Despite rising child labor violations and new Senate demands to investigate the nation’s largest meat processor, the U.S. Department of Labor remains silent on whether it has the staff to conduct future probes amidst a major reduction in its workforce.
At a May 22 congressional hearing, newly appointed Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said 2,700 department employees have taken a deferred resignation program offered to nearly all federal employees as a part of Trump administration-led staff reductions. However, she said enforcement staff with the Wage and Hour Division, who are responsible for investigating child labor, are exempt from the program.
“At the Department of Labor, our goal is to fully enforce the law and make sure that we are using the full enforcement capability of the Department of Labor to crack down if someone is knowingly breaking that law, and we will double down to do that,” Chavez-DeRemer said.
Federal agencies that enforce labor, environmental and agricultural laws have seen layoffs, budget cuts and attacks on federal workers in recent months under the Trump administration.
Jessica Looman, former administrator for the Wage and Hour Division under the Biden administration, said she worries ongoing cuts to staff and budgets will have a chilling effect on the division's ability to carry out its work.
“Enforcing federal child labor laws is one of the most important things that the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor does and it's critical that they have the resources to be able to do that work,” Looman said in an interview with Investigate Midwest.
The Wage and Hour Division has roughly 1,400 full-time employees and a budget of $260 million as of fiscal year 2024, according to DOL budget documents and interviews with former staff. The agency has around 700 investigators tasked with enforcing federal child labor and other labor laws.
In its 2025 budget proposal under the Biden administration, the Wage and Hour Division requested 50 additional full-time employees to continue investigating child labor.
“Over the last decade, WHD enforcement capacity has decreased from more than 1,000 on-board investigators to just over 720 investigators — one of the lowest levels in fifty years,” the document states.
The DOL would not answer direct questions from Investigate Midwest about how federal budget cuts and deferred resignations have impacted the Wage and Hour Division, or how these changes would affect its ability to conduct child labor investigations.
The concerns over cuts to staff responsible for child labor investigations come as multiple senators are calling for more investigations into potential child labor in meatpacking plants.
This month, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, sent a letter to DOL Secretary Chavez-DeRemer demanding an investigation into Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry processing company. Hawley said he was contacted by a whistleblower who previously worked for the company and claimed to have seen underage workers at a processing plant employed by a third-party contracting service, as well as hearing from other coworkers that underage workers were working at the facility.
“They're using child labor, they're using illegal immigrant labor and they're basically participating in an illegal human trafficking ring,” Hawley said in an interview with Investigate Midwest. “This has got to stop.”
Tyson Foods is still under investigation for the use of child labor at two of its facilities in Arkansas, according to a DOL statement from March. In a letter sent to Hawley, the Department of Labor confirmed the company is under investigation for child labor, but did not detail specific facilities.
“We do not allow the employment of anyone under the age of 18 in any of our facilities, and we do not facilitate, excuse, or in any other way participate in the use of child labor by third parties,” a Tyson spokesperson said in a statement to Investigate Midwest.
Hawley and Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker reintroduced legislation in March to prevent companies with child labor violations from obtaining federal contracts and funding.
Nearly half of all child labor violations in the past two decades have come from agriculture industries, with the number of child labor violations increasing 35% in the past 10 years, according to DOL data.
While crop production accounts for most of these violations, major meatpacking companies, such as Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Perdue Farms, Cargill and Mar-Jac Poultry have been fined and investigated for violating federal child labor laws in the past decade.
In 2023, the Wage and Hour Division announced that Packers Sanitation Service, a company formerly based out of Wisconsin and now headquartered in Atlanta, employed more than 100 children – ages 13 to 17 – at 13 meatpacking plants across the country. The company was fined $1.5 million for child labor law violations.
“With cuts going on in the Trump administration, we certainly have a fear that there's going to be even less capacity and less appetite for enforcing child labor laws,” said Todd Larson, co-executive director for environmental and labor advocacy group GreenPeace, part of a coalition working to prevent child labor in meatpacking and food processing..
While it’s unclear how child labor in the U.S. will be affected by federal cuts, international enforcement already has seen an impact.
The quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cut $240 million in funding for the Department of Labor’s International Labor Affairs Bureau in March, according to POLITICO. The office investigates global use of child labor in supply chains, as well as labor performed under human trafficking or coercion.
In a letter to the DOL, Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee called on the agency to reinstate funding to the bureau to prevent goods made under child labor conditions from entering the country’s supply chain and competing with the U.S. labor force.
“American trade policy relies on critical federal programs working overseas to challenge unfair competition from governments that commit egregious abuses in global supply chains,” the letter states. “By eliminating these and other technical assistance projects, the Administration is surrendering an essential tool for leveling the playing field and holding our trade partners accountable.”
This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.