The death of the summer job is a good thing

You may have heard that the summer job, once a rite of passage for American teens, is dying.

At least, that’s according to a spate of news stories since the Great Recession, with headlines like, “The End of the Summer Job?,” “The Death of the Great American Summer Job,” and “American ‘idle’? Teens have lost the summer job urge.”

The teenage workforce has indeed been shrinking for decades. In the 1970s, roughly 60 percent of American teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 were either employed or looking for work during the summer months. By 2016, only 35 percent were.

Since then, young people working in the summer months have seen something of a resurgence, with the employment rate for teens reaching 38 percent in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But even with that upward swing, the summer job is no longer the cultural staple it once was.

That might sound like bad news. Many Americans have long thought of summer jobs as a way to teach kids about work ethic, responsibility, and finances. But the decline in the teen labor force is actually a good thing — not a result of teenagers becoming lazier, as some narratives might suggest, but occurring in large part because they are spending more time in school. The high school graduation rate in 1975, for example, was just over 65 percent; it surpassed 90 percent by 2019.

As the writer Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2017, “With tougher high school requirements and greater pressure to go to college, summer classes are the new summer job.”

It’s not all good news, however — at least not for all kids. While some Americans might lament the passing era when teens earned extra money waiting tables or mowing lawns, a growing movement has seized on that nostalgia to drastically undermine child labor protections.

Over the past few years, dozens of states have introduced or enacted bills that increase the number of hours kids are allowed to work, expand the types of industries they can work in, and remove red tape by eliminating work permits that require parental consent.

The result is that a lot of young workers — and marginalized kids in particular — are at risk of being exploited, if they haven’t been already.

The United States started combating oppressive child labor at the same time workers across the country gained stronger protections.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which passed in 1938, set rules that limited the number of hours children are allowed to work and deemed some industries too hazardous for child workers. To this day, that law is the source of many child labor regulations at the federal level and is responsible for keeping kids out of brutal working conditions.

The Fair Labor Standards Act paved the way for American teens to prioritize their education — and to work safer and more rewarding jobs during the summer months, out of a desire to gain experience or socialize rather than out of need or desperation.

But as the summer job has been slowly phasing out of the typical American teenage experience, many state legislatures have been attacking child labor laws. According to the Economic Policy Institute, more than 30 states have introduced legislation to roll back child labor laws since 2021, and eight states have enacted those bills in 2024 alone.

Many supporters of weakening child labor standards argue that they’re simply making it easier for kids looking for work to land jobs. They also argue that current child labor laws create too many obstacles for employers to hire workers.

But by proposing to expand the types of industries kids can work in or to eliminate the youth minimum wage — which the federal government and many states already set as lower than the standard minimum wage — it’s clear that states curtailing child labor protections are, at least in part, engaging in an effort to make cheap labor more available for businesses at a time when a tight labor market is driving wages up, including for young workers. It’s not a coincidence that so many industry groups have lobbied for rolling back basic child labor protections.

These changes in standards have coincided with a rise in child labor violations by companies across the United States. In a New York Times exposé last year, the journalist Hannah Dreier uncovered the various ways migrant children have been exploited in brutal working conditions that all too often lead to serious injuries. And she found at least 12 cases of migrant children being killed on the job.

“The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles,” Dreier wrote.

There’s a stark contrast between the often privileged kids who take a job scooping ice cream or lifeguarding the neighborhood pool for a few months and the migrant and often poor kids working dangerous jobs or ungodly hours. And the weakening of child labor laws has little, if anything, to do with encouraging the former.

“There’s often a disconnect, especially when in states where these lawmakers are proposing rollbacks, where they sort of describe this workforce as if it’s like teens who just want to earn a little bit of extra pocket change and work in movie theaters. Those are the same youth they bring to the hearings to talk about how meaningful and fun it is to work in these jobs,” said Nina Mast, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute who focuses on child labor standards. “They’re always ignoring the reality that a lot of the most dangerous and difficult jobs are being done by migrant youth or other marginalized young people who are not being represented in these conversations.”

