Buried among the 922 pages of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the far right blueprint for the next Republican president, is a proposal to make a major change to federal child labor law.
Since the 1930s, the federal government has banned children under 18 from working in occupations deemed “particularly hazardous” for youth. The Labor Department identifies specific off-limits roles, including operating power saws and compactors, or working in mines or near explosives. According to Project 2025, this labor ban “results in worker shortages in dangerous fields.”
“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,” assert the authors of the document, which was published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. They propose a change: “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”
This proposal would remove the governmental power to decide whether certain jobs are too dangerous for children, and place that power instead in the hands of parents. The suggestion is part of a larger right-wing movement to loosen federal and state restrictions on child labor. The think tank Economic Policy Institute noted that from 2021 to 2023, largely a period of low unemployment, at least 10 state legislatures moved to weaken child labor laws, and rollbacks were enacted in Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire and New Jersey.
Meanwhile, violations of existing child labor law are on the rise. The Department of Labor reported an 88 percent increase in child labor violations from 2019 to 2023. Many unaccompanied, undocumented children are exploited at their jobs in construction, factories and slaughterhouses, illegally working with dangerous machinery or on all-night shifts.
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“For too long this industry has evaded basic legal oversight,” a legal scholar told Truthout.
Chipping Away at Protections, One State at a Time
While Project 2025 suggests a change to federal law, in recent years, pro-business groups have pushed a new wave of state legislation dismantling child labor protections — often under the guise of promoting parental rights.
“Parental rights can be used for a variety of different purposes,” Naomi Cahn, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, told Truthout. “Sometimes parental rights can be used affirmatively to protect children, and sometimes parental rights can be used as a rhetorical device on behalf of other interests.”
In a 2024 scholarly paper, Cahn and her coauthors, Maxine Eichner and Mary Ziegler, outline how calls to weaken child labor laws “in the name of parental rights often have little to do with parental autonomy, instead reflecting the ambitions of well-funded campaigns by business interests.”
The Department of Labor reported an 88 percent increase in child labor violations from 2019 to 2023.
In 2023, Arkansas removed a decades-old law that required child workers under 16 to obtain a work permit from the state Division of Labor by showing parental permission, proof of age and a description of the job’s role and hours. The bill removing this requirement stated that it would “restore decision-making to parents concerning their children.”
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Rebecca Burkes, told the press, “We’re talking about empowering parents to make decisions and not getting permission from the government for this person to work.” A representative from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s office called the now-defunct rule an “arbitrary burden on parents.”
Similar proposals to remove work permit requirements for youths have been introduced in Missouri and Georgia. Meanwhile, the Nebraska legislature proposed a new, subminimum wage for minors. Other states have introduced legislation to lift restrictions on hazardous work for minors, similar to the proposal in Project 2025. Specifically, Minnesota legislation would allow kids as young as 16 to work construction jobs, while legislation in Iowa would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work in industrial laundries, and in industrial freezers and meat coolers at meatpacking plants.
Meanwhile, bills aiming to extend allowable work hours for youths have been introduced in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio and South Dakota, and passed in New Hampshire, New Jersey and Wisconsin. (Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Wisconsin’s bill.)
As in Arkansas, parental rights have been invoked in the debates surrounding some of these bills. Cahn’s article notes, for example, that the Ohio Restaurant Association supports Ohio’s proposal to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9:00 pm with parental consent. The industry group asserted that kids’ working hours should be “a choice that appropriately belongs to the family.”
This flurry of legislation is largely supported by business interest groups and right-wing think tanks concerned about worker shortages.
A 2023 Washington Post investigation revealed that a think tank called the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project played a central role in writing the Arkansas and Missouri legislation. According to The Washington Post, FGA was founded in 2011, and grew to $10.6 million in annual revenue by 2020, more than 70 percent of which came from 14 conservative groups. Top donors include the family foundation run by the Uihleins, conservative megadonors who made the third-most campaign contributions in the 2024 cycle; the 85 Fund, which is tightly associated with Leonard Leo, chairman of the board of the Federalist Society; and the Searle Freedom Trust, a conservative foundation that also funds ALEC and the American Enterprise Institute.
On its website, FGA lists such priorities as stopping Medicaid expansion, banning a universal basic income, rejecting DEI initiatives, “cleaning up voter rolls” (language right wing groups have adopted as a cover for voter suppression) and cutting off families’ Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits after 12 months.
When pushing for weakened child labor restrictions, FGA relies heavily on parental rights language. Vice President of Communications Nick Stehle asserted in a Fox News essay that “the main push for [Arkansas’ law, which FGA helped write] didn’t come from big business. It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish.” The organization published a 2022 article titled “How States Can Streamline the Hiring Process for Teenage Workers and Restore Decision-Making to Parents.”
Despite this parental rights language, FGA does little to hide its other motive: getting children into the workforce to fill labor shortages. Among its 2022 article’s “key findings” is the fact that “teenagers are a critical source of labor for businesses struggling to find help,” and that “cutting bureaucratic red tape can help stabilize the economy.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, legislation weakening child labor protections is also frequently supported by the National Federation of Independent Business, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, and associations representing industries like hotels, tourism and home building. The right-wing dark money group Americans for Prosperity is another common supporter.
