Clocking in, Burning Out: A recent rise in child labor law violations impacts student at East and harms school performance

Students have felt the effects of local restaurants and fast food businesses taking advantage of teen workers, aligning with national trends of increasing child labor law violations in the past year.

According to the US Department of Labor, United States businesses saw a 14% increase in child labor violations in 2023. Kansas Senator Ethan Corson believes that this recent rise in violations is due to the lack of workers in the service industry and acknowledges its local effects.

“Folks are resorting to hiring, essentially, child or minor labor in order to meet demands because there are not enough workers,” Corson said. “That is something that we as a state have been grappling with, and I know it’s somewhat nationwide. It is just the challenge of having enough workers to meet demand.”

The current national labor laws state that 14 and 15-year-olds cannot work more than three hours on a school night and eight hours on the weekends. Despite this, in an Instagram poll of 158 people, 37% responded that they had been forced to work hours exceeding the legal limits.

Twenty-three of the 25 teachers responded to a Google form poll saying that they know of students who work more than three hours on a school day with 22 of them believing that these excessive hours affect school performance. 

“Many students and their families along with the student’s bosses are aware of the labor laws,” one teacher wrote in response to the poll. “It is a choice that they accept typically once they begin receiving a paycheck until they cannot keep up with school work.”

Sophomore Ruby Ovitt worked at Chick-fil-A starting at the beginning of this school year but quit in early December. Ovitt was 15 years old and working eight-hour shifts immediately after school.

“I would bring my work clothes to school and then right after school, I would rush to work and change in the bathroom,” Ovitt said. “I’d stay there sometimes until 11:30 [p.m.]”

Ovitt struggled to complete homework on time because of these late shifts and she was often tardy to class at least once a week because it was so hard to wake up in the morning.

“Sometimes I just gave up on doing homework because I was so exhausted from work and I would be late [to school] a bunch because it would be so hard waking up in the morning,” Ovitt said.

And this demanding — not to mention illegal — work schedule wasn’t by choice.

“[My managers] told me I could only work from either 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. or 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and so I was expecting that but they ended up having me close and I couldn’t get out of it,” Ovitt said. “When I asked they never did anything about it.”

Sophomore Julie Miller* has had similar experiences working at a local business for four and a half hours on school nights as a 15-year-old.

“Obviously, teenagers need decent hours of sleep,” Miller said. “It’s hard to go to a full day of school and then immediately go to work. Adults just go to work during the day, which I understand but, [students] have a full day and we’re still growing and developing.”

Miller attributes the rise in violations to the fact that many students, including her, don’t know the labor laws.

“I wasn’t really educated on the actual laws and so I had no idea that you can’t work a certain amount of hours,” Miller. “It’s the fact that people aren’t educated on [the laws]. I don’t think they are really enforced.”

Despite these issues, there’s no movement in the legislature to prevent child labor law violations, according to Corson.

Social Studies teacher Benjamin Hendricks has students that arrive to class late because of work. Some even end up falling asleep during lessons. He believes the way to solve this is for more resources to be put to investigate labor law violations. However this raises the question of whether it’s worth it for governments to spend more money on enforcing labor laws as funds would be diverted from other programs.

Hendricks ultimately believes that it’s the role of the students to stand up for themselves.

“Students need to honestly assess whether or not it’s affecting their performance and speak up [and say] ‘Hey, I can only work 18 hours,’” Hendricks said.