In February, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the nation is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations across all industries; since 2018, the agency has documented a 69-percent increase in children who were employed illegally. The vast majority of employers committing this wave of violations, as Teresa Cotsirilos explains in FERN’s most recent article, have something in common: they grow, package, deliver, cook, sell and serve the nation’s food.
A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry. The agency uncovered more than 12,000 child labor violations in the nation’s food system—out of 16,000 total violations across all industries—between Jan. 1, 2018 and Nov. 23, 2022, the most recent date for which data were publicly available. Investigators found minors working illegally at vegetable farms in Texas and Florida, at dairy farms in Minnesota and New Hampshire and at poultry plants in Alabama and Mississippi. Children are involved in every step of the food supply chain, working illegally from farm to table.