Key takeaways:

• So far this year, at least 13 states have introduced bills weakening child labor protections, and four have enacted them.
• Meanwhile, only three states have introduced bills to strengthen standards in 2026, compared with 15 in 2025.
• Industry-backed attacks on child labor standards have followed four troubling trends: 1) lowering minimum wages for teen workers; 2) weaponizing “youth apprenticeships”; 3) eliminating youth permits; and 4) weakening safeguards for teen child care workers.
• The Trump administration has undermined federal enforcement of child labor standards, even amid rising violations.
• Oregon enshrined current federal child labor standards into state law, offering a replicable model for states to hold the line against potential federal rollbacks.

Many state lawmakers took encouraging steps in 2023 and 2024 to strengthen their child labor standards—in response to high-profile reporting of widespread child labor violations across the U.S. and simultaneous efforts to weaken state child labor standards in the wake of COVID-19. But trends in 2026 suggest that this momentum may be waning despite continued increases in child labor violations. Meanwhile, opponents of strong child labor standards have continued to erode state standards and—in effect—chip away at the basis for federal standards, which have also come under threat.

In fiscal year 2025, more cases of federal child labor violations were uncovered than during any other year since the Great Recession, and hazardous work violations ticked up again after declining in the year prior (see Figure A). The rate of young worker deaths nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, and at least one minor was killed on the job in the past year. At the same time, enforcement of federal child labor standards appears to have diminished under the Trump administration, which has proposed weakening existing standards. Since Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) has published news releases about only three child labor enforcement actions. In the last year of the Biden administration, WHD published news releases about 26 cases.

Figure A

Amid this growing child labor crisis, a few states are taking necessary action to shore up or strengthen standards, but in far too many states industry-backed attacks are continuing to succeed in rolling back child labor laws.

Oregon enshrined current federal standards into state law, a model other states can emulate

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets guidelines for the hours and nonhazardous jobs for which employers can hire minors. It sets a floor above which states can adopt and enforce their own stronger standards, but where state standards are weaker, federal law applies. Oregon, the only state to pass a bill strengthening child labor standards so far this year, enacted a law that enshrines into state law FLSA work hours for minors as of January 2026. Prior to the change, Oregon law followed federal hours guidelines for 14- and 15-year-olds,1 but had prevented the adoption of any state guidelines more restrictive than those in federal law (FLSA). The new law locks in current standards and guards against potential future erosion of federal standards, stipulating that Oregon’s minor work hours rules must be no less restrictive than FLSA standards as of January 1, 2026, and giving the state freedom to implement its own higher standards for minor work hours if needed in the future. Other states can propose legislation that enshrines federal child labor standards into state law and can go further by establishing standards that improve upon the existing federal floor.

Three other states proposed bills to strengthen existing standards

In 2026, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York lawmakers also made progress on bills to strengthen state child labor standards, but none have been enacted as of this publication. A 2025 New York bill mandating that minor workers receive information on their workplace rights in order to receive work authorization passed the Senate in March; a New Jersey bill proposes establishing minimum penalties and increasing penalties for certain child labor violations; and a Maryland bill establishing civil penalties and preventing the executive branch from seeking waivers from the FLSA passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate. The Maryland bill’s provision prohibiting FLSA waivers was likely a response to a proposal in Project 2025 that would allow states to opt out of certain FLSA provisions, which would erode workers’ right to federal minimum wage and overtime protections. Next year, lawmakers should recommit to advancing stronger state standards, especially given the distinct possibility that federal standards will come under threat.

Over a dozen state legislatures attempted to roll back child labor standards this year

So far in 2026, at least 13 states have introduced bills that weaken child labor protections, and four have enacted them (see Table 1). In contrast, only three states have introduced bills to strengthen child labor protections in 2026, and only one has enacted such legislation.2 For comparison, 15 states introduced bills to strengthen child labor standards in 2025.

Table 1

Proposals to erode existing standards this year included: weakening protections from hazardous work; implementing or expanding minimum wage exemptions for minors; extending the number of hours employers can schedule minors to work; eliminating the state’s youth employment documentation system; and lowering minimum age requirements for workers in child care centers (see Table 1). Four particularly troubling patterns have emerged in legislation attempting to weaken child labor standards across multiple states:

1. Attempts to lower the minimum wage for teen workers;
2. Attempts to use state legislation on “youth apprenticeship” or “work-based learning” programs as a vehicle for weakening state child labor standards;
3. Elimination of youth work permits or other systems that ensure the documentation of minor employment; and
4. Attempts to lower or remove safety standards and staffing ratios for teen workers in child care facilities.

Lawmakers continued to propose excluding teen workers from voter-approved state minimum wage increases

As in previous years, state lawmakers continued to advance proposals that would subject minor workers to lower minimum wages than adults, particularly in states where successful ballot measures recently increased the state minimum wage. Florida, Missouri, and Nebraska voters approved ballot measures in recent years that increased the state minimum wage to $15 an hour (Florida’s minimum wage will increase from $14 to $15 in September). Legislators in the same three states are now attempting to exclude minor workers from these higher minimum wages.

Florida lawmakers reintroduced a bill to allow minors in work-based learning programs to “opt out” of receiving the constitutionally-mandated state minimum wage; Missouri lawmakers proposed paying minors nearly $3 less than the state’s new $15 minimum wage; and Nebraska lawmakers successfully enacted a bill that increased the state’s temporary youth training wage but also implemented a permanent subminimum wage for 14- and 15-year-olds. Such proposals undermine the stated goals of lawmakers to boost youth employment, address the “labor shortage,” and allow teens to earn for their futures. Youth subminimum wages do not benefit young people and erode the wage floor, depressing wages for all workers—teens and adults alike.

States continued a troubling trend of using unregulated state “youth apprenticeship” programs to roll back child labor protections

As shown in Table 1, three states proposed bills to weaken hazardous work protections for minors enrolled in work-based learning programs, marking a continued trend of attempts to erode standards that ensure early career training programs provide valuable experiences and skills without unnecessarily exposing young people to hazards known to pose a high risk of illness, injury, or fatality.

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers proposed exempting minors enrolled in work-based learning programs from state child labor standards, except where such standards reflect federal law. In Virginia, lawmakers introduced legislation that would allow employers to set the standards for appropriate work in hazardous occupations, undermining existing state laws that require work-based learning programs to be accredited by the U.S. Department of Labor or state Board of Education. However, education advocates managed to neutralize the bill’s harms by removing that provision, limiting the scope of work-based learning programs to particular industries, and adding language requiring such programs to comply with federal laws prohibiting employers from exposing teens to hazardous work.

In West Virginia, lawmakers used their recently created “youth apprenticeship program” to further erode state child labor standards for all minor workers, exacerbating troubling conflicts between state and federal child labor law created by earlier state legislation. In 2024, West Virginia lawmakers established a new “youth apprenticeship program” (YAP) that appears to permit YAP-enrolled minors to be employed in any of the 17 hazardous occupations prohibited by federal law, even though federal law provides limited exemptions for apprentices and student learners for only seven of the 17 hazardous occupation orders. This year, lawmakers expanded the program by removing the requirement that hazardous work assigned to youth apprentices be “occasional and incidental” to their training. This guardrail, which originates in federal law, is meant to protect youth apprentices from being treated as adult workers in hazardous jobs and to ensure that they are assigned hazardous work very rarely and only when it is necessary to further their training.

As part of the same legislation, West Virginia lawmakers also removed from state code the list of hazardous occupations prohibited for minors under state law. As a result, working minors not covered by the FLSA will no longer have protection from being employed in the deadliest jobs, and if federal protections are unenforced or eroded as Trump’s Project 2025 agenda has threatened, all West Virginia minors working in these jobs would lack protection. Many states have their own list of state hazardous occupation orders, which may differ slightly from the federal list. Where state and federal standards differ, the more protective standard prevails. Removing the state’s list will both endanger young workers and create confusion for employers who may not realize they must still follow federal law in areas where state law has been eroded, leading to increased reputational risk and legal liability for the state’s businesses.

Several states have weakened restrictions on hazardous work while eliminating the state’s ability to identify and investigate child labor violations

The West Virginia playbook for rolling back state child labor laws represents a troubling pattern for lawmakers and advocates to continue to monitor and resist. In 2024, the state created a new work-based learning program that did not conform to federal law, then eliminated youth work permits (and replaced them with weaker age certificates, which have now also come under threat), and a year later further weakened the state’s hazardous work protections using their new work-based learning program as a vehicle.

In just the past three years, two other states—Indiana and Iowa—have both eliminated their systems for documenting youth employment while also weakening prohibitions on hazardous work for minors. In 2023, Iowa lawmakers eliminated youth work permits, weakened hazardous work protections for youth enrolled in “work-based learning” programs, and added new provisions allowing state agencies to “waive” restrictions on hazardous work that violated federal law, among a host of other changes.

And this year, Indiana lawmakers eliminated the state’s “youth employment system” for documenting minor employment after implementing the system to replace eliminated youth work permits in 2020. As a result, state agencies will have no record of teen employment—a change the legislature’s own fiscal analysts acknowledged will impede enforcement of child labor laws. Indiana’s 2026 rollback comes on the heels of numerous changes enacted in 2024 that extended work hours for minors, eliminated night work restrictions, weakened protections for hazardous work, and—though this provision was amended out of the final bill—proposed giving employers complete civil immunity for workplace fatalities of minors enrolled in work-based learning programs.

Recent research shows that youth work permits play an important role in preventing child labor violations by enhancing awareness of child labor standards, creating legal accountability, and aiding in enforcement. In 2024, Wisconsin lawmakers passed legislation eliminating work permits for minors under 16, but the governor vetoed the legislation and stated in his veto message that he objected to eliminating a process that protects youth from exploitation. This year, Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development uncovered more than 1,600 child labor violations by a single Burger King franchisee—the largest in the state’s history—including 593 work permit violations. Recent research has shown that states with work permit mandates have fewer child labor violations. Employers violating work permit rules are also often violating work hours and hazardous work protections.

Continued efforts to weaken protections for teen child care workers are part of a larger deregulatory agenda in the care industry

This year, for the third time since 2022, Iowa lawmakers proposed legislation to weaken standards related to teen supervision of children in child care facilities. In 2022, Iowa enacted a bill that lowered the minimum age for child care workers and increased the number of children facilities could place under the care of a single staff person. In 2024, lawmakers proposed allowing a 16-year-old to be charged with the care of four infants, seven toddlers, or 10 three-year-olds without direct supervision, but the bill failed. The bill was supported by the billionaire-founded right-wing dark money group Americans for Prosperity, which also lobbied in support of a 2023 Kansas bill to allow minors as young as 14 to care for young children and allow 16-year-olds to provide child care with no adult supervision.

In 2025, Iowa enacted additional changes through the administrative rulemaking process, allowing teenagers as young as 16 to care for children of any age in limited circumstances. And this year, lawmakers proposed allowing 15-year-olds to care for children without supervision. The 2026 Iowa bill received significant support from lobbyists representing The Family Leader and Family Leader Foundation, Iowa’s state affiliate of the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion hate group.

