Portside

Key takeaways:

• Some state lawmakers are abetting Trump’s far-right, anti-worker agenda laid out in Project 2025 by proposing legislation that intentionally conflicts with federal worker protection laws.
• State-by-state efforts to erode workers’ rights—including protections against hazardous or exploitative child labor, the right to a minimum wage, and a safe workplace—build pressure for eventual relaxation or elimination of standards for the whole country.
• These attacks are not new, but they are an increasing threat under an administration that has launched an all-out war on workers and the federal agencies that safeguard their rights.
• State lawmakers have a responsibility and opportunity to resist such attacks and strengthen state worker protections.

Following a growing trend, Republican lawmakers this year proposed legislation in Florida, Kentucky, and Ohio that would undermine federal laws on child labor, minimum wage, and worker health and safety protections. These proliferating state challenges to federal law are laying the groundwork for more extreme and dangerous Project 2025 proposals to allow employers across the country to hire children for hazardous jobs or to allow states to “opt out” of various federal labor standards like the minimum wage.

Multiple states have enacted or proposed legislation to weaken state child labor and minimum wage protections in ways that conflict with federal law

The Trump administration’s first 100 days have closely followed the Project 2025 policy roadmap. Mass firings of federal civil servants, closures of field offices with labor enforcement roles, and deep cuts have quickly imperiled the federal government’s capacity to ensure U.S. workers get paid what they’re owed, stay safe at work, have the freedom to form a union, and work in environments free from discrimination.

Meanwhile, many states have weakened child labor protections in recent years, and some states like Iowa have openly defied long-standing federal laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which has set a national floor for minimum wages, overtime pay, and child labor standards since 1938. State laws can provide more protection than the federal statute mandates, but they cannot provide less. Where state standards are weaker than those provided in FLSA, federal law preempts the state standard.

This year, legislation in both Ohio and Florida attempts to weaken state child labor standards in ways that challenge federal law. In Ohio, Republicans have reintroduced a proposal to extend the hours employers can schedule 14- and 15-year-olds to work during the school year, conflicting with FLSA guardrails in place to ensure that young teens can enter the workforce without jeopardizing their health or education. A concurrent resolution introduced with the child labor bill calls on Congress to amend the FLSA to align with weaker hours guidelines proposed for Ohio. As of this publication, the legislation has passed the state Senate and is now being considered in the House.

As Ohio’s concurrent resolution illustrates, state legislators have often been clear that they understand these weaker standards conflict with FLSA rules (and therefore only apply in non-FLSA-covered employment contexts)—and that such conflict is in fact part of the point. In 2024, an Indiana lawmaker speaking in support of a child labor bill that would have violated federal law promised that, if elected to Congress, he would “throw out all the book of regulation of employing our youth.” In 2023, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed an unprecedented package of rollbacks to child labor standards, over many public objections that the extreme changes conflicted with federal law and would create confusion and increased legal liability for employers. A year later when some Iowa employers were fined for FLSA violations after following the state’s weakened child labor laws, Governor Reynolds enlisted the state’s congressional delegation in protesting the federal fines and published her own editorial arguing that the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) should “look to Iowa as an example” of how to relax child labor standards and enforcement.

In Florida, lawmakers are seeking to treat minors like adults with regard to work hours while paying them a subminimum wage. Proposed legislation would eliminate all hours of work guidelines for 16- and 17-year-olds, allowing employers to schedule these teens for unlimited hours year-round, including overnight shifts during the school year. The House version of the bill initially proposed also allowing employers to schedule 13-year-olds to work during the summer of the calendar year in which they turn 14, even though federal law has set 14 as the minimum age for employment in most jobs. In response to concerns raised by youth advocates, the provision to allow 13-year-olds to be gainfully employed was amended out of the bill.

