Muckraking Project

For this project my partner and I decided to research about children under the age of 18 working more than the legal rights allowed. When we first chose the project we thought it was going to be quite hard because usually every place is required a work permit and they were strict about the laws. But we did have a teen that never was asked for a permit to work and students that worked over. We researched about the legal number of hours you are allowed to work during the school year on weekdays and weekends. According to the California Child Labor Laws, if you are 16 years old you are allowed to work 4 hours on weekdays and 8 hours on the weekends. If you are 15 years old you are allowed to work 3 hours on weekdays and 8 hours on the weekends. This was a huge surprise because some of my friends work over that. One of my friends had to work a double shift which then she work 8 hours one day during the week. She started work at 3:15pm and ended at 10:30pm. Talking to most of our friends, they said that the problem they have about this is was not that the work paid wasn't good, it was more because they weren't being able to have a social life outside of work. We could see that this was definitely something that they other employees either don't care because they are getting paid enough money or there is no way to change it. The mangers of the stores are working the teens under the age of 18 to much and it's not okay that they don't care about it. Something that was surprising to me was that it was just a certain store that was doing this but there are stores all over the bay area that do this to teens. It isn't fair to them because they aren't being able to have a life outside of school nor work.