Michigan also issued new administrative rules effective April 2026 that increased child-to-staff ratios and allow 16-year-olds to care for numerous young children without supervision—in both group and family child care homes.

The push to lower the minimum age for child care providers and increase child-to-staff ratios is part of a larger industry agenda to deregulate the care economy and avoid reckoning with its true costs. This agenda—which has also involved reducing the education and experience requirements necessary for provider licensing and even using state power to block stronger local standards—has strained providers, degraded the quality of care, and led to injuries and even deaths of young children in recent years. Placing the burden of responsibility of caring for young children on teenagers who are still themselves children harms everyone while sidestepping the real issues facing our child care system: insufficient public investment to make child care affordable and to pay providers adequately.

In an era of federal retrenchment and continued state rollbacks amid rising violations, more state lawmakers should seek to strengthen standards

Though the news media has largely moved on and federal enforcement attention appears to have waned, child labor violations remain a persistent issue and may be getting worse. Fiscal year 2025 saw more child labor cases generally and more minors employed in violation of hazardous occupation orders than any year in recent memory. While some states continued advancing legislation to strengthen child labor standards in 2026, and Oregon succeeded in enacting legislation to guard against federal rollbacks, far more states focused their efforts on weakening existing standards.

Given the very real risk that aspects of FLSA child labor protections could be eliminated (or will go unenforced), all states should at a minimum lock in existing FLSA standards and ensure state capacity to enforce them. Beyond this, states have critical opportunities and responsibilities to modernize child labor standards beyond the minimal, outdated FLSA floor to ensure that minors who must work or choose to work can access safe work experiences that don’t harm their health or education.

1. Maximum of 3 hours per day, 18 hours per week when school is in session; 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week when school is not in session. See: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/child-labor

2. We exclude legislation related to child influencers. At least five states have introduced bills to increased protections for children featured in video content in 2026 (AZ, MD, MO, NJ, TN), and two states (NJ, TN) have enacted such legislation.

Key takeaways:

• The federal minimum wage is at its lowest real value in 77 years. Frozen at $7.25 since 2009, the federal minimum wage has lost 30% of its purchasing power during this 17-year freeze.
• Setting the federal minimum wage at two-thirds of the national median wage would raise pay for 39.6 million workers in 2030, about 1 in 4 of the wage-earning workforce.
• The policy would move the federal floor meaningfully toward one definition of a living wage, meeting EPI’s Family Budget Calculator thresholds in half of U.S. counties for a single adult working full time. But it falls short for many families, meaning that policies to strengthen unionization, provide a more robust safety net, and keep unemployment low remain essential.
• Decades of economic research support this two-thirds benchmark, finding little to no employment loss from ambitious minimum wage increases.
• Indexing the federal minimum wage to median wage growth would lock in these gains. Median wages typically outpace prices, so median wage indexing would prevent the kind of decades-long slide that has eroded the current floor.

Introduction

The federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 since 2009, is now at its lowest real value in 77 years and a major driver of the affordability crisis facing low-wage workers. For over a decade, the senior Democrats on the House and Senate’s labor committees have consistently introduced and championed the Raise the Wage Act, which would significantly raise the federal level (most recently, to $17 an hour in 2030) and index it to median wage growth going forward. But Congress as a whole has failed to take action on the legislation. In the absence of federal movement, states have moved on their own: Thanks in large part to the Fight for $15 campaign, 21 states and the District of Columbia, home to half of all U.S. wage earners, will have a minimum wage of at least $15 by 2028. But that patchwork still leaves 20 states—home to about 55 million workers—at $7.25, and updating the federal floor to a modern benchmark is the only way to reach these workers.

Raising the federal minimum wage to two-thirds of the national median wage would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers, about a quarter of the workforce. Two-thirds of the median—equivalent to roughly $17.70 today, a projected $20 in 2030, and a projected $25 in 2038—matches the benchmarks used in other high-income countries and tracks the direction of recent minimum wage research. Indexing to median wage growth thereafter would keep the floor from losing ground to inflation or falling behind the broader economy.

A federal minimum at two-thirds of the national median would eliminate poverty wages and move the floor meaningfully toward a living wage in much of the country: A single adult working full time could cover modest expenses in half of U.S. counties under EPI’s Family Budget Calculator thresholds. Maintaining the two-thirds minimum-to-median ratio would lock in those gains, improving affordability for U.S. workers and their families. It would also durably narrow the gap between low-wage workers and the typical worker, with Black workers and women seeing the largest benefits.

The two-thirds benchmark is also well-supported by economic research. Decades of studies of state and federal minimum wages find that higher floors raise pay for low-wage workers with little to no effect on employment, and a smaller but growing body of work on minimum wages approaching two-thirds of the median reaches the same conclusion. Setting the federal floor at two-thirds of the median, and updating it annually, would raise incomes at the bottom and prevent the kind of decades-long slide that has left the current minimum at its lowest real value in 77 years.

The outdated federal minimum wage and extent of low pay

The federal minimum wage is now at its lowest real value in 77 years. Stuck at $7.25 since 2009, it is in its longest stretch without an increase since the federal wage floor was established in 1938 (Figure A). Inflation has eroded 30% of its purchasing power over those 17 years, gradually cutting real pay for the lowest-wage workers in states still tied to the federal floor. Simply indexing the 2009 wage to inflation, a far weaker standard than this report proposes, would put the federal minimum at about $10.60 today.

The minimum wage was once meaningfully higher in real terms. Civil rights organizers in the late 1960s pressed Congress not only to raise the wage floor but also to extend its coverage to service industries that had previously been excluded because they disproportionately employed Black workers. By 1968, the federal minimum wage reached $1.60 per hour, equivalent to $12.62 in 2026 dollars and roughly 61% of the national median wage at the time, close to the two-thirds benchmark this report proposes. Even a federal minimum wage of $12.62 today would raise the wages of about 12 million workers.

Because Congress has not raised the federal floor in 17 years, states and localities have moved on their own. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and dozens of cities and counties have raised their minimum wages, many in response to the Fight for $15 campaign (EPI 2026a). By the end of 2028, more than half of the U.S. workforce, about 74 million workers, will live in a state with a minimum wage of at least $15.

The state-by-state patchwork has delivered real successes but also left tens of millions of workers behind. Roughly 55 million people work in the 20 states still tied to the $7.25 federal floor, and they are nearly twice as likely as workers elsewhere to earn less than $15 per hour. Nationally, almost no one is paid exactly $7.25 anymore: The floor is so low it rarely binds. Yet 14 million workers, about 9% of the workforce, still earn less than $15. Closing that gap and preventing the federal floor from eroding further requires a national standard pegged to a modern benchmark.

A new standard: Two-thirds of the median wage

The federal minimum wage suffers from two related deficiencies: Its level is too low, and it does not adjust as the economy grows. Both can be solved by tying the federal minimum to two-thirds of the national median wage. Congress would first raise the floor to that level, and each subsequent year the minimum would adjust to maintain the same ratio.

First, the new benchmark replaces a poverty-level federal floor (Hickey and Cid-Martinez 2025) with one that pushes the minimum wage toward a living wage. As Oakford (2026) argues, two-thirds of the median is “a realistic stepping stone to living wages,” and standards below that ratio leave too large a gap between earnings and the cost of necessary expenses. A federal minimum at two-thirds of the median also better fulfills the original promise of the federal standard, which Congress described in 1937 as protecting “this Nation from the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life” (U.S. Congress 1937).

Second, maintaining the two-thirds ratio guarantees automatic increases as the economy grows, ending the recurring erosion that comes from a frozen federal floor. Because median wages typically outpace prices, median wage indexing produces real gains, not just inflation protection. In 2025, two-thirds of the national median wage was $17.11 per hour (Figure B), and today, it is estimated to be $17.70. By 2030, applying Congressional Budget Office (2026) Employment Cost Index projections, it would reach $20.02. A federal minimum tied to two-thirds of the median would likely reach or exceed $25 by 2038, four years sooner than if a $17.11 wage in 2025 had been indexed only to the cost of living going forward.1

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia index their minimum wages to inflation, but Connecticut goes further by indexing to average wage growth and capturing the real gains that wage growth typically delivers above prices. Congress should follow Connecticut’s lead and link the federal minimum to the national median wage. Of course, indexing to price inflation would be an enormous improvement to current federal minimum wage policy and to state and local minimum wage policies that have also failed to implement automatic increases. Tying the minimum wage to median wages—i.e., indexing the minimum to typical workers’ wage growth—would yield even larger increases over time.

Tying the federal minimum to two-thirds of the median would also durably narrow inequality in the bottom half of the wage distribution. Whenever the minimum wage fails to keep pace with economy-wide wage growth, the gap between low and median earners widens. But a substantial increase in the minimum to a fixed ratio of the median shrinks and bounds that gap by construction. The gains disproportionately affect Black workers and women, who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs due to persistent racism and sexism (Banks 2019). Minimum wages are a major determinant of Black-white wage gaps (Derenoncourt and Montialoux 2020; Wursten and Reich 2023), and the long erosion of the federal minimum was a leading driver of widening pay inequality among women (Autor, Manning, and Smith 2016).

The state of minimum wage research and new policies

Minimum wages and job losses

A federal benchmark of two-thirds of the national median would significantly raise wages, and recent research strongly supports the conclusion that ambitious minimum wage targets work as intended, with little to no employment downsides. Across more than three decades of modern economic research, the median estimated employment effect is small; among studies that look at all low-wage workers rather than narrow subgroups, the effect is essentially zero (Zipperer 2024). The recurring scare stories about job losses are not borne out by the body of evidence.

Businesses adjust to higher minimum wages through what Dube (2026b) and Bernstein (2013) call the “Three P’s”: productivity, prices, and profits.2 Take productivity first. Higher wages reduce the rate at which workers quit, particularly in high-turnover sectors like restaurants and retail. That lowers hiring and training costs and means employment levels can hold steady even as new hiring slows. Better-paid workers, and workers with longer tenure, are also typically more productive, further offsetting the cost of the wage increase.

The minimum wage also redistributes income to low-wage workers when employers cover higher labor costs through reduced profits or modestly higher prices. Vergara (2026) and Coviello, Deserranno, and Persico (2022) both find that minimum wage increases shrink profits in low-wage industries. Price pass-through is small in aggregate terms because low-wage workers’ earnings are only a fraction of total labor costs, which are themselves a fraction of total business expenses. California’s $4 overnight increase in the fast-food minimum generated a one-time increase in fast-food prices of 2.1% to 3.6% (Sosinskiy and Reich 2026; Clemens et al. 2026). To put that in context: The price of a $6.00 hamburger would have risen to about $6.17.

How high is too high?

A common way to measure the level of a given minimum wage is to use the minimum-to-median wage ratio. Sometimes called the Kaitz index, the minimum-to-median wage ratio compares the minimum with the underlying distribution of wages by measuring the share of the typical wage that the floor reaches. This report proposes setting that ratio at about 67%. Most of the U.S. evidence base reflects periods when the ratio sat well below that level, because until recently, U.S. minimum wages were rarely considered high by today’s standards. But a growing body of recent research, together with recent state and local policies, has pushed the evidence into higher ratios—and the results are the same: There is substantial room for higher minimums without large employment losses.

Cengiz et al. (2019) found no negative employment effects at minimum-to-median ratios up to 59%. Dube and Lindner (2021), studying city-level minimum wages with ratios averaging 58% to 64%, found small and statistically insignificant effects. Godoy and Reich (2022) found no employment effect across localities with ratios ranging from 56% to 82%. And the 1968 federal minimum, which reached roughly 61% of the median,3 has been reexamined in two recent studies that likewise found small or no employment effects (Bailey, DiNardo, and Stuart 2021; Derenoncourt and Montialoux 2021).

The most direct evidence that the floor can go meaningfully higher comes from California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage. In April 2024, the state raised the wage for fast-food chain workers from $16 to $20, pushing the ratio of that minimum to the state’s median wage to about 74%, well above most U.S. precedents.4 One might worry that customers would substitute toward lower-priced independent restaurants exempt from the policy, generating job losses at the chains. The actual evidence shows otherwise. Despite the large wage increase, research finds little to no employment effect of the policy (Bivens and Zipperer 2026), and the median employment effect in Dube (2026a) is essentially zero. Evaluations of the UK minimum wage through 2019, when it reached nearly 60% of the median wage, also find small, statistically insignificant effects on the employment of low-wage workers (Giupponi et al. 2024).

A federal benchmark set at two-thirds of the national median will push some states above two-thirds of their own median wage. There is good reason to be optimistic about employment changes there as well. The studies above already span a wide range of Kaitz ratios, from the high 50s through the low 80s, and consistently find little or no employment effect. California’s $20 fast-food minimum extends this evidence to a 74% state-level ratio with essentially no employment losses, and only five states would have a minimum-to-median wage ratio above that threshold under the proposed federal benchmark. And while the minimum wage would be at a higher level relative to the state median in those states, it would still be less than a “living wage” for many families in those areas, as I discuss later.

Even if some employment loss does occur, that is not the right test of policy success. Low-wage labor markets are dominated by job-to-job churn, so reduced employment in response to a higher minimum typically shows up as longer gaps between jobs rather than workers permanently shut out of the labor market (Cooper, Mishel, and Zipperer 2018). On net, low-wage workers come out ahead in annual earnings when significantly higher hourly pay more than offsets a modest increase in unemployment.

Policymakers and organizers campaigning for minimum wage increases have considerable room to maneuver above the current federal floor before needing to worry about job losses. To assuage concerns about employment impacts, a federal proposal could be structured to limit annual increases of the federal minimum wage so that they never exceed two-thirds of the national median wage. States and localities, of course, can and should continue to push for higher minimum wages, as many will have higher median wages and costs of living than the national average.

Existing proposals and policies reaching two-thirds of the median

Some recent federal proposals already target or are consistent with the two-thirds benchmark. The recent Give America a Raise Act would raise the federal minimum to $20 by 2029, close to this report’s projection of two-thirds of the 2029 median wage ($19.44). The Living Wage for All Act names the two-thirds benchmark explicitly and locks in indexation in statute: “once the minimum wage equals two-thirds of the national median hourly wage, it shall thereafter be automatically adjusted each year to maintain that ratio.” The Bold Economic Program for America (Reich 2026) likewise proposes $20 by 2030, and Oakford (2026) embeds the two-thirds target in a broader portfolio that includes just cause protections and stronger wage theft enforcement.

The benchmark also aligns U.S. policy with international practice. The UK Low Pay Commission has targeted two-thirds of the median for the National Living Wage since 2024, and in the EU, 17 of 22 countries benchmark their statutory minimum wages to a ratio of the median or average wage. The 2022 European Union Minimum Wage Directive obligates member states to use “indicative reference values”—such as 60% of the gross median wage—to assess adequacy of their wage standards (Luebker and Schulten 2026).

Some of these international benchmarks may look numerically lower than two-thirds, but they are usually defined against a different denominator. Germany, for instance, benchmarks against the median wage of full-time workers. In the United States, the full-time median is about 10% higher than the overall median, so 60% of the full-time median is roughly equivalent to two-thirds of the overall median that this report proposes.

Implementing a minimum wage equal to two-thirds of the median wage

Any federal legislation will need a phase-in period, but it must specify two things: a clear path to the target and an explicit guarantee that automatic median wage indexing kicks in once the floor reaches two-thirds of the median.

Implementing the benchmark also requires choosing a wage source. Legislation should designate the Department of Labor (DOL)—which already publishes median wage estimates through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS)—to publish the official median wage each year. DOL has two ready sources: OEWS, an establishment survey, and the Current Population Survey (CPS), the household survey already used to produce the unemployment rate, which collects detailed wage and hours data.

Each source has tradeoffs. The CPS is timelier, with wage data available at a one- to two-month lag, but smaller samples, the difficulty of computing hourly earnings for salaried workers, and respondents’ tendency to round wages all introduce noise. OEWS uses an established BLS hourly wage methodology and median wage calculation that may be less volatile, but it is published with a one-year lag and pools data from earlier, lower-wage years. DOL could pick one source or use a weighted average; recent data show only about a $1 difference between the two surveys.5 Either way, expanding resources at BLS and the Census Bureau would strengthen the underlying data and support further refinements to the methodology.

Once DOL has a baseline median, indexing requires projecting that median forward to the year the new minimum takes effect. The UK Low Pay Commission, which recommends a two-thirds median target to the UK government, offers a useful template: It estimates a midyear median wage by combining lagged historical data with timely indicators and short-run forecasts (Low Pay Commission 2024). A concrete schedule illustrates the approach. To set the minimum for January 1, 2030, DOL would announce the new wage on July 1, 2029, six months in advance, based on its best projection of the July 2030 median, the midyear point representative of the median wage workers will face on average throughout 2030. The projection would proceed in three steps: compute the 2028 median from CPS or OEWS data; roll it forward to early-to-mid-2029 using a combination of available data—like the Current Employment Statistics, the Consumer Price Index, and the Employment Cost Index (ECI); and then roll it forward one more year using short-run wage projections like those in the CBO Budget and Economic Outlook (2026).

National and state effects of a federal minimum wage at two-thirds of the median

To estimate the economic benefits of a federal minimum wage set at two-thirds of the median wage, I model how many low-wage workers would see higher pay under this policy. I assume the policy is phased in over five years, so that if it went into effect today, the federal minimum would reach two-thirds of the median in 2030 and then automatically adjust each year to maintain that ratio.

Concretely, I assume the federal minimum rises to $12 immediately in 2026 and then increases incrementally to $20 in 2030, which is about two-thirds of the projected national median wage.6 Legislation should build in a path adjustment if 2030 median wages come in higher or lower than projected.

I focus on the effects in 2030. I assume the same phase-in path and automatic indexing applies to the federal tipped minimum wage, which has been frozen at $2.13 per hour since 1991.7 Wages elsewhere are assumed to grow in line with CBO ECI projections from 2026 to 2030, and the model incorporates the effects of scheduled state-level minimum wage increases (see the appendix for details).

In 2030, a federal minimum wage equal to two-thirds of the national median would raise pay for 39.6 million workers, about 1 in 4 of the wage-earning workforce (Table 1).8 Annual earnings would rise substantially, and the gains would be largest for Black workers: A full-time, full-year Black worker affected by the increase would earn about $5,000 more per year, compared with $4,400 for all affected workers. In line with other minimum wage increases, women would gain more than men, with 31% of women seeing higher pay compared with 23% of men.

Adults ages 20 and over would make up 9 in 10 affected workers (teens would have the largest share of affected workers of any age group, but they make up a small share of total employment). The problem of low pay is far from limited to the youngest workers.

Although several states with scheduled minimum wage increases will see the gap between their minimum wage and the new federal floor shrink, workers in every state would still be affected (Figure C). With the exception of D.C., no state’s scheduled 2030 minimum wage reaches $20. The largest gains go to workers in the 20 states still tied to $7.25: 1 in 3 (33%) would see a raise, and annual pay for those affected would rise by about $6,200 on a full-time, full-year basis.

Figure C

Beyond who gets a raise and how much, a related question is whether the raise is enough to cover a family’s basic costs. Setting a target of two-thirds of the median would push the federal floor much closer to a living wage for many families. What counts as a living wage varies across the country, depending on local costs and on family size and composition. EPI’s Family Budget Calculator thresholds make this concrete: They calculate the income a given family type needs in a given place to afford a “modest but adequate” standard of living. For example, in 2025 a two-adult, one-child family in Los Angeles County, California, needed about $118,000 in annual pretax earnings to pay for housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities. In more rural Early County, Georgia, a similar family needed about $74,000. These budgets are minimal by design, with no allowance for savings, emergencies, retirement, college, or entertainment.

Of course, other business income and government provided social benefits can lower the amount of labor market earnings a family needs to maintain the same standard of living. Gould, Mokhiber, and deCourcy (2024) report that, according to Congressional Budget Office data, about 81% of a middle-income family’s budget is met by labor market income.

Applying that 81% adjustment to EPI’s Family Budget Calculator thresholds gives a more useful benchmark for what wages need to deliver. Under this adjusted measure, the Los Angeles County family would have needed about $96,000 in earnings to meet their 2025 budget, equivalent to both adults working full time, year round at about $23 per hour. The Early County family would have needed about $60,000, equivalent to both adults working full time, year round at $15 per hour.

The implications for everyday affordability are significant. After inflating these adjusted thresholds to 2030 dollars using CBO Consumer Price Index projections, a federal minimum at two-thirds of the median substantially closes the gap between full-time annual earnings and necessary expenses for low-wage workers and their families. A single adult working full time at the 2030 minimum of $20 would cover modest but adequate expenses in half of U.S. counties. Two full-time working parents with two children would meet their family budget in roughly a quarter of U.S. counties. Using similar thresholds, Oakford (2026) finds that a federal minimum at two-thirds of the national median in 2025 would be “90% to 99% of the median living wage of a single adult without children in 16 states.”

A federal minimum tied to two-thirds of the national median would therefore make enormous progress in increasing affordability and helping families make ends meet. Closing the remaining gaps will require a broader set of policies, including strengthening other labor standards like overtime protections and their enforcement, a more robust safety net, expanded public goods like universal health insurance, fewer barriers to unionization, and a renewed commitment to full employment.

Conclusion

The federal minimum wage is at its lowest real value in 77 years, and tens of millions of low-wage workers are paying for that erosion every paycheck. Pegging the federal floor to two-thirds of the national median wage, and maintaining that ratio, would correct the two flaws that have left the floor unfit for purpose: a level too low to function as a meaningful wage standard and a structure that does not adjust as the economy grows.

