Child Labor: DOL Action Needed to Better Protect Working Children

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Daderot · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

An estimated 2.8 million children worked in the U.S. in 2023, and the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Labor's own data on their injuries, illnesses, and deaths has significant gaps, including missing cause-of-death and industry information in fatality records. Annual cited child labor violations and the number of children affected have generally risen since fiscal year 2015.

DOL launched an initiative to strengthen enforcement but discontinued its interagency child labor task force in 2025, undercutting collaboration that GAO says didn't fully follow best practices even before it was scrapped. The agency also can't say whether its public outreach on child labor laws is having any effect.

GAO issued five recommendations, including fixing data gaps and evaluating outreach efforts. DOL agreed with three, neither agreed nor disagreed on outreach, and outright disagreed with the recommendation to fix its own data gaps.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A department that can't say why a child died on the job but keeps citing more violations every year has a filing cabinet problem dressed up as a policy problem. Disagreeing with the recommendation to fix your own data gaps is like a mechanic telling you the noise under the hood is fine because he doesn't want to look. Ninety years since the law passed and the ledger's still got holes big enough to walk a forklift through.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: At Rest · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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