$37 Million in Penalties, 773 Kids in Hazardous Jobs

In Twin Falls, Idaho, a grocery chain called Swensen's Magic Markets put six minors — including a 13-year-old, below the legal working age for non-agricultural jobs — to work cleaning meat slicers, meat tenderizers, and grinders, loading trash compactors, and running a rotisserie.▸ The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division found the violations, and in June 2025 Swensen's agreed to pay $250,833 in civil penalties plus $5,078 in back wages. It is one entry in a federal dataset that, for fiscal year 2025, is the worst on record by two different measures at once: the most children found in hazardous work, and the most money ever assessed to punish it.

Federal law bars minors from a defined list of "hazardous occupations" — operating meat-processing machinery, working roofs, running forklifts, handling certain chemicals — regardless of parental consent.▸ In fiscal year 2025, the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division found 773 minors employed in violation of those rules, more than in any of the 13 fiscal years the agency has published data for, and more than double the 365 counted in FY2024. The Economic Policy Institute's independent tally of the same DOL series confirms it: hazardous-occupation violations "ticked up again after declining in the year prior."

That 773 is a subset of a bigger number: 5,272 minors total were found employed in violation of federal child labor law in FY2025, across 976 separate cases — itself the most cases WHD has resolved in any year since the Great Recession.▸ A Tennessee cleaning contractor, QSI, is a case in point: WHD found it had put children on overnight sanitation shifts at 13 meat and poultry plants across four states between January 2021 and February 2024, and it agreed to pay $400,000 in penalties in January 2025.

WHD's penalty total for the year — $37,215,327 — is also a record, and not a close one: it is 145% higher than FY2024's $15.2 million, and roughly 27 times FY2015's $1.39 million.▸ Spread across the 5,272 minors found in violation, that works out to about $7,059 per child — well under the $16,035 maximum federal law allows for a single non-hazardous violation, per the table of 2025 civil penalty levels that the Department of Labor left unchanged for 2026. A violation that causes a minor's serious injury or death can draw up to $72,876, doubled to $145,752 if it is willful or repeated.

The caps themselves didn't move for 2026 not by policy choice but by accident of timing: the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act requires the annual increase to be calculated from October's Consumer Price Index, and the October–November 2025 lapse in appropriations meant the Bureau of Labor Statistics never published that data.▸ The Office of Management and Budget told every agency, Labor included, to keep using 2025 penalty levels — a cap on the price of a child's safety, held flat by a government shutdown.

Federal law sets a floor; states are free to go higher, and for most of the last decade a wave of them did.▸ That wave broke this year. As of EPI's June 2026 count, at least 13 states introduced bills weakening child labor protections in 2026, and four have enacted them — Indiana's HB 1302 eliminated the state's youth work-permit system entirely. Only three states introduced bills to strengthen standards in 2026, down from 15 the year before, and only one — Oregon, which wrote current federal work-hour limits directly into state law as a floor against future federal rollbacks — actually passed one.

All fiscal-year figures are Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division data as published; FY2025 figures may still be subject to routine agency revision. Penalty totals are nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted.