025 manifesto is to vote against the people who intend to realize those ideas. Another way is to support unions. From their very beginnings, unions have argued for safeguarding childhood and clearly defining the types of work kids should be allowed to do, at what ages, and limiting the amount of time they can do it. Because of unions, like the hard-working crews that build New York City’s best buildings, mass exploitative child labor has been old news.
But it’s making a comeback. So do like our unions do: fight back.
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