I saw this on facebook and thought it had to be fake. I guess I was wrong, sadly.
Beneath the smugness of
Ron DeSantis, at Florida
leading the nation in immigration enforcement lies something of a conundrum: how to fill the essential jobs of the scores of immigrant workers
targeted for deportation.
The answer, according to Florida lawmakers, is the state’s schoolchildren, who as young as 14 could soon be allowed to work overnight shifts without a break – even on school nights.
A bill that progressed this week through the Republican-dominated state senate seeks to
remove numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and allow them, in the Florida governor’s words, to step into the shoes of immigrants who supply Florida’s tourism and agriculture industries with “dirt cheap labor”.
Unsurprisingly, the proposal has alarmed immigration advocates and watchdog groups concerned about child labor abuses and exploitation.
They point out that there is nothing “part-time” in the language of the companion
senate and
house bills currently before lawmakers, which instead will permit unlimited working hours without breaks for 14- and 15-year-olds who are schooled at home or online, and allow employers to require 16- and 17-year-olds to work for more than six days in a row.
“It’s essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), an independent research and economic analysis group.
“It’s important to remind people that teens can work. They can get that experience and some extra money if they need it. But there have to be protections in place to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this that’s absolutely not going to happen.”
“There’s different arguments that people will put on the floor in order to do what they think it takes to get a bill passed. Given some of the justifications that state leaders have made in recent days, it’s clear that they are linking the immigration issue and child labor,” she said.
“When the sweeping
anti-immigrant bill of 2023 passed, we did warn there would be impacts on the labor force and the economy given how reliant we are on immigrant labor. Of course, not all of those people are undocumented, but as we’ve seen recently at the federal level all types of people, even permanent residents, are getting threatened with deportation.
“Combined with what’s going on at the state level, that absolutely is a concern. It’s no surprise that last year, and then again this year, we’re talking about the need to fill gaps with other forms of labor.”
The Farmworker Association of Florida, which represents tens of thousands of low-income, immigrant laborers, says about 60% of its membership is undocumented, and most vulnerable to detention and deportation.
The state was singled out in a
2024 report by Governing for Impact and the Economic Policy Institute that recorded a surge in workplace injuries and violations involving minors – some in the agricultural industry where hazards include exposure to toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery.
The report noted a corresponding push in at least 30 mostly Republican-controlled states to weaken workplace protections for children, and warned the second Trump administration would
seek to escalate the rollback.
“The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has always been net migration and they’ll never go for that because of their politics. So their only answer is to widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger.”
Kennedy, however, pointed to another
Republican bill that progressed this week that would allow employers to pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage.
“To recap, they made the state hostile to immigrants. They deported a bunch of people, or scared people into not coming, or moving out of the state. They exacerbated worker shortages, so now they’re trying to gut child labor protection standards, while at the same time passing a law that would allow them to classify these children and other workers as interns,” he said.
“It’s insane, right?”
