Florida faces worker shortage due to deportations. Their solution: Child labour
ByHT News Desk | Edited by Nikita Sharma
Mar 30, 2025 04:45 PM IST
Florida's move aims to fill jobs left by deported immigrants but has drawn criticism for potentially exploiting minors.
While the Trump administration is working with full dedication to impose stricter immigration rules and ensure the deportation of illegal immigrants, it has led to a gap in the job market. The question arises - who is going to take up the essential jobs that were done by deported immigrants, at quite considerable budgets.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has supported the bill, saying that nothing is wrong with expecting teens to work part time.(File/AP)
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has supported the bill, saying that nothing is wrong with expecting teens to work part time.(File/AP)
Florida, a Republican state known for its many beaches and harsh weather, has come up with a solution that many may not agree with - getting teenagers to join the workforce.
“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? That’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” the Guardian quoted Ron deSantis, Florida’s governor, as saying.
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be [doing] all this stuff,” he added.
Bill to ease child labour laws
A bill that aims to ease laws around child labour was presented by the state legislature on Tuesday. The bill, if passed, will allow teens as young as 14-year-olds to do overnight shifts, doing away with the current restriction on working between 11 pm to 6:30 am for children, reported CNN.
The bill was passed on Tuesday by the Florida Senate’s Commerce and Tourism committee with a 5-4 vote. It has to pass through two more relevant committees following which it will be presented to the full Florida Senate for vote, the report added.
Raising concerns
The bill, which aims to loosen child labour laws so that can enter the workforce and potentially fill the void left by deported undocumented immigrants, has drawn flak from groups concerned with child labour abuse.
They have expressed concern that the bill potentially means that teens will be treated like adults while their bodies and minds are still developing. “It’s essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year,” the Guardian quoted Alexis Tsoukalas as saying. Tsoukalas is a senior policy analyst at an independent research group - Florida Policy Institute (FPI).
He also added that while teenagers can work for some extra income if they wish to, they still require protection which will be taken away if the bill is passed.
A similar child labour law was also passed last year, which allowed additional hours of employment for minors. The bill removed “certain hourly restrictions for minors 16 and 17 years of age to work and provides a new exemption for those minors who are enrolled in an approved virtual instruction program,” says Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
In 2023, a law was passed in Florida that made it difficult for undocumented immigrants to land jobs in the state. It required the employers who have over 25 employees to check whether all of them were legal citizens, says the CNN report. Even then, concerns were raised regarding the gap in the labour force that law would create.
Referring to it, Florida Immigrant Coalition’s spokesperson Thomas Kennedy said that this is a form of “exploiting minors” as the state seeks to pull them into the state’s labour force. “We’ve been saying since 2023 that this is a way for them to exploit minors, it was when they passed this large, anti-immigrant omnibus and the same year that they tried to pass the first law gutting child labor protection,” the Guardian quoted him as saying.
“The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has always been net migration and they’ll never go for that because of their politics. So their only answer is to widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger,” he added.
Both Tsoukalas and Kennedy remain hopeful that the bill may not pass the state senate since there are some Republican senators who have expressed their reservations against it, the report added.
Child labour violations in other US states
The state of Arkansas witnessed a spike in child labor violations last year. According to a report released by Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, the state saw spike of a whopping 266% in child labour violations, from 460 to 1,685 between 2020 to 2023.
AACF’s report says that over half the child labour violations between 2020 to 2024 include making teens work for hours longer than legally set. Another big violation included not obtaining an employment certificate to hire teens below 16 years of age.
In 2023, the state governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders passed a bill making it easier to employ children by doing away with obtaining the said certificate, saying that it was “an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job,” said an NPR report.
Those who don’t agree with the bill say that it takes away teens' protection from exploitation.
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