A federal minimum at two-thirds of the median would raise pay for nearly 40 million workers in 2030, deliver the largest gains to Black workers and to women, and bring the floor close to a living wage in much of the country. Decades of research, recent state and local experience, and California’s $20 fast-food minimum all point to the same conclusion: The labor market can absorb minimum wages of this size with little to no employment cost. The benchmark also brings U.S. policy into line with the UK and most of the EU, where two-thirds-style targets are now standard practice.

A higher floor cannot, on its own, guarantee economic security for working people. That will require a broader agenda: a stronger safety net, expanded public goods, fewer barriers to unionization, and a renewed commitment to full employment. But updating the federal minimum to a modern, indexed benchmark is the single most direct step Congress can take to raise wages at the bottom, and the only step that reaches the 55 million workers in the 20 states still stuck at $7.25.

Appendix

State benefits

Methodology

Underlying wages are based on the 2025 Current Population Survey and between 2025 and 2030. I assume wages increase at the rate of CBO (2026a) ECI projections and because of future state-level minimum wages. Due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the possibility of continued labor market weakening, how the baseline level of employment grows over the next five years is very uncertain. For simplicity, I hold the estimated employment level constant between 2025 and 2030 instead of making additional assumptions about either employment rates or population growth. In terms of total population growth, this assumption may not be too far off the mark of current projections; CBO (2026b), for example, estimates that between 2025 and 2030, the civilian population ages 16 to 64 will only grow by 0.06%, or 130,000 people.

Affected workers include those “directly” affected, whose wages would otherwise be less than the new federal minimum wage, as well as “indirectly” affected workers who earn up to 115% of the new minimum (Cooper, Mokhiber, and Zipperer 2019). These particular estimates may overstate the number of workers affected because while they incorporate already scheduled state-level increases, they exclude city-level minimum wage increases, and some cities will have higher than $20 minimum wage standards in 2030. On the other hand, if the labor market continues to weaken, low-wage workers will, in the absence of minimum wages, face slower than usual wage growth because their wage growth slows disproportionately when unemployment is higher (Bivens and Zipperer 2018).

Notes

1. These projections follow CBO ECI and CPI projections from 2025–2036, and for subsequent years assume 2026–2035 annual growth rates of 2.26% for CPI and 2.94% for ECI. 

2. For additional discussion, see Dube and Lindner (2025), Schmitt (2013), and Zipperer (2023).

3. OECD (2026) estimated the U.S. minimum-to-median wage for full-time workers was 55.05% in 1968. Assuming a 10% premium for the full-time median wage relative to the overall median wage results in a minimum-to-median wage ratio of 60.56%.

4. In April 2024, the state raised the wage for fast-food chain workers from $16 to $20, pushing the ratio of that minimum to the state’s median wage to about 74%, well above most U.S. precedents.

5. The 2024 OEWS national median wage (which is the latest available data) was $23.80 (BLS 2025). The EPI State of Working America Data Library (EPI 2026b), which uses CPS wage data and which we use for wage levels throughout this paper, reports a 2024 median wage of $24.87.

6. The exact schedule simulated below is $12 in 2026, $13.50 in 2027, $15.50 in 2028, $17.50 in 2029, and $20 in 2030.

7. Ideally other subminimum wages would be phased out, including those for some workers with disabilities and youth workers. I do not model the effects of those changes due to data constraints.

8. I concentrate on the effects in 2030. Were low-wage workers’ wages to grow slower (or faster) than median wages, these estimates would understate (or overstate) the effects in later years.

References

Banks, Nina. 2019. “Black Women’s Labor Market History Reveals Deep-Seated Race and Gender Discrimination.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), February 19, 2019.

Bernstein, Jared. 2013. “If Increasing the Minimum Wage Doesn’t Cost Jobs, How Does It Get Absorbed?” Huffington Post, August 14, 2013.

Bivens, Josh, and Ben Zipperer. 2018. The Importance of Locking in Full Employment for the Long Haul. Economic Policy Institute, August 2018.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2025. “Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) Tables, May 2024” [Excel file], Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Accessed May 13, 2026. 

Clemens, Jeffrey, Olivia Eduwards, Jonathan Meer, and Joshua D. Nguyen. 2026. “The Effects of Calfornia’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 34990, March 2026.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2026a. The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036. February 11, 2026.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2026b. The Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056. January 7, 2026.

Cooper, David, Zane Mokhiber, and Ben Zipperer. 2019. Minimum Wage Simulation Model Technical Methodology. Economic Policy Institute, February 2019. 

Coviello, Decio, Erika Deserranno, and Nicola Persico. 2022. “Minimum Wage and Individual Worker Productivity: Evidence from a Large US Retailer.” Journal of Political Economy 130, no. 9: 2315–2360.

Derenoncourt, Ellora, and Claire Montialoux. 2021. “Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1 (February): 169–228.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2026a. “Labor Market Effects of California’s $20 Fast-Food Minimum Wage.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 35171, May 2026.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2026b. The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It. New York: Penguin Random House.

Dube, Arindrajit, and Attila S. Lindner. 2024. “Minimum Wages in the 21st Century.” In Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 5, edited by Christian Dustmann and Thomas Lemieux. 

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2026a. Minimum Wage Tracker. Accessed May 5, 2026.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2026b. State of Working America Data Library. Accessed May 5, 2026. 

Giupponi, Giulia, Robert Joyce, Attila Lindner, Tom Waters, Thomas Wernham, and Xiaowei Xu. 2024. “The Employment and Distributional Impacts of Nationwide Minimum Wage Changes.” Journal of Labor Economics 42, no. S1: S293–S333.

Hickey, Sebastian, and Ismael Cid-Martinez. 2025. “The Federal Minimum Wage is Officially a Poverty Wage in 2025.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), April 28, 2025.

Low Pay Commission. 2024. “What Will the Minimum Wage Be Next Year?” (blog post). April 19, 2024.

Oakford, Patrick. 2026. Federal Employment Standards as the Foundation of Economic Security: Revisiting Minimum Wage, Just Cause, and Tools to Combat Wage Theft. Roosevelt Institute, May 2026.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2026. OECD Data Explorer. Accessed May 5, 2026.

Reich, Michael. 2026. The Unexpected Effects of a $20 Federal Minimum Wage. Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, February 2026.

Reich, Michael, and Denis Sosinskiy. 2026. “Effects of a $20 Minimum Wage: Evidence from Granular Data on Wages, Employment, and Prices.” Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper, April 1, 2026.

U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. 1937. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937. S. Rep. No. 884, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Wursten, Jesse, and Michael Reich. 2023. “Racial Inequality in Frictional Labor Markets: Evidence from Minimum Wages.” Labour Economics 82, 102344.

Related: Why the U.S. needs a $17 minimum wage • Why eliminate the tipped minimum wage

Interactive

February 26, 2026

Good afternoon, Chair Ricks, Vice Chair Camacho, and members of the committee,

My name is Nina Mast, and I’m a policy and economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). EPI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank founded in 1986 to research the economic status of working America and propose public policies that protect and improve conditions for low- and middle-wage workers.

I’m here today to testify in support of HB 1054, a bill to strengthen Colorado workers’ right to a safe workplace. HB 1054 represents an opportunity for Colorado to continue showing leadership in efforts to protect all workers—both adults and minors—from preventable workplace injuries or fatalities.

As a national expert on state labor standards—including state standards to prevent young workers from exposure to hazardous occupations—I have had the opportunity to work on many state-level efforts to improve state workplace laws—including in Colorado. I regularly encourage policymakers to look to Colorado as a leader in making crucial and innovative updates to its standards both through legislation and administrative rulemaking. HB 1054 is an important next step for Colorado to take in this direction at a time when long-standing federal workplace health and safety standards are at risk.

Since the 1970 passage of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act first established basic nationwide workplace health and safety standards, OSHA has saved tens of thousands of lives and prevented millions of injuries. Unfortunately, federal OSHA today faces numerous threats including diminished enforcement capacity, efforts to block important and long-overdue new worker protection standards, and—notably—efforts to weaken the statute’s general duty clause, which ensures foundational safety protections to all workers, regardless of the occupation or industry they work in. The Trump administration has proposed carving entire industries out of coverage under the “general duty” clause. This disastrous proposal could leave many workers without any federally guaranteed right to protection from known and preventable workplace hazards.

Given the inadequacies of current federal OSHA enforcement and the risk that existing minimum federal standards could soon be eroded further, it’s crucial for states to step in to protect their workers.

HB 1054 not only enshrines the long-standing intention of the general duty clause into state law, but it also goes further to ensure stronger protections from workplace illnesses and injuries for Colorado workers today. Specifically, the bill creates a general duty of employers to provide “reasonable and adequate” protections for all workers and comply with all standards adopted through administrative rulemaking. The bill also empowers the state attorney general and the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) to refer cases for investigation and recover penalties to be used for enforcement. And—importantly—it provides labor organizations and individuals harmed on the job with the option to file civil actions and pursue statutory damages in cases in which employers violate legal obligations to provide a safe workplace. These provisions will strengthen enforcement of the law, encourage reporting of unsafe working conditions by workers who report abuse at great personal risk, and more meaningfully deter violations.

As a national organization that convenes a network of state research and policy organizations, we have been closely tracking the implications of federal actions for workers at the state level. In the past year, OSHA has faced unprecedented threats to its enforcement capabilities, and aggressive immigration enforcement will make workers even less likely to feel safe reporting unsafe conditions at work. Because of these threats, state lawmakers have an opportunity and responsibility to resist the erosion of hard-won worker protections and take up the mantle of advancing workers’ right to a safe workplace. The sponsors of this bill have shown that they take this commitment seriously, and we urge all members of this committee and the Colorado General Assembly to do the same by supporting the passage of HB 1054.

Thank you.

This FAQ answers key questions about the “no tax on overtime” policy and what it means for working people.

Amid increased child labor violations, youth work permit systems have been under attack in some states

In recent years, child labor violations have been on the rise across the country. At the same time, lawmakers in many states have proposed bills to reverse long-standing state child labor standards that prohibit employers from exposing youth under 18 to hazardous jobs or overly long work hours that interfere with their health and well-being. Youth work permits—which many states have historically required—have been a repeated target of this coordinated, industry-backed campaign to weaken child labor laws. Such permits typically require employers to outline the potential hours and work duties for a minor worker, as well as parental approval and verification that the minor is attending school.

Since 2021, lawmakers in at least nine states have proposed weakening or eliminating youth work permit systems, and four have enacted such legislation (Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and West Virginia). Most recently, in 2025, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy encouraged the legislature to pass a bill that would have eliminated the requirement that minors receive individual authorization to work (and replaced it with a general authorization for employers to hire minors). And in West Virginia, lawmakers successfully eliminated youth work permits for 14- and 15-year-olds and replaced them with age certificates following a two-year push by the right-wing think tank Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA). FGA has played a leading role in efforts to eliminate youth work permits in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

New research explains how and why youth work permits are so effective

Proponents of eliminating youth work permits have often argued that work permits are not necessary, are overly burdensome for employers, or that they infringe on parents’ right to decide whether, where, and how long their child should work. In reality, work permits are a proven, effective policy for ensuring that young teens can enter the workforce safely by making sure employers are aware of child labor laws and that parents are fully informed about the conditions of a proposed job.

