Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law HB 917, legislation related to career and technical education that also rolls back child labor protections.
Florida’s Department of Education and the Deparment of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) both emphasize that the state’s child labor laws are meant to protect children’s health, workplace welfare, and education. Yet in 2023, the Legislature began efforts to weaken these laws, ultimately passing two harmful bills impacting up to 94,000 working teens as a result. This rollback is part of a larger national trend, despite child labor violations having increased by 78 percent in the Sunshine State (from 85 to 151) between 2020 and 2023. [1]
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The perils of child labor became front and center in the early 20th century amid the second industrial (i.e., technical) revolution. This technological progress had a downside. It meant that more children were working in factories, canneries, street trades, and Florida’s cigar industry, while the employment of children in agriculture, like Florida’s citrus and strawberry fields, continued. It was not uncommon to find children as young as 5 and 6 years old working in these settings; some were paid meager wages, while others were deemed “apprentices” and not paid at all.
In response, social workers, alongside the national and Florida chapters of the Child Labor Committee, mobilized to enact the state’s first robust protections in 1913. Florida’s child labor laws have been amended numerous times since and are now regulated by the DBPR. However, protections still do not apply to child domestic workers or legislative pages. Moreover, Florida does not have its own administrative entity (like a Division of Labor Standards or Department of Labor) to enforce wage and hour laws, unlike most states.
Weakening Florida's child labor laws amid lax state oversight is dangerous for Florida youth — including immigrant youth, who are increasingly exploited by employers. To ensure children are empowered to thrive in work and in life, it is vital that Florida resist efforts to further erode child labor laws.
Note
[1] Florida Policy Institute analysis of Fair Labor Standards Act-Child Labor violations in Florida from 2019 to 2023 via the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Enforcement database, accessed March 14, 2024, https://enforcedata.dol.gov/views/search.php
