Minors under 18 years old may not work in any jobs that are considered to be hazardous—including those involving mining, wrecking and demolition, logging, and roofing. The Secretary of Labor defines what jobs are deemed hazardous and so out-of-bounds for young workers. To find out which jobs are currently considered hazardous for the purposes of the FLSA, call the local office of the U.S. Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, located in the government section of your telephone book The Department of Labor’s website, at www.dol.gov, has a listing of local offices—and also has information about child labor restrictions.
To encourage youngsters to stay in school rather than becoming beholden to the dollar too soon, there are additional restrictions on when and how long workers between ages 14 and 16 may be employed in nonhazardous jobs:
Some industries have obtained special exemptions from the legal restrictions on child labor. Youths of any age may deliver newspapers, for example, or perform in television, movie, or theatrical productions.
The farming industry has been fighting the child labor restrictions as well as the rest of the FLSA ever since the law was first proposed in the 1930s, so less-strict rules apply to child farmworkers. For example, children as young as 12 may work on their parents’ farms. And workers as young as ten years old may work for up to eight weeks as hand harvest laborers as long as their employers have obtained a special waiver from the U.S. Labor Department.