A year ago, we reported on research providing new quantitative evidence that work permits help prevent federal child labor violations. Using comprehensive data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division from 2008 to 2020, researchers at the University of Maryland and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, found that states requiring employment certificates saw 13.3% fewer violation cases and 31.8% fewer minors involved in these violations.1 States with work permits also saw 34.9% lower civil penalties per minor, indicating reduced severity of violations that do occur.

New findings from the same research team now reveal two key mechanisms that explain how work permits provide this protection: 1) work permits create a documentary paper trail that increases employers’ accountability and aids government enforcers, and 2) work permits improve compliance with state and federal standards by increasing employers’ awareness of child labor laws. According to the new analysis, requiring verification of parental consent for a minor to work and providing education to employers about hours restrictions are the main features that make work permits effective. State lawmakers can use the new findings to strengthen and modernize their youth work permit systems, using strategies proven to reduce violations and protect youth well-being.

Work permits create legal accountability and enable effective enforcement

Researchers found that work permits enable more effective enforcement of child labor standards by creating a record that employers were informed of child labor standards, therefore making it harder for employers to claim ignorance if violations occur. By analyzing publicly available federal court records, researchers found that in states with work permit mandates, 91% of child labor cases were classified as “willful” or “repeated” violations. These more serious classifications carry higher penalties. In contrast, only 33% of cases in states without work permit mandates received these classifications.

This finding implies that when employers hiring teens must complete a work permit that documents the minor’s age, obtains parental consent, and acknowledges legal requirements, they are made aware of child labor standards and can fully comply with state and federal laws. Work permits also enhance the investigatory capacity of federal enforcement agencies by providing basic documentation about youth employment that investigators can scrutinize when they suspect violations of federal law, as well as bolstering their ability to take effective action if an employer violates the law despite having been informed.

Work permits enhance awareness of specific child labor standards

Second, researchers found that work permits enhance awareness and monitoring of employers’ compliance with federal and state laws—but only for standards that are explicitly mentioned in the permitting process. Analyzing all relevant Department of Labor news releases detailing specific violations (118 in total) from 2020 through 2025, researchers found that work permits reduce precisely the types of violations that the permit forms explicitly warn employers are prohibited under federal law. As Figure A highlights, states with work permits showed: 1) fewer hours violations—minors working beyond federally permitted hours (e.g., federal law limits 14–15 year-olds to 18 hours per week during school weeks); 2) fewer age-limit violations—employment of children below minimum working age (typically 14 for nonagricultural work); and 3) fewer recordkeeping violations—failure to maintain required documentation such as age verification. On the other hand, hazardous occupation violations remained similar across both types of states. Analysis of employment certificate forms from all 38 states with mandates reveals why: While 100% mention age requirements and 60% mention work hours restrictions, most forms do not enumerate the specific hazardous occupations prohibited under federal law.

Figure A

Parental consent and hour limits provide strongest protection

The researchers also examined which features make permits most effective. Figure B highlights the findings. Examining employment certificate forms from 37 of the 38 states that require them (Mississippi’s form was not publicly available), researchers found that parental consent requirements had the strongest protective effect, reducing violations by 13.9% and case severity by 38.7% (measured by civil penalties assessed). Work hours documentation—in which the certificate must record the minor’s planned work schedule (typically completed by employers, though responsibilities vary by state)—also proved effective, reducing the number of minors involved in violations by 24.0%. In contrast, more passive requirements, such as employer signatures and job description requirements, showed lesser independent effects. This suggests that active oversight mechanisms, particularly parental involvement and explicit requirements to record work schedules to show compliance with legal guidelines on hours of work, drive the protective benefits. That these two features are particularly impactful provides further evidence that requiring employer documentation on work permits and verifying parental consent make work permits effective.

Figure B

Work permits prevent violations. State lawmakers should strengthen, not eliminate them.

Understanding how work permits prevent violations points to ways for states to further increase their effectiveness. The researchers identified four best practices lawmakers should consider:

• Strengthen parental consent requirements: Youth work permit applications should require parental signature and include a process for parents to revoke their consent in the future. 
• Strengthen requirements to outline the specific duties of the potential job: Youth work permit applications should require employers to document specific duties of the potential job and include the minor’s planned work schedule. 
• Include information about hazardous occupation restrictions on permit forms: Youth work permit applications should include a list of prohibited jobs for minors under state and federal law and affirm the employer’s commitment not to employ a minor for hazardous tasks and occupations.
• Clearly state hour limits: Youth work permit applications should include permitted daily and weekly hours and prohibitions on overnight work under both state and federal law. These forms should also clearly state that, where there are discrepancies between state and federal law, the more protective law applies.

These new insights into how youth work permits function reinforce the researchers’ original conclusion: Youth work permits are a proven method for reducing child labor violations. And they show that the permitting process can be a highly effective vehicle for educating employers, teen workers, and parents about legal rights and protections. States with existing work permit systems can strengthen them to enhance their protective effects—as Illinois, Michigan, and Washington have done—and states that do not have work permit requirements should take immediate steps to implement or reinstate them.

1. Throughout this report, the terms “work permits” and “employment certificates” are used interchangeably. Age certificates are distinct and more limited; they typically verify age but do not include the same safeguards.

Amanda Wood Laihow
Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health
U.S. Department of Labor 200 Constitution Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20210

Comments on RIN 1218-AD71: Interpretation of the General Duty Clause: Limitation for Inherently Risky Professional Activities

Dear Acting Assistant Secretary Laihow,

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) submits these comments to oppose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking “Interpretation of the General Duty Clause: Limitation for Inherently Risky Professional Activities.” We strongly oppose limiting the scope of the general duty clause, which protects workers from known and preventable dangers where no other specific standard applies. We oppose the deregulation of this critical protection that holds an essential role in maintaining safe and healthy work environments and urge the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to withdraw this proposed rule.

The Economic Policy Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America, proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-income workers, and assesses policies with respect to how well they further those goals. For years, EPI has conducted research on the importance of strong labor standards, including health and safety standards. 

The proposed rule would exclude certain occupations that are deemed “inherently risky professional activities” from the general duty clause. The general duty clause is an essential component to the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act by filling the gap for known and preventable dangers that do not have existing standards. The proposed carveout will result in a significant increase in preventable injuries among workers and a decrease in employer accountability. In OSHA’s own estimates, at least 115,000 workers from arts, entertainment and sports occupations would be affected by the proposed rule. However, the rule also solicits commenters to provide additional industries for exclusion, which may result in a rippling effect of excluding all industries with higher safety risks, where the OSH Act’s protections are most vital.1

Exclusion from the general duty clause means these workers would no longer be protected from known and preventable hazards that do not already have an existing standard. For example, while OSHA is undergoing a rulemaking on whether a federal heat standard should be established, there currently is no federal heat standard in place for workers. Therefore, the general duty clause is the only avenue for workers to be protected from extreme heat. There are a multitude of other health and safety risks that do not have OSHA standards, including protections against infectious diseases, ergonomic strains, and workplace violence.

Furthermore, at the time of this rulemaking, the Department of Labor has proposed amending or eliminating dozens of regulations that are designed to ensure workers have safe workplaces.2 This includes regulations that require employers to limit workers’ exposure to a variety of harmful substances (such as benzene, asbestos, lead, and cotton dust), regulations that require medical evaluations of respirators, and regulations that require color-coding to mark hazards.3 If the Department of Labor’s deregulatory agenda is finalized, workers will be less protected from known and preventable hazards.

The general duty clause is an essential component to the OSH Act that helps mitigate health and safety risks that we do not have existing standards for. Employers in higher-risk industries have already adjusted to providing these basic protections since the OSH Act was passed in 1970, and there is no indication that the general duty clause generates an unstainable burden on employers. For these reasons, EPI opposes the proposed rule and strongly urges OSHA to withdraw this rulemaking.

Sincerely,

Margaret Poydock
Senior Policy Analyst
Economic Policy Institute

Endnotes

1. 90 Fed. Reg. 28372.

2. U.S. Department of Labor, “Secretary Chavez-Deremer Unveils Aggressive Deregulatory Efforts in Push to Put the American Worker First” (press release), July 1, 2025.

3. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Deregulatory Rulemaking” (web page), accessed on October 30, 2025.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act—passed in 1970 after decades of fierce advocacy by organized labor and its allies—mandates that workplaces be “free from recognized hazards that could cause death or serious physical harm to employees.” To implement this mandate, the Act created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop and enforce workplace health and safety standards. OSHA standards are designed to limit workers’ exposure to hazards; ensure access to adequate safety equipment; and require that employers monitor workplaces for hazards and report injuries and illnesses. OSHA also provides training and compliance assistance to workers and employers and gives workers the right to request workplace inspections. The OSH Act established the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the sole agency responsible for conducting research to inform OSHA policymaking with evidence-based assessments of injury and fatality risks, and providing actionable guidance for employers to improve safety. Since OSHA was created, fatalities and work-related injuries have dropped by 65%, even while the U.S. workforce has doubled in size.

Separately, following a century of lawmaking related to mine safety, the 1977 Federal Mine Safety and Health Act created the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which is charged with enforcing mine safety rules with the goal of reducing deaths, injuries, and illnesses in U.S. mines.

The OSH Act establishes roles for both federal OSHA and states on occupational safety and health protection. The relationship between federal government and state OSH mandates is complicated. The OSH Act grants the federal government jurisdiction over worker health and safety law, but states have the option to establish their own state-level OSHA standards and enforcement systems (known as “state plans”) that are then monitored by federal OSHA. State OSHA plans must be approved by federal OSHA, be “at least as effective” as federal OSHA, and must cover state and local government employees at a minimum. Currently, federal OSHA can only cover private-sector workers. The cost of running a state plan is shared between the state and federal government. At present:

• 29 states are under federal OSHA jurisdiction (“federal OSHA” states). Federal OSHA covers all private businesses engaged in commerce and all federal agencies but does not cover state and local governments (see Figure A). Self-employed workers are excluded and employers with 10 or fewer employees are exempt from OSHA’s record-keeping requirements (though they are still required to comply with OSHA standards and to report serious injuries and fatalities).
• 21 states have OSHA-approved state plans that cover both private-sector and state and local government workers.1
• Six states have “hybrid” plans, where private-sector workers fall under federal OSHA jurisdiction, but public-sector employees are covered by a state plan.2

Figure A

What are the threats to federal workplace health and safety protections?

