By Clara Nowak
UNITED STATES — The number of child labor violations in the United States has risen fivefold over the last ten years, and the number of minors illegally employed in hazardous occupations has more than doubled between 2015 and 2025. Those are only the violations that make their way into official figures; the current regime has drastically decreased inspections and enforcement of labor laws, and for the last several years, states around the country have been reducing their own labor protections for youth.
The violations, which numbered over 5,000 in 2025, varied from widespread safety and hours violations at fast-food chains, to meatpacking plants employing minors for overnight shifts with dangerous industrial equipment.
Several states have passed laws that allow further exploitation of children this year alone: Indiana eliminated its tracking of employers with workers under age 18, Nebraska implemented a lower minimum wage for 14 to 15 year old workers, Washington extended the maximum hours for minors in work-based learning programs, and West Virginia removed some prohibitions on hazardous work for minors entirely.
Since 2021, similar bills have been introduced across 30 states, and 17 states have successfully passed them so far. Some of these changes make it legal for children be paid less than adults for the same work, to work more hours, or to do more unsafe jobs; not only legalizing their further exploitation, but making it more profitable for businesses to replace their more expensive, and more powerful, adult workers. Others make it harder to catch companies that break the laws that still exist, ensuring that many cases of exploitation will go unnoticed.
Federal law sets bare minimum standards that ban certain exploitation regardless of state laws. However, the penalties under federal law have not been preventing the sharp year-over-year increase in violations, and the federal government has become even less interested in enforcing any labor laws under the current regime. Last year, there was a general 97% decline in wage and hour cases and a 35% decline in health and safety cases brought compared to the year before.
In addition to cases that are not caught, data on child labor violations does not include child labor that is not illegal, but still may be unsafe or harmful. Many federal child labor restrictions have different standards for children who work on farms, allowing children under 12 to be legally employed for agricultural labor and allowing teenagers 16 and older to work agricultural jobs considered hazardous in what is statistically one of the most dangerous industries in the United States.
These rollbacks are not just an attack on adult workers’ bargaining power; they are a declaration that the ruling class is willing to feed children directly into the machinery of exploitation wherever profit demands it. Child labor will not be ended by appeals to the same state that licenses it, but through struggle against the capitalist order that treats every life, young or old, as raw material for accumulation.
