Senator Hawley Calls for Tyson Probe Amid Cuts to Child Labor Protections

In a letter dated May 6, Senator Josh Hawley wrote to the Department of Labor urging an investigation of Tyson Foods following whistleblower reports of children employed at one of their plants. He called on Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to make good on her promises to clamp down on exploitation of underage workers. Yet the Department of Labor has faced serious cuts under Elon Musk’s spending crackdown, losing approximately 20 percent of the workforce. Hawley’s request seems at odds with the contemporaneous push for federal staff cuts and states seeking to roll back child labor protections — both actions reminiscent of Project 2025 recommendations.

In hazardous industries, children under 18 are not allowed to work, except for agriculture where they can work as young as 16, although some state laws differ. A number of DOL investigations have found children illegally employed as young as 13 in slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities, resulting in serious and sometimes fatal injuries. From 2019 to 2024, the number of children employed in violation of federal law rose 31 percent.

Chavez-DeRemer said at a Congressional hearing in May that staff responsible for carrying out labor investigations are not impacted by the layoffs. However, the agency was already stretched thin during the Biden Administration — a 2023 report found that less than 1 percent of farm employers were investigated per year.

Reduced staff capacity and enforcement efforts at DOL will likely mean less oversight and more risk for child laborers, Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, tells Sentient.

Project 2025 and Some GOP Want to Ease Child Labor Rules

Language in Project 2025 — a conservative federal policy agenda published prior to the last presidential election — explicitly called for the DOL to cut back on child labor protections in hazardous employment.

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job,” reads one Project 2025 excerpt.

President Trump has staunchly claimed no involvement with the agenda, although critics say some of his policy decisions reflect Project 2025’s guidance, such as taking measures to eliminate the Department of Education.

“That playbook specifically makes this argument that teenagers want to do hazardous work. It doesn’t say how they know this, right?…It’s absurdly simplistic and wrong, I believe,” Maki says.

Roughly 52 percent of all child worker deaths occur in agriculture. Maki worries that cuts at DOL and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) as well as a trend of states moving to weaken child labor laws might exacerbate the number of child labor deaths. “We’re talking [roughly] 50 children a year whose parents get to enjoy them and where the families are not devastated by the premature death of those children,” he says.

One new policy put forward by Congressional Republicans is the “Teenagers Earning Everyday Necessary Skills” Act, introduced last week by House Republican Dusty Johnson. Its stated goal is to allow teenagers to work more hours and later at night, as Johnson and other proponents argue the bill will address workplace shortages in typical teen jobs like restaurants and teach valuable life skills.

Child Labor Violations Trigger Hawley’s Call for Investigation

While it’s true that many young employees do work in food service jobs as Representative Johnson suggests, others — particularly immigrants — can end up in more dangerous jobs within the agriculture sector. Proponents for child labor protections say the current regulations are already too lax for these young workers.

“What we have found in the last five years is this uptick of serious child labor exploitation in industries such as manufacturing, meatpacking plants, poultry processing plants — where we have very young kids that are cleaning very dangerous equipment on the kill floor at 2:00 in the morning,” a Biden administration DOL spokesperson previously told Sentient.

The current Department of Labor did not respond to our request for comment. Recently, employees at DOL were told by the chief of staff, Jihun Han, that if they spoke to journalists about agency operations, they could face criminal charges.

In January just before Trump returned to the White House, JBS and Perdue were ordered to pay $4 million each for the illegal employment of migrant children in their facilities. The revelations about these companies’ hiring practices reflects a larger trend of the meat industry’s biggest players employing minors in often hazardous conditions.

“We do have concerns that a number of states are trying to roll back their enforcement of child labor laws because they’re having a hard time finding enough workers to actually work within these various industries. So they’re loosening the laws in order to gain more workforce, which is a terrible direction for the United States to go in,” Todd Larsen, Executive Co-Director at Green America tells Sentient.

Green America launched a campaign in April asking consumers to call on U.S. meat processing companies to eradicate child labor. So far, 190,000 messages have been sent to these meat companies in the hopes of tackling child labor in their supply chain and ensuring accountability, Charlotte Tate, Labor Justice Campaigns Director at Green America told Sentient in an email. Two of the four meat companies are in communication with Green America following consumer complaints, though the organization declined to identify the companies at this time.

Although DOL did not state specifics, they confirmed that they are investigating Tyson Foods for child labor in a letter to Hawley, obtained by Investigate Midwest.

A spokesperson for Tyson Foods told Sentient by email: “We do not allow the employment of anyone under the age of 18 in any of our facilities, and we do not facilitate, excuse, or in any other way participate in the use of child labor by third parties. We take the enforcement of all labor laws seriously, and we verify the age of all team members by fully participating in the federal government’s E-Verify and IMAGE programs. We also have multiple processes in place, including an anonymous ethics hotline, for all team members to report suspicious activity.”

Department of Labor Cuts Felt Within and Beyond U.S. Borders

Cuts to the Labor Department have had impacts beyond U.S. borders. In March, all grants from DOL’s International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB) were canceled, including those issued to help reduce child labor, forced labor and trafficking.

The Child Labor Coalition, along with more than 100 organizations, wrote to Secretary of Labor Chavez-DeRemer and the U.S. Congress, urging them to restore ILAB’s staff and programs.

“If you operate a grant in Central America that’s helping kids stay in school, and they do stay in school, those kids aren’t migrating, they’re not coming across the border and working in meat packing plants,” Maki tells Sentient. Over the last 20 years, the number of child laborers fell by 78 million globally, thanks to ILAB’s work, according to the Department of Labor.

Maki sees a notable shift from enforcement under the Biden administration and today, specifically in terms of increased fines imposed on companies. “Now, because there’s really no public enforcement going on, there’s no promotion of enforcement efforts. That whole climate is eroding…they are probably thinking we can get away with this.”

Update: JBS, Cargill and Perdue did not respond to our request for comment.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story described the TEENS Act as “in line” with Project 2025. Though the Act would remove restrictions around hours worked, the language in Project 2025 referred to hazardous work.

Correction: an earlier version of this story contained a misspelling of Jihun Han’s name.