Threats to federal workplace health and safety protections include:

• Diminishing capacity to enforce or develop workplace safety standards: OSHA has long been understaffed and underfunded. Federal and state OSHAs collectively employ fewer than 2,000 inspectors to cover 161 million workers; it would take the agency 185 years to inspect every U.S. workplace just once. Trump administration actions have already significantly exacerbated OSHA’s existing capacity and enforcement constraints, by:
  • Attempting to close OSHA and MSHA offices, as well as attempting to eliminate NIOSH;
  • Issuing guidance allowing OSHA staff to reduce certain employer OSHA violation penalties by up to 70%; and
  • Announcing self-audit programs that carve out inspection exemptions for employers. These programs reduce the agency’s enforcement powers and create a system that relies on self-policing and individual companies’ voluntary adherence to the law.
• Restricting the General Duty clause: Trump’s Department of Labor has proposed carving out exemptions to this foundational OSHA protection, which ensures that employers have a basic obligation to protect workers from known and preventable dangers not covered by other OSHA regulations. This rule change would exempt certain industries from this obligation and has dangerous implications for the future of OSHA.
• Blocking or delaying long-overdue standards on serious hazards like silica dust or heat exposure: The Trump administration has already paused enforcement of a new mine safety rule on silica exposure that would prevent black lung disease and death from silicosis among coal miners. It is widely anticipated that the administration will block or weaken a proposed new OSHA standard to protect workers from extreme heat exposure.

How can states maintain and strengthen workplace health and safety protections?

State authority to enact and enforce health and safety standards depends on whether a state is a “federal OSHA” or “state plan” state, as follows:

• Federal OSHA states are preempted from enacting standards in areas already addressed by federal OSHA but can still enact policies covering areas of occupational health and safety not addressed by federal law.
• States with state OSHA plans have authority to enact standards that exceed the federal floor—for example, by strengthening existing standards or adopting standards in additional areas, as well as strengthening enforcement programs and imposing civil monetary penalties that exceed federal amounts.

Step I: Update state laws and standards to lock in current federal protections

In state plan states, OSHA standards and enforcement must be at least as strong as the floor set by federal OSHA. However, many state plan states have not achieved this basic standard. Meanwhile, federal OSHA states run the risk of leaving workers unprotected if federal OSHA standards are eliminated or enforcement is further weakened.

Federal OSHA states should:

1. • Ensure OSHA coverage for all public employees: Federal OSHA excludes millions of workers from its protections because it does not cover state and local government employees. Six federal OSHA states have passed protections covering all public employees, but 23 federal OSHA states and the District of Columbia have not yet taken necessary steps to extend protections to state and local government employees. All federal OSHA states should extend coverage to public-sector workers, as is currently under consideration in Pennsylvania. (Because state OSHA plans often struggle with underfunding and capacity constraints that limit their effectiveness, advocates should remain aware that extending coverage to public employees under this model is an important short-term solution, while a best-case long-term scenario would be an expanded federal OSHA that covers all private- and public-sector workers).
   • Pass worker health and safety trigger laws: Federal OSHA states cannot strengthen or adopt standards in areas already regulated by federal OSHA. However, states can safeguard against the possibility of existing federal standards being eliminated by passing legislation to automatically incorporate into state code any eliminated federal standards to ensure workers are not left unprotected. For example, a recently enacted Illinois law directs state agencies to ensure state wage and hour, occupational health and safety, and mine safety standards remain at least as protective as existing federal standards in the event that certain federal protective standards are eliminated.

State plan states should:

• • Ensure full adoption of all current federal standards: Too many state plan states have track records of failing to adopt required new federal standards in their OSHA plans. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Arizona failed to adopt an emergency temporary standard (ETS) for health care workers and failed to align with federal OSHA’s new increase in penalties. After federal OSHA threatened to revoke Arizona’s state plan privilege, the state met its obligations to adopt these standards and penalty increases. Some states, like Kentucky, have failed to update their penalty policy to align with federal minimum standards.

Step II: Close critical gaps in workplace health and safety protections

• All states should adopt standards in key areas federal OSHA fails to cover: Federal OSHA lacks standards in several areas where workers face serious and ongoing workplace hazards, but intense industry opposition has blocked or stalled federal OSHA rulemaking. Fortunately, all states have latitude to adopt their own standards in these areas and can do so by drawing on existing, evidence-based proposals already developed (but not enacted) by federal OSHA, relying on recommendations from NIOSH, or replicating strong standards already implemented in other states.
  • Heat exposure: Heat is a serious and deadly hazard for many workers. There is currently no federal heat standard; it is unlikely that the proposed protection moving through the rulemaking process will be finalized. In the absence of a federal standard, several states have implemented their own state heat standards, which vary in strength and coverage. Lawmakers seeking model policies can look to states like California, Maryland, and Oregon, where strong heat standards apply to both indoor and outdoor workplaces and there are clear temperature thresholds for when protections kick in.
  • Wildfire smoke: Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe, yet there is no federal OSHA standard requiring protection from wildfire smoke. States can follow the lead of California, Oregon, and Washington, which have all promulgated rules that require employers to follow protocols to protect many workers, not just responders. Outdoor and indoor workers need protection from wildfire smoke when airborne particulate matter reaches a certain concentration threshold.
  • Ergonomics: Ergonomic hazards like repetitive lifting, twisting, and forceful hand and wrist motions have long been a leading source of workplace injuries, especially in industries like warehouse work, meat processing, health care, and construction. A federal ergonomics standard was enacted in 2000 but then promptly repealed by Congress. A few states have passed rules to protect workers in certain industries from musculoskeletal disorders, such as hotel housekeepers in California and meatpacking workers in Minnesota. New York recently passed a warehouse worker protection act that includes specific protections against musculoskeletal disorders, among other workplace health and safety concerns.
  • Workplace violence: Workplace violence has worsened over the past five years and is now the third-leading cause of death on the job, yet federal efforts to implement a workplace violence standard have so far been unsuccessful. California, however, is in the process of developing a general standard for workplace violence protections after the state legislature passed SB 553 and mandated comprehensive protections. Cal/OSHA had already implemented a workplace violence prevention standard for employees in health care industries. Several other states proposed standards this year.
  • Infectious disease: In the absence of a federal OSHA standard on airborne or aerosolized infectious disease, U.S. workers—particularly health care workers, low-wage workers, and workers of color—continue to face high risk of workplace exposure during major infectious disease outbreaks. A 2021 OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard established to address COVID-19 in health care settings was withdrawn six months later and OSHA’s stated intent to develop a broader infectious disease rule for health care remains in limbo. During the pandemic, at least 14 states implemented temporary COVID-19 worker safety protections. Other states, such as New York, have adopted limited infectious disease standards. Unfortunately, no state has adopted a comprehensive, enforceable measure yet.
  • Right to refuse work under dangerous conditions—including during climate emergencies: While federal OSHA law has some retaliation protections for workers refusing to work under dangerous conditions, they are weak and largely unenforced. It is therefore urgent that states take steps to ensure that workers may refuse to work under dangerous conditions without being subject to retaliation—and that they continue to be paid so long as the dangerous workplace condition remains unremedied. The need for this protection is only increasing as the climate crisis causes more severe and more frequent emergencies. Some states—such as California and Oregon—and localities like Miami-Dade County, Florida, have enacted laws that prohibit employers from taking adverse action against non-essential workers who refuse to continue work when emergency conditions are present or imminent.
  • Mandate injury and illness prevention programs (IIPPs): Federal OSHA does not have a specific standard to require an IIPP but has issued formal recommendations that employers adopt comprehensive safety programs. Several states, including California, Minnesota, and Washington, have created regulations that require that employers implement an injury and illness prevention plan.
  • Strengthen anti-retaliation protections for workers that voice concerns about safety and health hazards: Though federal OSHA law contains some language on protecting workers from retaliation when exercising their rights under the law, the provisions are weak and the OSHA offices that enforce the provisions are critically understaffed. Providing workers with a private right of action so that they may go to court if they are retaliated against is critical for ensuring workers are protected. States with existing whistleblower laws should expand them to protect workers who notify fellow workers or the public about workplace hazards (not just workers who file complaints).
• State plan states should strengthen existing standards: State plan states should increase protections for workers by implementing stronger versions of existing weak or outdated federal standards. State plan agencies can look to states like California and Washington, whose OSH agencies regularly pass the nation’s most stringent standards, for guidance.

Step III: Use proven strategies to increase effectiveness of enforcement, encourage compliance, and expand community awareness

• State plan states should implement targeted, more effective enforcement and penalty strategies. They should:
  • Increase agency resources and staff: Where possible, states should dedicate more resources to their state OSH agency. Like federal OSHA, state plans are plagued with staffing shortages that severely limit their ability to carry out regular, sufficient inspections. As of 2024, state plan states had an average ratio of one OSHA inspector per 84,937 employees.
  • Increase penalties to meaningful levels: Penalties are effective for deterring violations only if they’re substantial enough to compel employers to take notice and remove hazards. While state plans are required to maintain statutory maximum penalties that are at least equivalent to those of federal OSHA, Kentucky is one of several states that has failed to raise its penalties after Congress required OSHA to raise its penalties in 2016 and index them to inflation. There are also often significant disparities between the already low average penalties assessed by federal OSHA and the average penalties assessed by state plans, even among those that have adopted new maximums. In fiscal year 2024, the average penalty for a serious violation under federal OSHA was $4,083, compared with an average penalty under state OSHA plans of only $2,580. These penalties are far too low to serve as effective deterrents; state plan states should raise penalty rates substantially across the board. In addition, states should resist adopting the new federal OSHA penalty reduction policy that the Trump administration announced in July.
  • Implement instance-by-instance citations: States can use instance-by-instance citations to cite and fine employers for each individual iteration of a willful and serious violation. This strategy can have a significant impact by compounding OSHA’s otherwise low penalties. Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries, for example, fined a manufacturing company over $2 million after it found 31 willful serious, seven willful general, 94 serious, and more than 40 general violations across three of the corporation’s locations. 
  • Cite all involved employers for violations: It is often the case that companies do not directly employ many of the workers who perform tasks for them—work is often outsourced via other entities such as subcontractors, temporary agencies, and workers misclassified as independent contractors. Multiple employers may also operate at the same site. Federal OSHA has maintained a multiemployer policy since the 1970s, but it is underutilized and not regularly enforced. When workers’ safety rights are violated in situations that involve multiple employers, state plans should cast as wide a net of responsibility as is legally feasible and hold all involved companies that possess control over working conditions financially responsible.
  • Require workplace hazards to be addressed while citations are being contested: Federal OSHA and most state plans do not require employers to abate workplace hazards identified during an OSHA inspection while that violation is being contested. State plan states should require employers to address recognized hazards whether they appeal the violation or not, as is done in Washington.
• Monitor and expose routine violators: Federal OSHA’s Severe Violator Enforcement Program designates agency resources toward inspecting and monitoring employers that have “demonstrated indifference” to their OSH Act obligations. Severe violators are subject to additional inspections and are publicly listed on the Severe Violator Enforcement Program Log. This program has been found to be effective at deterring violations by peer employers. States can implement a state-level “wall of shame” like New Jersey’s Workplace Accountability in Labor List (WALL), a publicly accessible list of employers with outstanding wage/benefit theft or tax liabilities, and can issue press releases publicizing serious and willful violations by employers.
• Provide or require workers’ rights education: States can mandate that both youth and adults receive education on workplace health and safety and their rights under OSHA. For high school students, “workplace readiness” curricula—like the one implemented in California and those proposed in other states—can include education on workplace rights including health and safety protections. States can implement use of NIOSH’s “Youth@Work—Talking Safety” curriculum in schools and develop state-level versions of programs like the federal Susan Harwood Training Grants Program, which provides funding to nonprofit organizations to provide workplace health and safety training—particularly to marginalized workers in high-hazard industries.

