As House lawmakers take on a sweeping bill to loosen hourly working caps for teenagers, differing visions for the Department of Labor’s role have emerged.
In one, parents command autonomy over their children’s working hours, interceding directly with the employer if they feel workplace expectations are too high. In the other, the department takes a more muscular role, carrying out investigations and visits on behalf of families.
The competing ideas lie at the heart of the debate over Senate Bill 318, which passed the Senate, 11-10, last month and met its first House hearing in the Labor Committee on Wednesday.
Proposed by Sen. Andy Sanborn, R-Bedford, the bill is broadly focused. It raises weekly work caps on 16- and 17-year-olds, allowing them to work 56 hours a week during vacations, and up to 40 and a quarter on school weeks of four days or fewer. It reins in some of the latitude the department has in investigating businesses, raises the standards that must be met for officials to open those investigations, and includes an unrelated provision to require employers to provide uniforms free of charge.
With so many moving parts, the legislation was always due for long discussions. But one piece in particular – the discretion the Department of Labor has within its investigations – took on scrutiny Wednesday.
At present, the commissioner of the department can carry out investigations into businesses with few limitations. SB 318 would require that the department receive a complaint, or at least hold an articulable suspicion that an investigation of the business will garner a result.
Representatives on both sides agreed the change would be significant. Proponents said it would reduce unnecessary fines on businesses; opponents argued it would weaken enforcement efforts. According to the department itself, however, little would change in practice.
“Nine times out of 10, an inspection comes out of a complaint,” said Rudy Ogden, deputy commissioner of the Department of Labor, speaking on current practices. And he said while the law does raise the requirements for the department, most investigations carried out would pass the test for articulable suspicion.
Absent a complaint, Ogden added, the department often relies on its own records to determine noncompliance. If a business registers and reports employees but doesn’t have worker’s compensation, for instance, the department has enough to prompt an investigation. That, he added, would still meet the requirements of the proposed law.
“We would interpret the language pretty broadly,” he said of the bill.
The department’s records show it carried out 937 on-site investigations into wages and working hours in fiscal year 2017 and 858 in fiscal year 2018 – slightly fewer than the number of safety compliance inspections, which average just over 1,000 a year. Around 10 percent of the wage and hour investigations were related to youth employment, according to the data.
Ogden said that for some families, the ability to ask the department to investigate rather than confronting their kid’s boss directly is a source of comfort.
“When parents want their kids to have jobs, they don’t want to be the ones that are saying to the boss, ‘Hey, my kid can’t work that many hours,’ because the kid might lose the job,” he said. “So what’ll often happen is parents will look to us.”
Still, some representatives say that the law should encourage more direct conversations between parents and their children’s employers over any disputes over hours.
“A mom can already say I wouldn’t want my son to work 40 hours, or 38 hours,” he said. “You go by the parents, I think it puts the parents involved in making decisions.”
The bill will be studied in a subcommittee next Tuesday before coming to a vote in the committee Wednesday, according to Rep. Stephen Schmidt, R-Wolfeboro, the committee chairman.
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)