Sponsors (9)
Official title: To protect children from oppressive child labor and unsafe workplaces, and for other purposes.
Introduced June 12, 2025 by Robert C. Scott · Last progress June 12, 2025
The bill strengthens protections, enforcement, and data-driven prevention for child labor—likely reducing injuries and improving remedies—at the cost of higher penalties, greater compliance and litigation burdens for employers, added administrative costs, and reduced congressional control over redirected penalty funds.
Children and youth will face stronger protections and likely fewer deadly injuries because the bill raises civil and criminal penalties and creates stronger deterrence for oppressive child labor and hazardous work.
Creates a stable, dedicated enforcement and prevention funding stream plus an advisory body, enabling sustained investigations, interagency work, and targeted enforcement without relying on annual appropriations.
Gives child labor victims (and their families) a private civil right to recover compensatory and punitive damages, increasing access to remedies and strengthening deterrence against violators.
Small businesses and employers will face substantially higher compliance costs, larger potential fines, and greater criminal/legal exposure, which could reduce hiring, chill certain business activities, or strain small employers' finances.
Creating a private right of action plus much higher penalty levels is likely to drive increased litigation and higher insurance/premium costs that may be passed on to consumers, workers, or taxpayers.
Broad enforcement tools (like calculating the 'economic benefit of noncompliance' and mandatory multipliers) risk uneven application by courts or agencies, producing unpredictable penalty outcomes for employers.
Based on analysis of 11 sections of legislative text.
Raises penalties for child-labor and OSHA violations, creates an advisory committee and a penalty-funded Child Labor and Safety and Health Fund, and expands research, reporting, and hazardous-occupation reviews.
Strengthens enforcement and penalties for unlawful child labor and unsafe youth work, creates a permanent advisory committee on child labor, and establishes a dedicated Child Labor and Safety and Health Fund financed by civil penalties to support enforcement, research, training, and interagency coordination. It also requires expanded research, data collection, reporting, and periodic review of hazardous‑occupation orders to better protect children and young workers and directs agencies to use precautionary assumptions for toxic exposures that could cause long‑term harm.