Where to go next

This document is designed to be a primer on OSHA, as well as to provide insight into the complex relationship between the federal OSHA and state plan states. It is a first step for those interested in improving worker health and safety conditions in their state. It does not provide enough details to guide drafting of laws or regulations for your state. If you are interested in advocating for specific policies mentioned in this brief, please contact us at earn@epi.org. We will be happy to connect you with relevant health and safety experts and organizations for further technical assistance.

Additional recommended resources:

• AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report
• AFL-CIO’s resources for workers
• Health & Safety resources from National Employment Law Project
• National Council for Occupational Safety and Health
• Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Debbie Berkowitz and Rebecca Reindel for their expertise and guidance.

1. These states are Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. Puerto Rico also operates a state plan.

2. These states are Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. The Virgin Islands also operate a hybrid plan.

The human and economic costs of extreme heat

Heat is the leading cause of death among all weather-related fatalities, killing 177 people last year alone and at least 211 workers between 2017 and 2022. We know that existing data on heat-related workplace fatalities significantly understate their true incidence and that, as climate change leads to more frequent and intense heat waves, these numbers will only rise. Despite this, 43 states and D.C. have yet to take action to prevent heat deaths. With federal rulemaking now in limbo, it is more imperative than ever for states to act quickly to protect workers from the growing danger of heat exposure.

Like workplace deaths and injuries in general—and due to occupational segregation and geographical factors—the ­­impacts of extreme heat are distributed unevenly based on income, race/ethnicity, and immigration status. The lowest-paid 20% of workers suffer five times as many heat-related injuries as the highest-paid 20%. And Black, Hispanic, and immigrant workers face higher exposure to extreme heat because they are more likely to work in high-risk industries like construction and agriculture.

While workplace deaths are the most urgent consequence of extreme heat, heat is also responsible for thousands of illnesses and injuries every year that result in unexpected health care costs, missed workdays, lost wages, and productivity declines that cost both workers and their employers. Overall economic costs are staggering: Short-term heat-induced lost labor productivity costs the U.S. approximately $100 billion annually and these costs will only increase as climate change worsens. Without emissions reductions or sufficient heat adaptations, labor productivity losses may double to nearly $200 billion by 2030 and reach $500 billion by 2050.

If no action is taken to mitigate the growing risks of extreme heat exposure, the hottest states will suffer the gravest economic consequences. Researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated annual earnings at risk for workers in each state across seven of the most heat exposed occupations.1 Southern states make up nine of the 10 states where workers stand to lose the highest average annual earnings (see Figure A). Texas will be one of the hardest hit; it’s projected to lose a cumulative $110 billion in labor productivity by 2050.

Despite these economic risks, some Southern states are standing in the way of protecting their own workers and businesses. Texas and Florida—which accounted for almost half of all heat-related severe injuries in the construction industry between 2015 and 2023—have failed to adopt statewide heat standards and banned cities and counties from passing local heat standards.

Figure A

Even though the economic harms of heat-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths are well documented, new heat standard proposals regularly face significant opposition from industry interests who claim, with little evidence, that protections will be too costly to implement. While exaggerated claims and fearmongering are consistent with a long history of industry resistance each time OSHA has proposed new standards, suggestions that a heat standard would disrupt business aren’t backed by available evidence. In its own regulatory impact analysis of the proposed heat standard, federal OSHA estimated that savings to employers are projected to outweigh any implementation costs by $1.4 billion each year.

Existing models provide roadmap for states to adopt or strengthen their own heat standards

Years of research and experience have produced clear guidelines for evidence-based, effective standards that states can now adopt quickly and with confidence. The strength and effectiveness of existing heat standards varies across states with respect to which workers are covered and what steps employers must take to prevent extreme heat exposure. All state heat standards (except for Nevada’s) set a temperature threshold above which employers are required to provide workers with water and shade. Most states also set a high-heat threshold above which additional precautions must be taken to protect workers. Many states also mandate an acclimatization period for workers to adjust to working in high temperatures, but the length of that period varies across states. All states with heat standards mandate that employers train workers on heat illness prevention, monitor workers for signs of heat illness, and have a plan to respond to heat illness emergencies.

A strong state standard should, at a minimum:

• Cover all indoor and outdoor workers;
• Include temperature thresholds to mandate precautions like water, rest, and shade;
• Guarantee an acclimatization period;
• Designate a high-heat temperature threshold at which additional precautions apply; and
• Impose no new costs on workers, meaning that workers should be paid for rest breaks and time spent acclimatizing.

Seven states have already implemented heat standards: California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. While California, Washington, and Minnesota were early adopters of heat standards, advocates have built tremendous momentum toward the adoption of new standards in additional states in the past two years. In 2024, Colorado, Maryland, and Nevada all passed new heat standard laws and California expanded its existing heat standard (originally covering only outdoor work) to cover indoor workers. This year, 18 state legislatures proposed new heat standards, including bills in states like Illinois and New Jersey, that outline elements of comprehensive, evidence-based standards that other states can use as models. 

States with existing standards should review checklists for a strong heat standard as well as model legislation in states like Illinois and New Jersey to audit their regulations and strengthen them if needed. States without standards should build comprehensive, effective standards that follow these evidence-based recommendations, cover as many workers as possible, and include clear, enforceable measures.

States should act now to limit harms to workers, businesses, and state economies while federal rulemaking is in limbo

The fate of the proposed federal heat standard now under consideration could eventually reshape the heat standard policymaking landscape, but in the meantime, there is no downside to states taking action. The current proposed federal standard is fairly strong, a testament to years of research, advocacy, and community mobilization. However, given the Trump administration’s hostility toward workers and industry lobbying groups’ strong opposition to the proposed standard, possible outcomes include the adoption of a weakened standard or long delays in formalizing the proposed rule to effectively block its implementation. 

Some industry representatives opposed to the current proposed federal standard have indicated that, instead of continuing to block the federal rule, they may support the passage of a weak standard in order to stave off future rulemaking. Some have speculated that industry interests may support modeling a weak federal standard on Nevada’s months-old, untested state standard, which has no temperature threshold and has been characterized as “almost as bad as no heat standard” by worker advocates.

There are three possible outcomes of the federal heat standard rulemaking process: 

1. The Trump administration finalizes the proposed, strong federal heat standard. If a strong rule is formalized, states should (and must) adopt it. A strong federal rule protecting all workers from the effects of extreme heat is the best-case scenario. Under this scenario, states where employers and workers have already gained experience with strong state heat standards will be better prepared to implement the federal rule.
2. The Trump administration abandons/indefinitely delays action on the current proposed federal heat standard. If no federal rule is implemented, states will retain latitude to continue enacting their own heat standards. Under this scenario, states with strong, effective standards will help workers and employers immediately reap important safety and economic gains as climate change continues to increase risks of human and economic damage from extreme heat.
3. The Trump administration finalizes a weakened version of the federal proposal. In this scenario, states under federal OSHA jurisdiction would be required to follow the new federal standard and states with OSHA “state plans” could continue to enact/enforce stronger heat standards. It is also likely that any new federal standard could face legal challenge (delaying its implementation), so having a strong track record of effective state standards in place would remain critical for building additional legal and political pressure to eventually enact a stronger federal standard. Likewise, given likely legal delays, even under this scenario, states under federal OSHA’s jurisdiction would be able to continue to enforce their own standards until any new federal rule were upheld in court and any stronger state law had been blocked by a federal court order.

In short, states have every reason to enact strong, effective heat standards and no reason to wait on uncertain federal action. There is zero risk for states who act now and great dangers associated with waiting while workers and businesses alike continue to suffer.

Amid federal backsliding, state lawmakers can act to protect workers from deadly heat

Over 144 lives have already been lost to heat-related hazards since federal rulemaking began four years ago to establish a long-overdue federal OSHA heat standard. Given the possibility that the Trump administration could block or delay the proposed federal standard—or worse, weaken it to try to preempt more effective state and local standards—state lawmakers should move quickly to implement strong heat standards of their own, prevent more deaths and illnesses, and bolster their state’s economy against the damaging effects of extreme heat.

1. The research was conducted in 2021. Given the limited number of occupations considered in these wage loss estimates, recent federal reversals of major policies intended to address climate change or accelerate the clean energy transition, and documented increases in global warming since 2021, these estimates are likely extremely conservative.

Amid this crisis, states have urgent obligations to shore up basic protections. The crisis also presents states with big opportunities to remedy long-standing weaknesses and exclusions in outdated labor laws and take leadership in addressing major economic challenges like wage suppression, growing income inequality, racial and gender wage gaps, and declining job quality.

Below we summarize some of the actions states have taken so far in 2025 to raise wages, prevent harmful child labor, combat wage theft and worker misclassification, guarantee the right to unionize, expand paid leave, protect worker health and safety, and improve unemployment insurance. These examples from across the country show how state policymakers can assume more expansive, effective roles in enacting and enforcing key worker rights and protections.

Wages

The federal minimum wage—now officially a poverty wage—is just $7.25 per hour and has not increased since 2009. Moreover, federal law continues to allow employers to pay subminimum wages to tipped workers, workers with disabilities, youth under 18, and others, while excluding certain occupations (e.g., farmworkers) from coverage. Resulting wage suppression hurts all workers and is particularly harmful to Black workers and other workers of color. In the absence of federal action, states continue to lead important progress on raising the minimum wage to levels that address inflation and regional costs of living; eliminating subminimum wages; and closing loopholes that deny some groups of workers minimum wage coverage.

This year Rhode Island enacted legislation (H5029) to progressively raise the minimum wage to $17 by 2027. Virginia also passed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $17 by 2027, but it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Youngkin.

Following a years-long campaign, Maine expanded its state minimum wage law to include farmworkers who are otherwise excluded from most federal labor protections. (Maine legislators also passed related legislation [LD 588] to extend anti-retaliation protections to farmworkers, but it was vetoed by Governor Mills). And this year, Georgia joined 26 states that have taken action to prohibit or disincentivize paying subminimum wages to workers with disabilities. Georgia’s new law (SB 55) will phase out the disability subminimum wage by 2027.

