GAO Issues Five Open Recommendations for DOL Child Labor Enforcement
The Department of Labor must address data gaps, outreach and interagency collaboration to protect the 2.8 million children who worked in 2023.
The Government Accountability Office released a report identifying five recommendations for the Department of Labor. All recommendations remain open, and the Secretary of Labor, the Wage and Hour Division Administrator and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner are tasked with implementation.
GAO estimates that 2.8 million children worked in the United States in 2023. The agency's fatality dataset omits cause-of-death and industry details, and a change in injury and illness data collection in 2021 prevents year-over-year comparison. Between 2015 and 2023, one DOL survey and two other federal datasets that contained child-labor injury data ended, creating persistent information gaps.
Citations of child-labor violations and the number of children affected have generally increased since fiscal year 2015. DOL's recent enforcement initiative faces obstacles: regional and district officials say the data used to target egregious violations lack sufficient detail, and the agency has no systematic process to identify and evaluate additional data sources. DOL's communications strategy to raise awareness of child-labor laws has not been measured for effectiveness.
Interagency collaboration in 2023 and 2024 did not fully follow leading collaboration practices, and DOL discontinued its interagency task force in 2025. GAO recommends strengthening collaboration by incorporating eight leading collaboration practices and ensuring continuity of information sharing.
DOL disagreed with the recommendation to mitigate data gaps, neither agreed nor disagreed with the outreach assessment recommendation, and agreed with the remaining three recommendations. The agency's response to each recommendation will be tracked for future updates.
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