Governor Mike DeWine
Riffe Center, 77 South High St., 30th Floor
Columbus, OH 43215

Dear Gov. DeWine:

I write today to urge you to veto Senate Bill 50 (SB 50), which would allow employers to schedule children ages 14 and 15 for work as late as 9:00 p.m., beyond the 7:00 p.m. limit maintained by federal law.

Throughout your tenure as governor, you have called on lawmakers to allocate more funds to K-12 education and childcare, and to invest in literacy. But children’s success in school also depends on them being rested and ready to learn, having had time to complete their homework. Provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act that limit working hours for teens under 16 to three hours per day, before 7:00 p.m., are designed to make sure students can spend their time learning.

SB 50 would dismantle the 7:00 p.m. protection, if it were allowed to supersede federal law. And though SB 50 does not provide for an extension of the three-hour limit, it opens the door to skirting this requirement.

Such legal safeguards help protect children from abusive labor conditions. Loosening restrictions on hours worked reduces agencies’ chances of intervening before abuse gets even worse, as it recently has: Violations of child labor laws verified by the USDOL have increased 31% since pre-COVID-19. In 2023, an Ohio lathe mill paid $22k in fines for employing a 15-year-old to operate a wood processing machine, when he “became entangled in the gears,” and employed four minors under the age of 16 outside of the allowed hours. A Cincinnati pizza restaurant was fined $30k for allowing children under the age of 16 to operate gas ovens and open flames, and assigning 16 minors shifts in violation of FLSA. Restaurants employ the largest share of youth and are the most prevalent violators of child labor laws of any industry. The restaurant industry is known for low wages, weak labor standards, and abusive working conditions – including high rates of sexual harassment. Of the 922 child labor violations in Ohio verified by the USDOL in the last 5 years, 87% were by accommodation and food service companies.

Dismantling long-settled laws designed to protect children from abuse clears the way for corporations to access and exploit children in desperate situations, instead of paying livable wages that would attract adult workers. It may be appropriate for young teenagers to work a few hours a week to earn spending money or gain job experience. Current law allows this already. Limiting young teenagers to three hours per night and not past 7:00 p.m. on school nights ensures that they are able to go to school. Teenagers need evening hours to do their homework, participate in extracurricular activities and rest.

Rolling back child labor protections to solve an adult workforce issue is a regressive attempt at circumventing the economic needs of Ohio workers. The fact that some families depend on the earnings of children is a problem — one that reflects the failure of our labor market to deliver livable wages to adults in the workforce, and of policymakers to implement a minimum wage that meets the cost of living. Instead, policymakers are opening the door for businesses to cut costs through employing children, who are permitted to be paid less than the minimum wage under federal law.

Like the three-hour school-day work limitation, the ban on children working in certain food processing and manufacturing facilities would remain if SB 50 becomes law. However, the state and federal governments allocate far too few resources to wage and hour enforcement. Lifting the 7:00 p.m. work limitation would remove an enforcement tool now available to oversight agencies in the USDOL and Ohio’s Commerce Department, making it less likely that violations of this type are discovered and stopped.

Lucy Manning wrote for the USDOL that “laws preventing child labor, like other laws for the protection of workers, help to improve working and living conditions for all the people.” She wrote those words in 1946. That’s how far back I had to look to find discussion on the need for child labor protections, because these points have long been settled law — codified in the Fair Labor Standards Act since 1938 — and common sense.

Ohio lawmakers must not condone the commodification of children. That members of the state legislature would do so by passing SB 50 is a shameful dereliction of their duty to protect all Ohioans and create a state in which all children are able to complete their education. I urge you to veto it.

Sincerely,