UCLA Labor Center hosts Workshop Highlighting the National Fight for Young Workers’ Rights
By: Jack Kearns, UCLA Labor Center Policy Advocate
On April 7, 2025, the UCLA Labor Center, in partnership with the University of Iowa Labor Center and the Thai Community Development Center, hosted a workshop on child labor at the United Association for Labor Education (UALE) Conference in downtown Los Angeles.
This workshop brought together labor centers, labor unions, and worker centers to discuss the distressing rise in child labor across the country, the attack on child labor laws at the state level, and the role of labor educators in protecting young workers.
Robin Clark-Bennett, labor educator at the University of Iowa Labor Center, presented on her collaboration with Iowa labor unions in response to Iowa Senate File 167, a bill introduced in early 2023 that would vastly reduce labor standards for children.
The University of Iowa Labor Center supported the Iowa Federation of Labor with fact sheets, research, and workshops, helping to provide accurate information in support of a movement that garnered national attention when hundreds of union members protested at the state Capital against the bill. While an amended version of the bill was eventually enacted, this education and advocacy were essential in ensuring the most extreme version of the bill was not signed into law and provided a playbook for other states dealing with similar bills.
Phatchara Udomsin, staff attorney at the Thai Community Development Center, presented on how his organization supported youth migrant workers found by the Department of Labor (DOL) to be working illegally at poultry processing facilities about 20 miles outside of Los Angeles in 2024. These children were unaccompanied minors primarily from Guatemala, working long hours on dangerous machinery to make ends meet.
The Thai CDC, along with several other community-based organizations as well as governmental agencies, were instrumental in providing resources to these workers, including immigration relief, public benefits enrollment, and distribution of back wages.
Jack Kearns, policy advocate at the UCLA Labor Center, provided a comprehensive presentation on the issue as a whole. Kearns has been working on this project with Kent Wong, director of Labor and Community Partnerships, in collaboration with the New World Foundation since October 2023. Kearns and Kayla Degala-Paraiso, former graduate student researcher on the project, conducted research on child labor and interviewed several young adults who worked dangerous jobs as children, including construction, logging, and agriculture.
Kearns and Wong also participated in a panel discussion on child labor with the Al Shanker Institute and the Department of Labor last October, educating teachers on the laws governing child labor and how to identify child labor warning signs in the classroom.
The UALE Conference also featured a workshop on young workers learning their rights, introducing strategies being used in classrooms and community spaces to teach young people about their rights as workers. This included presentations from labor educators across the country, including Alison Dickson from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Cassie Williams from the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Jessica Cook-Qurayshi from DePaul University.
Nicolle Fefferman, director of the Young Workers Education Project, and Jazmin Rivera, community education specialist at the UCLA Labor Center, presented their work teaching students at Los Angeles high schools about labor history, collective bargaining, and workers rights. The UCLA Labor Center’s Young Worker Initiative has spearheaded the creation of a curriculum to teach students about their workers rights pertaining to California’s new “Workplace Readiness Week” created by Assembly Bill 800 in 2023.
AB 800 is one prominent example of states strengthening protections for young workers in the response to efforts to weaken state child labor laws. Already this year, 13 bills have been introduced to rollback child labor laws.
“This is part of a coordinated attack by powerful conservative and business-oriented interest groups to fill labor shortages with cheap, exploitable child labor, ” said Kearns. “Most of the bills being enacted in the past few years have increased the number of hours children can work, created a subminimum wage for minors, repealed the requirement for state work permits that identify a child worker and their age, and created apprenticeship programs to allow children to work in hazardous industries.”
Conservative legislators in Florida introduced a bill in April that would allow 16-year-olds to work unlimited hours, even during the school year.
Child labor violations reported by the Department of Labor saw a huge jump beginning around 2021, as many companies sought to hire children to fill labor shortages coinciding with the pandemic. Last year, nearly four times as many minors were employed in violation of federal law than a decade ago.
The UCLA Labor Center remains committed to confronting these rollbacks through education, policy advocacy, and community partnerships that uplift and protect young workers.
