Florida Governor Ron Desantis recently announced intentions of a rollback on labor laws for Florida youth on March 4th, 2025. Eventually regulations that determine work hours, school night shifts, and breaks during shifts will be loosened up, allowing more children to be capable of working, and for slightly more hours.
“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” explained Desantis in an interview with CNN 10.
While tourism is Florida’s largest industry, agriculture is its second with more than 300 commodities being produced on more than forty-four thousand farms. According to the America’s Heartland Florida Organization, Florida comes in second place to California in production of fresh vegetables, while also producing eighty-two percent of America’s citruses annually. Due to Trump’s new deportation policies, many immigrant workers are being removed from the United States and stripped of their jobs. Even when immigrants have not been deported yet, the fear of deportation is enough to make them refuse coming to work. This creates an abundance of jobs, but with a lack of workers. To fill this gap, Florida intends to weaken the child labor laws to have children replace the lost workers. According to the Miami Herald, Governor DeSantis stated in a panel discussion with Trump’s administration that a younger workforce could be the resolution to providing “dirt cheap” labor.
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when, you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts; college students should be able to do this stuff.” stated Desantis.
In previous years, Florida has had very strict child labor rules to keep children safe. This was a result of a mass exploitation of minors in agricultural work fields. Prior to modern laws, children as young as five years old were allowed to work in these fields. Not only were they working young though, they were also working in other dangerous jobs, such as the cigar industry. These rules were soon updated, but even then many loopholes were present, still allowing the exploitation of kids to continue.
As of now, Florida’s laws have been closely updated to keep children safe. The current regulations allow children no younger than fourteen to work jobs. If a minor gets a job, the employer is not allowed to schedule the minor night shifts, more than eight hours per day on school nights, and more than thirty hours per week while school is still in session. With the upcoming changes though, children will be allowed more hours, and allowed school night shifts, worrying many about the exploitation of the kids.
“I disagree with the changes Florida wants to make. I’m employed by my family business, but still only work on weekends. Having children working more hours and on school days seems unfair since money is a persuasive object that can likely make the child eager to work the other shifts. This can pull them away from their school work and other things kids should be doing,” commented Jayden Nyuen (‘27).
These rule changes are crucial to be aware of because, just like Florida, California is an agricultural state. California is likely to suffer from Trump’s deportation laws as nearly 500 thousand farm workers here are undocumented according to CBS News “California Farmworker Explains How Undocumented Immigrants Find Work”. Once one state proposes regulations, more states are likely to follow suit. With the similarity of both Florida and California being agricultural states, it opens up the possibility of the same rules weakening Florida’s child labor laws to be implemented in California. Therefore California youth should be educated as well, so they are not taken advantage of when working.
