More and more states are repealing child labor laws and so Governor Ron DeSantis has decided it’s a good time to do it here in Florida. He wants children working eight hour shifts from midnight to 8:00 AM on a school nights and while legally not having to give them breaks.
Transcript:
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Caleb Cunningham: So let’s talk about these child labor laws. More and more states are repealing child labor laws. Let’s be clear, it’s 2025, not 1825 and we’re seeing this across the country. And so DeSantis has decided it’s a good time to do it here in Florida.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what they want to do is almost put it on steroids because we have seen so many other right wing states say no more child labor laws. We’re loosening them. We’re changing restrictions. DeSantis says, you know what? I’m going to go one step further than everybody else. So not only are they trying to open it up to where children as young as 14 can now work overnight shifts on a school night for eight hours. They’ve also added, oh, by the way, they don’t get breaks. These children, the 14-year-old kids can work an eight hour shift from midnight to 8:00 AM on a school night and you legally don’t have to give them a break. We have seen some horrible child labor law changes. We haven’t seen something just that grotesque and of course it’s coming from Florida because that’s what DeSantis does.
Caleb Cunningham: Well, you know we saw Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, a year or two ago, she had the sad children around her and she was repealing the labor laws. And of course they were in little blazers and they were in little suits, and they’re not going to be in those little suits long because they’re going to be working at chicken plants. Mississippi rolled it back, 16-year-old got ground up in machinery last year or the year before. And so DeSantis, the Republicans here in Florida, unfortunately, think this is a great idea. Let’s get the kids around the hazardous machinery and put them to work so they don’t have to go to school. I find this sickening. And when you read some of this stuff, labor violations, child labor violations are up over 200% around the country. So that’s the backdrop we’re doing this to, that we’re repealing and trying to put the children to work and it’s just horrific. As somebody who has spent his career, both as a prosecutor and with Levin Papantonio, hunting people down who abuse children. This is rife for abuse. This is rife for companies to take advantage of children because look, I worked, when I was a kid through the high school, we had a program and we got to go and it was supervised by the school, so I got a grade. I learned those soft skills and hard skills. I don’t think anybody’s against that. But I think we should be against a child working a graveyard shift to help support his family because then his grades are worse and then he’s trapped. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Caleb Cunningham: This disproportionately affects lower income people.
Farron Cousins: And that’s what they’re trying to do right now, is just create this generation of loyal, uneducated workers. Right. You’re not going to be able to go to college. We’re going to trap you in this job because you have to, because your family can’t make ends meet because the economic situations that also, by the way we created, are so horrible for your family, you don’t have a choice. And that’s part of the big problem here, is that this is symptomatic of the overall economic collapse that we’re seeing and it also goes to the immigration issue. That’s the big reason DeSantis had to do this right now, is because you’ve got the farm workers union saying, listen, 60% of our workers here in the state of Florida for our farms, undocumented people. What are we going to do? Because you are the biggest cooperator with Trump’s administration to deport all these people. You’re actively preventing them from coming into the state. You are sending them out. The doctors have to report if an undocumented person walks in the door. We need workers. So DeSantis’ brilliant idea is, well, I saw some kids at a high school, go get them. Get the 14-year-old, eighth graders, because my daughter is 14 and she is in eighth grade, and she could now, if this passes and gets approved, go work overnight at a hotel with no breaks and then turn right back around and go straight to school from there. That’s insane.
Caleb Cunningham: We saw the same thing in Alabama, and I think it was 2011, they had HB56, they lost billions of dollars in crops, sweet potatoes rotting in the fields. Georgia did it around the same time. They couldn’t even get prisoners to pick the peanuts because nobody wants to do this. This is not an apprenticeship program where you can go and eventually become a welder or a journeyman of something and learn a skill, which we need in this country desperately. This is manual labor that other people don’t want to work and I think about that 16-year-old a lot in Mississippi who got ground up in a chicken plant because there’s limited safety and kids are vulnerable. They’re 14, 15, 16 years old. They can be pressured into things. They don’t know their rights. They don’t know when to say no. And these employers loiter it over. When I was a prosecutor, local fast food chain, he was sexually molesting all the teenage girls that worked there and then threatening to fire them if they told.
Farron Cousins: Oh, wow.
Caleb Cunningham: And so these are the type of abuses we’re going to see. Kids are going to die. Kids are going to get sexually molested because they’re on their high horse and they’re talking about soft skills and it makes me sick.
Farron Cousins: And to add a little bit of insult to injury, something a lot of people don’t realize is that, in a lot of states, Florida’s one of them for at least the first 90 days, if you’ve got somebody under the age of I believe 16 working, you can pay them less than minimum wage. So if these kids only do this over the summer, they could make $3 an hour, $4 an hour, doesn’t even have to be minimum wage.
Caleb Cunningham: It’s outrageous. And when really the fix of this is to have a functioning immigration system or to pay people a livable wage, and then you can get employees because that is capitalism. If you’re not paying people enough to fill your job, then you need to pay them more and you have to charge more. That’s what capitalism means. So we all say we’re fans of capitalism, but when it starts affecting these corporate dollars, we say, let’s put the 14 year olds to work in the plant.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
