Key takeaways
- The restaurant industry is engaged in a coordinated multistate push to lower the age at which young workers can serve alcohol in restaurants and bars.
- Since 2021, at least nine states have introduced bills to lower the alcohol service age. Seven states have enacted them.
- Wisconsin is seeking to lower the alcohol service age to 14.
- In West Virginia, 16-year-olds can serve alcohol and bartend.
- These same nine states have a pattern of low minimum wage rates and subminimum wages for tipped workers and youth.
- Serving alcohol puts underage workers at risk of sexual harassment and increases the likelihood that underage workers and customers will consume alcohol.
States across the country are quietly lowering the alcohol service age
In Federal States across the United States, lawmakers are engaged in a coordinated, corporate-backed campaign to weaken child labor protections. One type of protection – minimum ages to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants – has been eroded in seven states since 2021, as per Economic Policy Institute (EPI). While lowering the age to serve alcohol may sound benign, it is not. It puts young people at risk of sexual harassment, underage drinking, and other harms.
The restaurant industry is already plagued by labor violations. In fact, it is the industry with the highest incidence of child labor law violations. Laws that lower the alcohol service age will subject more young people, at younger ages, to potentially dangerous working conditions at low wages—all in service of employers’ pursuit of cheap labor.
The restaurant industry is rife with abuse, including child labor law violations
Teen alcohol service is part of a corporate agenda to cut labor costs and deregulate employment, as per the EPI.
The National Restaurant Association (NRA) – which represents over 100 fast-food and full-service restaurant corporations and has affiliate groups in every state – has long sought to maintain low wages and weak labor standards in the restaurant industry. The NRA has also played a key role in recent efforts to roll back protections for young workers in numerous industries by lobbying in support of bills that extend the hours teens can work, lift restrictions on hazardous work, and eliminate the permitting process for youth work. While the NRA’s agenda on child labor is not confined to the restaurant industry, the lobbying organization is particularly focused on eroding protections for young workers in the restaurant industry, including by supporting efforts to lower the age at which young workers can serve alcohol in bars and restaurants.
The restaurant industry is notorious for low wages and benefits and exploitative working conditions, including systemic racial and gender discrimination and rates of sexual harassment that are dramatically higher than in other industries.
The presence of alcohol is a serious risk factor, both for sexual harassment of restaurant industry workers and for alcohol dependence among restaurant workers.
At the same time, restaurants are, by far, the worst offenders of child labor laws of any industry and are the largest industry employer of youth. A 2023 analysis by the Food and Environment Reporting Network of U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division data found that nearly two-thirds—64%—of the 16,000 documented child labor violations over the past five years were committed by food service employers. The leisure and hospitality industry, which includes food service employers and restaurants, has long employed the largest share of teens and young adults of any industry – between one-quarter and one-third of workers these ages.
In recent years, states have ramped up efforts to lower the alcohol service age
Previous EPI research on child labor documented coordinated attempts to roll back child labor protections in 14 states. Four of these 14 states (Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin) have introduced or passed bills related to youth work in the presence of alcohol in 2021–2023.
A deeper analysis of the latter trend reveals a coordinated multistate effort to pass such laws that extends beyond these four states. This effort has been alarmingly successful but has received little attention compared with other child labor law rollbacks.
Since 2021, at least nine states have introduced legislation to lower the alcohol service age. Seven of these states have signed the bills into law. For comparison, it previously took 18 years, from 2003 to 2020, for five states – South Dakota, Delaware, Arizona, North Dakota, and Arkansas – to make changes to youth alcohol service laws.
Recent changes represent an increasingly coordinated effort to roll back protections for young people in the restaurant industry, a trend that does not appear to be slowing.