Your first job in Oklahoma: Form 601, school-night hours, and pay

Oklahoma's work permit is called the Employment Certificate of Age and Schooling, or Form 601. The principal or another administrative officer at your school issues it. If you are homeschooled, your parent or guardian does. Nobody under 14 can get one, and a student who is not meeting the state's school attendance rules cannot get one either.

The steps go like this. The principal gives you Form 600, the application. You, a parent, and the employer each fill in your part, and you bring it back. The principal then signs Form 601, gives you a copy for your employer, and faxes a copy to the Oklahoma Department of Labor. In summer, when the school office is closed, the district superintendent can issue both forms.

At 16 and 17, Oklahoma law does not require a work permit at all.

For 14- and 15-year-olds, the Oklahoma Department of Labor lists the same limits as the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the national law on wages and child labor. You can work only outside school hours, after 7 a.m. and before 7 p.m. (9 p.m. from June 1 to Labor Day). The caps are 3 hours on a school day, Friday included, and 18 hours in a school week. When school is out, the caps are 8 hours a day and 40 a week. You also get a 30-minute break for every 5 hours worked.

Under 16, some jobs are off limits in Oklahoma: cooking or baking, fryers and grills, slicers, ladders, and mowing lawns unless you are self-employed, among others. So the Lawton student can take orders, but not work the grill.

The department's child labor page lists hour limits only for teens under 16, and federal law sets none for 16- and 17-year-olds. Federal hazardous-job rules still apply until 18.

Oklahoma's minimum wage law has no dollar amount of its own. It adopts the federal rate, $7.25 an hour, for employers with 10 or more full-time workers at one location or more than $100,000 in yearly sales. For smaller employers the state figure is $2.00, but the state law does not cover any job the FLSA already covers, and the FLSA's $7.25 reaches most chain stores and restaurants.

That federal reach comes from United States v. Darby (1941). The Supreme Court held that Congress can set minimum wages, maximum hours, and child labor limits through its power over trade between states, and it rejected Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), which had said Congress could not ban goods made with child labor.