Under current Florida state law, children as young as 14 cannot work overnight shifts; the new proposed bill would change that.
Florida is looking to children as young as 14 to fill the vacancies left by the state’s crackdown on employers who hired undocumented workers. According to CNN, in a bill recently advanced through the Florida Senate’s Commerce and Tourism Committee, children as young as 14 years old would be able to work overnight shifts—even on school nights. Under the state’s current law, children are not allowed to work before 630 a.m. or past 11 p.m.; homeschooled 16- and 17-year-olds are allowed to work any hour of the day.
The latter rule was passed by the Florida legislature in 2024.
The bill in consideration would have to pass through two other committees before being taken up for a full vote by the Florida Senate. Other notable proposed changes to current state law in the bill include eliminating daily hour restrictions on 14- and 15-year-olds who are homeschooled and eliminating guaranteed meal breaks for employed 16- and 17-year-olds.
The bill comes in response to the state’s need to fill low-wage and “undesirable” jobs left open once the state’s employee immigration status verification law took effect in 2023. The bill, signed into law by Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, requires all employers with 25 or more employees to use a federal database to check the immigration status of each worker. Any businesses found to be non-compliant with the verification can be fined $1,000 per day until they can prove all of their employees are legally able to work in the United States.
While this policy successfully reduced the number of undocumented workers hired by employers, it left a void of unfilled jobs, hence the desire to loosen child labor laws, a move that Gov. DeSantis supports.
“Yes, we had people that left because of those rules, but you’ve also been able to hire other people. And 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,” said Gov. DeSantis during a recent panel discussion with Tom Homan, the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.
He added, “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.”
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