Meanwhile, a separate bill in Florida would allow employers to pay youth “interns” or work-study participants an hourly wage lower than the constitutionally mandated state minimum wage, attempting to reestablish a subminimum wage loophole that was closed by a Florida ballot measure in 2020. FLSA rules are clear that individual workers cannot legally be induced to waive their right to a minimum wage, and employers may only pay subminimum wages under narrow special circumstances that require DOL certification. Yet, this long-standing FLSA protection has faced repeated challenges. An Arkansas legislator, for example, suggested in 2023 that the state should allow high school students to complete required community service hours by working for free for local businesses.

Fortunately, after significant public opposition, both Florida bills are expected to fail this session. While the child labor rollback bill passed in the House, as of this publication it was not slated to be taken up by the Senate before Florida’s legislature adjourns this year.

However, by repeatedly proposing and—in some cases—implementing standards that conflict with federal law, these states are chipping away at the already fragile federal floor for workplace protections. At the same time, they are shifting the entire burden of enforcing worker protections to chronically underfunded federal agencies that, amid Trump administration attacks, are now facing even more pronounced staffing shortages that will limit enforcement capacity.

Some states are already modeling Project 2025 proposals to allow states to “opt out” of federal labor laws

While Project 2025 proposes allowing all states to seek exemptions from the FLSA, some states have already adopted systems for employers to sidestep child labor laws. Florida has long maintained a system to grant individual employers approval to schedule minors to work beyond the limits of state child labor laws. Legally, the only state child labor protections that a state could legitimately “waive” would be those that exceed federal standards, but Florida’s statute on granting waivers does not spell out this limitation, leaving the system ripe for abuse by employers who may see it as an opportunity to gain state sanction to ignore federal law with little oversight (Florida’s labor department was dismantled in 2002).

In 2023, Iowa lawmakers created a system that even more explicitly violates federal law, allowing the state to grant “waivers” to employers seeking to employ minors in violation of federal hazardous occupations orders. Under the new system, the agency has begun to grant such waivers despite objections raised by the state’s department of inspections and state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

State lawmakers are also challenging federal workplace health and safety protections

Beyond child labor laws, some states have proposed legislation that conflicts with federal OSHA standards that set a floor for workplace safety for workers of all ages.

This year, Kentucky enacted legislation that could be in violation of federal requirements that states with their own OSHA plans must maintain standards and enforcement that is “at least as effective” as provided by federal OSHA. The new law prohibits the state from enforcing any worker health and safety regulations that are more protective than federal standards—effectively dismantling existing state standards—and also makes it harder to file complaints and hold employers accountable (making fines “optional” for violations, for example) in ways that fall below the minimum threshold of expectations set by federal OSHA.

In 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proposed creating a state OSHA agency, but only because he did not want the state to be subject to federal OSHA standards and falsely believed that a state agency would allow Florida to enact weaker health and safety protections for Florida workers.

Lawmakers can resist these threats by strengthening state worker protections

Many aspects of these current attacks bear close resemblance to past industry-backed attempts to block or dismantle federal worker protections, from the New Deal to OSHA. For example, today’s conservative calls to weaken federal child labor laws hearken back to 1982 proposals from Ronald Reagan’s labor department to extend maximum daily and weekly work hours for minors, expand youth subminimum wages, and roll back hazardous occupations orders that protect minors from being employed in particularly dangerous jobs. And arguments for rolling back child labor laws (re)surfacing in states today often closely echo those used by the business interests that aggressively fought passage and implementation of the FLSA from the 1930s up to the present.

Most of these past assaults on federal minimum labor standards were largely defeated, but not without persistent, coordinated responses from workers, unions, advocates, and policymakers. As Project 2025-style threats to workplace rights continue to mount today, it is particularly urgent to defend against state-level attacks on labor standards and seize opportunities to shore up state worker protections—at a minimum to ensure more states are equipped to maintain and enforce basic protections should at-risk federal standards disappear or go largely unenforced under the Trump administration. The crisis also presents opportunities for states to do much more, such as remedying long-standing gaps and exclusions in weak or outdated employment and labor laws that leave millions of workers without coverage; advancing new policies that address the economic challenges of growing income inequality, persistent racial and gender wage gaps, and declining job quality; and reasserting states’ roles in raising the floor for labor standards rather than driving a race to the bottom.