That means that lower-income and marginalized kids who might work to supplement their families’ incomes are entering a labor force with eroding standards.

That could eventually lead to even more disparities: Teens who work more than 20 hours a week tend to perform worse academically than kids who don’t have jobs, in part because they have less time to dedicate to schoolwork, which ultimately impacts their educational trajectory and prospects for higher-paying jobs later in life.

The effort to weaken child labor protections, in other words, helps to “create this permanent underclass of workers,” Mast said.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Labor has ramped up efforts to enforce federal child labor standards. In the last fiscal year, the federal government found nearly 5,800 children who were being employed in violation of US law. By contrast, the government found just over 1,000 cases 10 years ago.

It’s unclear how much of that increase is attributable to strengthened enforcement and how much is a result of a rise in illegal child labor, but the numbers lead to an alarming conclusion nonetheless: Thousands of children in the United States are being exploited for labor.

Yet, despite those findings, many predominantly Republican states have been plowing ahead with rolling back child labor protections.

Last year, for example, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a controversial bill that dramatically loosens child labor standards, including by extending the number of hours kids are allowed to work. When school is in session, 14- and 15-year-olds are now permitted to work six hours a day — until 9 pm during the academic year and until 11 pm during the summer — and 16- and 17-year-olds can now work the same hours as an adult. The law also allows teens to do work that was previously prohibited, including in potentially hazardous places, such as meat coolers and industrial laundry services.

In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders also signed a bill last year scaling back protections for young workers, including removing employer requirements to obtain work certificates that verify their workers’ ages and include parental consent.

The rollbacks aren’t only happening in Republican states. In New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that expands the number of hours kids can work during the summer, allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work a full-time schedule during the summer, and 16- and 17-year-olds to work up to 50 hours a week.

“At the same time that we’re seeing this rise in violations, we are also seeing this trend toward this coordinated industry-backed effort to roll back the child labor protections we have at the state level,” Mast said. The bills, she said, are scaling labor standards “back to the federal minimum or potentially, in some cases, to be in conflict with federal law.”

For decades, conservatives have pursued this goal to weaken or entirely abolish child labor protections and deregulate businesses. As my colleague Rachel M. Cohen wrote last year, “Some conservatives have long seen child labor laws as government overreach, dictating rules for minors that should be left up to individual families. Others simply oppose most forms of government regulation. Still others see youth labor restrictions as an unnecessary barrier at a time when companies are struggling to hire workers.”

Since these rollbacks have been implemented, some lawmakers have responded by proposing to strengthen child worker protections. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 20 states have introduced legislation to address weak child labor protections in 2024 alone. These bills include proposals to raise kids’ wages above the subminimum wage, restrict working hours, and ban work in some hazardous environments.

The major underlying problem with the broad effort to weaken child labor laws is that the brunt of the consequences will inevitably fall on marginalized kids who might work more out of financial need than to simply get the real-world experience a summer job might offer. The fact that some kids even resort to working to supplement their household incomes is itself a reflection of even deeper policy failures.

That’s why the response to weakening child labor protections shouldn’t just be strengthening their rights as workers. Instead, lawmakers should take a more holistic approach to protecting kids, including by expanding the social safety net that would keep them out of poverty, and by fixing the broken immigration system that currently leaves migrant children with little support and encourages them to find work instead.

Ultimately, child labor laws should mostly help give kids learning opportunities if they choose to seek them out themselves — as the summer job has long been billed to deliver.

Instead, the effort to scale these standards back has mostly given employers a workaround to get cheaper labor and forgo liability if something goes wrong.

“Something I think about a lot is just how the issues with child labor really reflect back on us — the economic policy choices that we’re making and our priorities as a country,” Mast said. “It’s kind of like a question of, do we want to return to a time where education and economic opportunity were only accessible to rich families and other families were forced from a young age into precarious and low-paid work?”

“Or,” she asked, “do we want to continue to make progress on ... policies that support the rights of children to grow up in safe environments?”