State labor officials are failing to complete most child labor investigations in New York City within a reasonable timeframe — and in some cases are letting them drag on for more than a year, according to a new audit by the state comptroller.
The audit comes amid a national increase in child labor exploitation cases that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials found state Department of Labor investigators did not meet the standard three-month timeline in nearly two-thirds of the 87 cases the comptroller’s office reviewed, including 36 cases that took more than a year to complete or were still actively being investigated.
The comptroller’s office also found the department lacks a process for identifying which child labor cases involve hazardous conditions, such as dangerous chemicals or equipment. Under state guidelines those investigations are supposed to be completed within a week, but none were marked as such in the state’s case management system for child labor cases, according to the audit.
When asked why, the labor department told the comptroller’s office their system “does not have the functionality … to identify hazardous employment cases in a systematic manner” and the division that handles child labor cases does not “manually identify hazardous employment cases,” the audit states.
“This is a major shortfall and a missed opportunity for the Division not only to identify employers in violation but also to act quickly on behalf of minors who are exposed to hazardous conditions,” the comptroller’s office wrote.
Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy and coordinator of the D.C.-based National Consumers League’s Child Labor Coalition, said officials have to do better.
“These rules are there to protect kids and prevent injury and educational damage,” he said. “We really can’t take them lightly. They took a long time to get in place — took decades, sometimes centuries, to bring about — and we can’t just throw them away because there’s a temporary labor shortage.”
Maki said children exploited for their labor often end up working in dangerous jobs, such as meatpacking, roofing and auto manufacturing.
In New York, the state labor department reported a 68% increase in child labor violations from 2021 to 2022, according to the comptroller’s audit. But the problem isn’t confined to New York.
In fiscal year 2021, the federal labor department found 2,819 illegally employed minors and fined employers with more than $3 million in civil penalties. Two years later, those numbers had more than doubled to 5,792 illegally employed minors and more than $8 million in civil penalties, federal data shows.
“At a time when increased vigilance is needed, the [state labor] department must do more to ensure labor violations in New York City are addressed promptly,” state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a statement.
The audit covered January 2019 through March 2023. Among other things, it found a “lack of collaboration” between the labor department and the New York City Department of Education, which serves more than 1.1 million students across 1,800 public schools.
State laws require the labor department to provide monthly lists to school districts with the names and addresses of all children determined to be illegally employed. But according to the comptroller’s office, the DOE said they had not received such reports from state labor officials, and state labor officials said they had not been “generating these reports under the belief that 1985 updates to the law made this requirement obsolete.” The DOE did not provide comment on the audit.
In a statement, state Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said her department has taken steps to improve child labor and wage-related investigations and is committed to transparency.
“We proactively ramped up our efforts to combat child labor violations after the Department identified an uptick in reports across New York State,” she said, adding that officials have increased staff training and public outreach on state labor laws.
"The Division did not meet the target completion time frame either before or after the pandemic years.”
The comptroller’s office chastised the labor department for unexplained delays in cases and for blaming the pandemic for laggard investigations.
“Division officials attributed investigation delays to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, stating that they were forbidden to go on field visits until July 2021,” the audit stated. “Although this may be true of cases that started in March 2020 through July 2021, we note that the Division did not meet the target completion time frame either before or after the pandemic years.”
In an example cited by the comptroller’s office, a parent called the department’s Division of Labor Standards on Sept. 23, 2020, claiming her daughter was working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on school days — an apparent violation of state labor laws and possibly federal regulations.
But the case was not assigned to an investigator until almost five months later, on Feb. 18, 2021, and case management records showed the investigator did not try to contact the parent until July 2021, nearly a year after their complaint. The investigator received no response, and the case was closed Aug. 18, 2021, the comptroller’s office said.
In three instances, state investigators who had left the labor department still had active cases assigned to them a few months later. The department had 47 investigators in New York City as of August 2022, according to the audit. Division officials told the comptroller’s office “there is no set deadline to reassign cases” and "immediately reassigning cases was found to be unproductive and bad for morale.”
DiNapoli’s office has also critiqued the state labor department over wage-related investigations where delays and lax enforcement allowed employers to exploit workers, impeding case resolution and potential restitution.
In response to the audit, the department said it would deploy a case coordinator “exclusively dedicated to monitoring all child labor cases” and that it had begun separately docketing these cases so supervisors could better monitor progress. It also noted that Gov. Kathy Hochul last year launched a Child Labor Task Force to combat the surge in alleged violations across the state.
So far this year, 46 child labor cases have been opened in New York, including nine in New York City, state data shows. Less than half the cases statewide are in active investigation and zero penalties have been collected so far.
Experts caution that child labor cases in the United States are widely underreported and uninvestigated, in part because children who fall prey to unscrupulous employers and traffickers are already in vulnerable positions due to their economic or immigration status.
Maki, the director at the Child Labor Coalition, said state and federal officials must invest more resources in investigating “Dickensian” conditions, especially for migrant children.
“All of the agencies are undermanned,” he said. “Then there are sectors like agriculture, which we know are dangerous and that a lot of kids work in, where there’s almost no enforcement at all.”