Cahn and her coauthors assert that in the case of child labor rollbacks, “The use of parental-rights rhetoric … is an attempt to distract from the brute, profit-driven interests that are driving this legislation in order to hire children to perform jobs cheaply by casting these issues in the more politically palatable rhetoric of parental rights.”
Century-Old Rhetoric
While the attempts to roll back state child labor protections, as well as the federal change proposed in Project 2025, are part of a recent organized effort, it is not the first time child labor has been framed as a matter of “parental rights.”
Congress made its first attempt to federally limit child labor in 1916, following decades of lobbying by anti-child labor advocates. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act used the federal power over interstate commerce to ban the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor.
“The years I’ve put in the cotton mills stunted my growth. They kept me from getting any schooling. I had to stop school after the third grade.”
The law was challenged almost immediately. Soon after its passage, the Southern Cotton Manufacturers handpicked a favorable federal judge in North Carolina, then searched for parents of children in his district who stood to lose their jobs. The industry group settled on Roland Dagenhart, a father whose 14- and 12-year-old sons worked in a nearby mill. The judge, as expected, ruled in favor of the father, calling the law unconstitutional and ordering the United States attorney not to enforce it in his district. The Department of Labor appealed to the Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 decision, the business-friendly Supreme Court upheld the decision, striking down the Keating-Owen Act in 1918. Congress tried again with the 1919 Child Labor Tax Law, which taxed goods produced by child labor. When that, too, was overturned by the Supreme Court, advocates decided the only option was a federal amendment giving Congress the constitutional power to regulate child labor. The Child Labor Amendment was approved by Congress in 1924.
But when it went to the states for ratification, the amendment was fiercely opposed by business groups. Many were armed with parental rights rhetoric.
Cahn and her coauthors outline this opposition, noting that the American Farm Bureau Federation distributed a brochure titled National Child Labor Law or Socialistic Bureaucratic Control Supplanting Parental Control of Children, Plain Politics for Parents. And when the Georgia legislature voted against ratification, it noted the amendment “would destroy parental authority and responsibility throughout America.”
In The New York Times, Cardinal William Henry O’Connell, the powerful Catholic archbishop of Boston, warned that the amendment “would tend in the future to weaken the rights of the States and, what is worse still, the rights of parents over their children.”
Opponents painted anti-child labor activists as dangerous communists and Soviet agents seeking to destroy the United States and the American family. “This benign-looking amendment … is promoted under direct orders from Moscow,” the anti-socialist, anti-feminist Woman Patriot Publishing Co. petitioned Congress, warning that it would threaten “the future rights and liberties of every father, mother, and child in the United States.”
The opposition worked, and the amendment was never ratified.
In its place, Congress included a less complete set of child labor provisions in the New Deal era Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. These, too, were challenged, but passed muster in the Supreme Court, establishing a balance between governmental and parental authority over children’s work that has lasted for nearly a century.
Centering Parents Over Kids
The recent rollback of child labor restrictions is part of a broader conservative centering of “parents’ rights” — as seen in fights over public school curriculum, parental permission for children to use their preferred names at school and vaccine mandates.
Cahn and her coauthors point out the often inconsistent use of parental rights rhetoric: “When it comes to gender-affirming care, for example, some states override parental rights willingly.”
And a heavy focus on parental rights in the teenage workforce overlooks a more fundamental question: What is best for the kids themselves?
Advocates warn that the children who stand to lose the most are the ones already in the most vulnerable positions — especially immigrant children. An extensive 2023 New York Times investigation profiled several young teenagers working long, dangerous shifts at farms, meat processing plants and factories, often in violation of existing labor laws.
“I didn’t get how expensive everything was,” 13-year-old Jose Vasquez told the Times. Six days a week, he works 12-hour shifts at a commercial egg farm in Michigan. “I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay rent?”
“Sometimes I get tired and feel sick,” 15-year-old Carolina Yoc told the Times about her night shifts on an assembly line at Hearthside Food Solutions. At least 11 employees of the company have required amputations for workplace injuries since 2015. Yoc came unaccompanied to the United States from Guatemala, and hoped to learn English at school, but was struggling to continue school alongside her grueling work schedule.
In many ways, these children’s experiences harken back to the abuses that led to the 1916 Keating-Owen Act, and the attempt at a federal child labor amendment a century ago.
More than 100 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roland Dagenhart, overturning the Keating-Owen Act, his 14-year-old son, Reuben, resumed his 6:00 am to 7:00 pm shifts at the cotton mill. Six years later, a journalist tracked him down.
“I guess I’d been a lot better off if they hadn’t won it,” said Dagenhart, then 20. “Look at me! A hundred and five pounds, a grown man and no education. I may be mistaken, but I think the years I’ve put in the cotton mills stunted my growth. They kept me from getting any schooling. I had to stop school after the third grade and now I need the education I didn’t get.”
“It would have been a good thing for all the kids in this state if that law they passed had been kept.”
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Publish date : 2024-10-29 02:40:00
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