Ongoing efforts to eliminate the tipped minimum wage met with setbacks in D.C., Michigan, and Colorado:

• In Washington, D.C.—where voters overwhelmingly supported measures to phase out the tipped minimum wage in both 2018 and 2022—the City Council voted to delay planned 2025 increases, extend the timeline for phasing in future increases to seven years, and eventually cap the tipped minimum wage at 75% of the minimum wage.
• Seven years after Michigan legislators blocked voters from weighing in on a highly popular ballot measure that would have phased out the tipped minimum wage, and a year after the Michigan Supreme Court reinstated the ballot measure’s benefits for low-wage workers, state legislators once again acted against voters’ wishes with compromise legislation (SB 8) that accelerates the schedule of minimum wage increases but maintains the state’s tipped subminimum wage.
• In response to intense lobbying from the restaurant industry, Colorado changed its law to allow localities with higher minimum wage rates to maintain relatively lower tipped minimum wages. Previously, Colorado cities with higher minimum wages were required to maintain a tipped minimum of $3.02 less than the local minimum wage (equivalent to the current $3.02 gap between the state tipped and full minimum wage). The new law allows for gaps larger than $3.02 between a local tipped and full minimum wage (providing that the local tipped minimum remains at least equivalent to the state tipped minimum). This compromise replaced an even worse bill that would have required all localities to lower their tipped minimum wage to match the state tipped minimum.

State prevailing wage standards—which require contractors on public works projects to pay workers at least the local median wage for a given type of work—help ensure that public investments yield good jobs with fair, equitable pay and benefits. This year, New Jersey strengthened its prevailing wage law by expanding prohibitions on public contracts with firms that have previously failed to pay prevailing wage. Oregon enacted HB 2688, extending prevailing wage requirements to some off-site manufacturing. A bill extending the state’s prevailing wage requirement to contractors working on underground infrastructure works passed in Virginia but was vetoed by Governor Youngkin.

Child labor

Despite ongoing federal- and state-level attempts to erode the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, advocates in several states succeeded in blocking new threats to weaken child labor protections. For example, EARN network affiliate Florida Policy Institute helped block two related bills (HB 1225 and SB 918) that would have allowed employers to schedule some 14- and 15-year-olds and all 16- and 17-year-olds for unlimited hours of work without breaks. Florida advocates also stopped passage of a bill (SB 676) that threatened to exempt student internships and work-study programs from the state minimum wage.

Continuing a growing trend, several states passed proactive legislation to shore up child labor protections. New York’s budget bill drastically increases civil penalties and adds criminal homicide charges for employers who cause the death of a child due to negligence on the job, while Washington passed legislation (HB 1644) increasing penalties for child labor violations, limiting an employer’s ability to hire minors following repeated violations, and strengthening state agency oversight of employers seeking permits to supervise student learning that involves potentially hazardous work.

Unfortunately, West Virginia eliminated their youth work permit system for 14–15-year-olds and replaced it with a mandatory age certification process which transfers sole approval authority and recordkeeping responsibilities from schools to the state labor division. Though an improvement on a previous bill, this law means school officials will no longer have the authority to reject work arrangements they believe are not in a student’s best interest.

Preventing wage theft and worker misclassification

State roles in enforcing strong wage payment standards are more important than ever at a moment when the Trump administration is rolling back federal wage and hour standards and the number of federal Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division investigators is already at an all-time low. This year, several states passed legislation to prevent wage theft:

• Building on an impressive multi-year initiative to strengthen state labor standards enforcement, Oregon’s SB 426 strengthens protections for construction workers by holding both project owners and contractors liable for unpaid wages. Oregon also passed HB 5015 to strengthen and increase funding for the state agency responsible for enforcing standards, the Bureau of Labor and Industries.
• Minnesota continued progress on combating wage theft with an amendment to existing laws that gives county attorneys authority to subpoena records of employers in wage theft investigations.
• Colorado enacted a new version of legislation (HB 1001) previously vetoed by Governor Polis, that will now expand state agency authority to penalize employers who commit wage theft and publicize violations on a state agency website.
• New York’s budget bill gives the state’s DOL more power to enforce wage theft laws, including the ability to seize a violator’s financial assets following an unpaid wage theft judgment.

Growing recognition of the costs of worker misclassification continued to generate important state policy advances in 2025. Employers who illegally misclassify employees as “independent contractors” skirt payroll tax, unemployment, and workers’ compensation payments, while depriving workers of fundamental workplace rights and increasing the likelihood of wage theft. 

• Though ultimately vetoed by the governor, Virginia lawmakers passed HB2561, which would have extended the timeframe for filing wage and misclassification claims and held employers liable for damages awarded in lawsuits.
• In Delaware, a bill currently awaiting the governor’s signature would hold contractors liable when their subcontractors misclassify workers and allow the state’s DOL to enforce compliance.

Rights to unionize and collectively bargain

Several states acted this year to strengthen workers’ rights to organize and bargain or to hold the line against new attacks on the right to unionize. State policies are especially critical for determining whether workers have the freedom to form unions at a moment when the Trump administration is hobbling the federal government’s ability to adjudicate labor law violations, attacking union rights of federal employees, and eliminating capacities to mediate contract negotiations. Even prior to these escalating attacks, millions of workers interested in unionizing faced daunting obstacles to organizing under weak, outdated federal laws that employers routinely violate.

This year, Washington (SB 5041) and Oregon (SB 916) took steps to encourage fairer labor negotiations by extending eligibility for unemployment insurance to striking workers. Connecticut legislation to do the same passed for the second year in a row but was again vetoed by Governor Lamont. Rhode Island (SB 126) joined the now 13 states protecting employees’ freedom to opt out of employer-sponsored “captive audience” meetings on political or religious matters unrelated to work duties. Such mandatory meetings are frequently used by employers to communicate anti-union views amid highly coercive, retaliatory campaigns to block workers from unionizing.

Several states took affirmative steps to safeguard collective bargaining rights for groups of workers otherwise excluded from federal coverage, or to resist attempts to limit workers’ collective bargaining rights with so-called right-to-work (RTW) laws. Vermont legislators approved placing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing collective bargaining rights on the ballot in 2026. Two other New England states—New Hampshire and Maine—rejected unpopular proposals to pass RTW legislation.

Colorado legislators passed the Worker Protection Act in an attempt to reverse an 80-year-old law that imposes de facto RTW conditions in the state. Unlike any other state, Colorado requires unionizing private-sector workers to undergo a state-sanctioned “second election” in order to gain full bargaining rights. Despite passage by large margins and a robust campaign demonstrating economic benefits of strengthening unions, the Worker Protection Act was vetoed by Governor Jared Polis.

Virginia attempted a significant expansion of collective bargaining coverage for state and local public employees (building on 2021 legislation that lifted a state ban on local government collective bargaining), but Governor Youngkin vetoed the legislation.

In Ohio, a new law curtailing freedom of speech in higher education also stripped faculty of their right to strike. In other states where legislators continued attacking rights of public employees this year, workers largely succeeded in resisting. For example, some Florida legislators attempted to make it even harder for public-sector workers to form or maintain unions, building on an already extreme anti-union law enacted in 2023. But this year, no new anti-union bills (HB 1217, HB 1387, HB 1328, SB 1766) were enacted in Florida. Most notably, after Utah passed unpopular legislation banning public-sector collective bargaining, over 300,000 Utahns successfully petitioned for a ballot measure to repeal the ban. The question will now go before voters in 2026.

Paid leave

Fed up with decades of lawmakers’ failure to enact paid leave legislation, voters approved paid sick leave ballot measures by wide margins in Alaska, Nebraska, and Missouri last November. All three of these ballot measures then came under fire during 2025 legislative sessions. Republican-majority legislatures repealed the paid sick leave portion of Proposition A in Missouri and weakened Nebraska’s paid sick leave program with new exclusions denying coverage to seasonal agricultural workers, young workers, and those working for small businesses. Attempts to do the same in Alaska were unsuccessful, and Alaska workers have now begun to accrue paid sick leave under the new program.

Several states—including Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi—took small but important steps to extend paid parental leave to some public employees, continuing a multi-year trend in the South. Signaling potential for much bigger breakthroughs on paid leave in the South, Virginia legislators passed HB2531, which would have established a statewide comprehensive paid family and medical leave program, if it had not been vetoed by Governor Youngkin.

Workplace health and safety

The Trump administration’s dangerous war on workplace health and safety standards was replicated in some state legislatures this year and actively resisted in others. Two new laws in Kentucky will increase dangers workers face on the job: The first (HB 196) reduces the number of emergency medical technicians required on site at active coal mines. The second (HB 398) cripples the state’s OSHA program by prohibiting the state from enforcing existing safety laws above the federal floor, limiting who can request safety inspections, and restricting the time in which an employee can file a complaint of retaliation after reporting a safety hazard. Florida legislation (HB 6033) threatening to repeal a 1995 state law that extends rights and protections to temporary and day laborers ultimately died in the House after a fierce campaign by grassroots group Beyond the Bars. Its repeal would have left these laborers without a number of health and safety protections not guaranteed at the federal level.

Other states are taking important steps to close loopholes in federal law or to anticipate potential erosion of federal OSHA standards. Maryland established a new state OSHA program to cover public-sector workers (who are otherwise excluded from federal OSHA coverage) and 18 states proposed standards to protect workers exposed to extreme heat. Though none have passed yet in 2025, these bills signal the dire need for heat exposure regulations (which already exist in seven states) as a proposed federal OSHA heat standard currently under consideration could take years to reach approval and is at risk of being weakened or abandoned by the Trump administration.

Unemployment insurance

This year, several states passed positive expansions and improvements to their unemployment insurance (UI) systems, while others weakened theirs.

Virginia enacted two UI improvements. The first, SB 1056, increased UI benefits, while SB 1057 increased the amount of “disregarded” income people can earn from part-time jobs without reducing their benefits. VA legislators also considered—but failed to pass—a related bill that would have allowed unemployed federal contractors to qualify for unemployment insurance. Georgia enacted updates to its UI system with the goal of allowing quicker and more efficient communication with UI recipients, and legislators in Maine created an interest-free loan system to help cover lost income for public employees during government shutdowns. The North Carolina House passed an increase to UI benefits, but the bill stalled in the Senate.

Continuing a long-standing trend of attacks on already fragile unemployment insurance systems, several states further weakened UI despite vocal opposition. West Virginia and Louisiana made it harder for workers to access benefits, passing legislation to require drug tests to qualify for benefits and increasing work search requirements respectively. Louisiana’s bill also slashed overall benefit amounts. After slashing UI benefits in 2023, this year Iowa enacted SF 607, drastically lowering employers’ contribution rates and putting the state’s UI trust fund at high risk for future insolvency. Workers and advocates had to fend off many other harmful UI bills in other states. Texas’s HB 199, for example, would have indexed Texans’ maximum number of UI benefits to the statewide average unemployment rate, slashing up to 12 weeks of unemployment insurance coverage for workers and unfairly punishing rural workers. Thanks to opposition from groups including EPI’s EARN affiliate EveryTexan, this bill was killed in committee.

Conclusion

While the Trump administration’s attacks on workers and unions continue to escalate, some states are stepping in to shore up and expand workers’ rights and protections. While much more remains to be done, 2025 state legislative sessions provide powerful reminders that states can and should, at a minimum, resist threats to erode labor standards and lock in existing worker protections. The national worker rights crisis also calls for more states to push beyond minimum standards, fix gaps and exclusions in weak labor laws, ensure all workers can build power, and lay the policy foundation necessary to rebuild an economy that works for all.