Connor here: SEM certainly is like the case of “everything that plan and everything goes on.” As the following report points out, the Trump Department of Labor (DOL) says the Wage and Hours Division, which is responsible for investigating child labor, is exempt from the Doge-inspired postponed resignation program. Even if it’s hard to imagine them making the situation worse. As the New York Times reported, wage and time divisions under the Biden administration were severely understaffed and were years ago.
The department has 750 investigators who oversee fair labor standards at 11 million workplaces, including 3,000 slaughterhouses. Even if an inspector catches a child’s labor violation, the maximum offender per child is $15,000, and usually fines the subcontractor, not the brand itself. Lawmakers are pushing for the largest fines to increase, but Congress is shaking as each has drafted its own bills and refuses to vote for the law introduced by the other side.
Leaving child work violations and new Senate violations to investigate the nation’s largest meat processors, the U.S. Department of Labor remains silent on staff implementing future probes amid a massive cut in the workforce.
At a May 22 Congress hearing, newly appointed Labry Lori Chavez-Dermer said 2,700 department employees have acquired a deferred resignation program in which nearly all federal employees have been appointed as part of Trump-administered staff. However, she said that executive staff in the wage and time department responsible for investigating child labor are exempt from the program.
“In the Department of Labor, our goal is to ensure that if Subsone knowingly breaks that law, then use the full enforcement ability of the job to crack the download.
Federal agencies registering the Labor, Environment and Agriculture Act have seen federal workers layoffs, budget cuts and attacks in recent mouths under the Trump administration.
Jessica Luman, a former manager of the Biden administration’s Wage and Hours Division, said she is worried about continuing cuts in staff and budgets.
“Federal Labor Law Enforcement Act is one of the most important things about wages and time division of the U.S. Department of Labor, and it’s important that you have the resources to do the job,” Luman said in an interview with the Midwest Research.
Emergence from Senator Josh Hawley’s letter to Secretary of Duty Lori Chavez Demer dated May 6, 2025. The complete letter can be read below.
According to a DOL budget document and an interview with former staff, the wage and time division has around 1,400 full-time employees and a budget of $260 million as of 2024 prosecutors. The agency has around 700 investigators who are tasked with federal enforced child labour and OHER labour laws.
Under the Biden administration’s STIS 2025 budget proposal, the Wages and Hours Division kept 50 additional full-time employees to continue investigating children’s jobs.
“In the past decade, enforcement capacity has decreased from over 1,000 investigators on board to over 720 investigators, the lowest level in 50 years,” the document states.
DOL does not answer any direct questions from the Midwest survey about how federal budget cuts and postponed resignations affect wage and time divisions, or how these changes affect children’s ability to study work.
An excerpt from the response of King Donald M. Harrison III, acting DOL administrator, addressed to Senator R-Missouri, May 12, 2025.
Concerns over the reduction in staff responsible for investigating child jobs have led several senators to seek more investigation into potential child jobs in meat packing plants.
This month he was a US Senator. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, felt a letter to Secretary Chavez Deremar calling for an investigation into Tyson Foods, the country’s largest poultry processing company. Holy said they were previously in touch with whistleblowers, a facility.
“They use child labour, they use illegal migrant workers, and are basically involved in illegal human trafficking rings,” Holy said in an interview with the Midwest Research. “This is falling to stop.”
According to a March DOL statement, Tyson Foods is still investigating the use of child work at two Arkansas facilities. In a letter sent to Holy, the Labor Bureau is investigating the company for child work, but didetoil unified the facilities.
“We do not allow employment of people under the age of 18 at the facility and will not promote, excuse or otherwise participate in the use of children’s work by third parties,” Tyson’s spokesperson said in a statement Investigating the Midwest.
Holy and Democrat New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker reintroduced the law in March to prevent businesses that involve child labor violations with federal contracts and funds.
According to DOL data, nearly half of all child labour violations in the past 20 years have come from the agricultural industry, with the number of child labour increasing by 35% over the past 10 years.
Most violation crop production affirmations have been investigated by major meat packing companies such as Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Lost Pharma, Cargill and Mar Jack Poultry Farm, and other fed fines for feder biting.
In 2023, the Wages and Time Division announced that Packers Hygiene Services, a former Wisconsin-based company and now headquartered in Atlanta, has hired more than 100 children, ages 13 to 17, at 13 meatpacking factories nationwide. The company was fined $1.5 million for violation of the Child Labor Act.
Sub-worried Trump reductions will harm future enforcement efforts
“As the Trump administration is under way, we have to fear that we will have even less capacity and less desire to enforce the work laws for children.
It is unclear how US child labour will be cap-fided by federal cuts, but international enforcement has already had an impact.
According to politics, the government’s quasi-government agency cut $240 million in March for the Department of Labor’s International Labour Affairs Bureau. The office is investigating the global use of child labour in the supply chain and the implementation of work.
In a letter to the DOL, Democrats’ Democrats mean the Democrats’ methods and means that rest on agencies to restore funding to the bureau, in order to prevent goods made under child working conditions from entering the country’s supply chain and competing with the US workforce.
“American trade policy on critical federal programs working abroad to challenge unfair competition from governments that have committed terrible abuse in the global supply chain,” written condition. “By eliminating these and other technical assistance projects, the administration is abandoning key tools to level the arena and maintaining trading partner accounts.”
