Two hundred and sixty children died in work-related incidents in the United States between 2013 and 2023. For more than half of them, the official records lack detailed information about the industry in which they worked or the cause of death. Twenty-four dead children a year, on average, and the authorities cannot produce a complete account of where and how they died.
The Government Accountability Office points to failures of coordination. Since January 2025, cooperation between the Department of Labor and other federal agencies over child labour violations has “largely diminished”. Keep that finding in mind while looking at what the employers have been doing.
Between fiscal years 2015 and 2025, 59 percent of recorded child labour violations involved making fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds work longer or later than federal law allows. Longer and later: that is what the employer wanted from the child. The law had already set a limit. The employer scheduled the work beyond it.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about this. The employer hires workers to make money from their labour and wants to use that labour as profitably as possible. A restriction on working hours gets in the way. The worker needs rest; the employer has work to be done. Now make the worker fourteen years old. The need for rest becomes greater, schooling has to be allowed for, the body is still developing — but the business still has work to be done, and the employer still wants it done. The age of the worker hasn’t abolished the employer’s interest in taking more of their time.
The figures show us which consideration prevailed. These employers had a legal obligation to stop at the permitted hours. They took more.
The number of children recorded as illegally employed rose from 1,012 in fiscal year 2015 to 5,272 in fiscal year 2025. More than five times as many. Accommodation and food services accounted for 62 percent of violations over the period. Keep the names of those industries in view. We are dealing with the businesses through which meals and accommodation are supplied, with employers arranging their ordinary business at children’s expense.
The fatality figures describe a different distribution. Among the 109 deaths for which an industry was recorded, three-quarters were in agriculture. Among the 111 for which a cause was recorded, two-thirds involved transportation. We have to keep repeating “for which”: the missing information prevents us from treating these proportions as a complete picture of the deaths. That qualification belongs in the indictment. Children have died, and the records needed to trace the dangers are incomplete.
Changes in data collection in 2021 prevent comparisons of injuries and illnesses with earlier years. A Labor Department survey and two other federal datasets containing information on child labour injuries have ended. The wage and hour division “has not fully addressed” its enforcement difficulties. Add the decline in cooperation since January 2025, and consider the position of an employer breaking the rules: the agencies supposed to detect the violation have less help from one another, while important sources of information have been lost.
Alongside all this, nineteen states have moved to relax child labour laws since 2021. The employers who break restrictions are accompanied by lawmakers prepared to loosen restrictions. A child can be worked under a weaker law as well as in defiance of a stronger one. The hours still have to be lived through. Changing the legal limit doesn’t give a fourteen-year-old another body.
Bobby Scott, who led the request for the GAO investigation, says that the Trump administration’s upheaval of federal agencies has harmed children. He describes the consequences this way:
“As a result of the administration’s chaos, the federal government’s response to child labor lacks coordination, and its enforcement of child labor laws is less effective.”
Chaos in the agencies can be very convenient to an employer who wants to carry on breaking the law. The officials fail to cooperate; the employer carries on using the child’s labour.
Scott has introduced the Protecting Children Act to improve the collection and use of information for enforcement. Yes, collect the information. Use it to make employers obey the law. A child spared an illegal shift has gained something definite, and workers have every reason to defend that gain. But keep hold of the dates. The 260 deaths occurred between 2013 and 2023. Moves to weaken state laws began before Trump’s return to office. His administration is answerable for the retreat on its watch; an explanation of child labour has to reach further back, into the businesses employing the children and the conditions that make their labour available for purchase.
At the centre of it stands the employer’s ownership of the workplace. The employer decides whom to hire, sets the schedule and uses the work to make a profit. The child enters that workplace as a seller of labour-power, subject to commands backed by the employer’s power over the job. Legal restrictions put limits on those commands. Their value is real, which is precisely why their weakening matters. But the employer remains in possession, with the same reason to demand more work tomorrow. Under bourgeois rule, protecting the child means continually restraining a power that the whole organisation of production leaves in the employer’s hands.
Take that power away, and the work itself can be organised differently. Under socialism, farms and businesses brought into social ownership would be run as part of a common plan, with workers holding political power. Food would still have to be grown, meals prepared, accommodation provided. The people planning that work would have to provide adult workers, equipment and workable hours to do it. An unfilled shift would be a staffing problem to solve within those limits. A private owner’s profit would no longer give that owner the power to demand a child’s evening.
This also requires children to be fed, housed and educated without having to earn their own keep. A socialist plan would include what their households need to support them, together with schools and other public services. Resources would have to be assigned to those purposes, and the assignment enforced. That is practical work, requiring records, supervision and competent administration. It gives those tasks a clear purpose: securing the child’s development, including the time development takes. Any work undertaken as part of a young person’s education would have to answer to that purpose.
Now return to those fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds scheduled beyond the legal limits. Even within the hours permitted by capitalist law, the employers couldn’t be satisfied. They wanted more of the children’s time, and they took it. The state whose laws they violated has been losing sources of information and cooperation between its agencies, while nineteen states have moved to loosen the rules.
The employers’ conduct is plain enough. Let their claim to decide how children work be judged by what they have already done with it.
