‘Not my monkey, not my circus’: Child labor scandal and safety scares rock GOP hopeful

A Republican running in one of the nation’s most competitive House races is facing tough questions about his family company’s labor record, including child labor violations and a worker’s death on the job.

John Braun, a state senator challenging Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) in the battleground 3rd District, is president of Braun Northwest, a Chehalis company his parents founded 40 years ago, and the Washington Post reported that state regulators fined it more than $2,000 last year for three child labor violations involving two teenage apprentices. The violations had not been previously reported, according to the Post.

One of the teens, a 17-year-old, was injured when her glove got caught in a drill press. State rules bar minors from using that machine without a barrier guard, and it had none. Records show another teen was using a hammer drill to install outlets in ambulances, and that one youth was allowed to work more than eight-hour days seven times during a week off from school.

Colten Keller, who worked at the company from 2023 to 2025, said he worried about its safety culture before his father, Karl Keller II, was killed on the job in August 2024. According to OSHA records cited by the Post, the elder Keller was beneath a just-finished ambulance when a co-worker started the vehicle and drove it over him. Inspectors ruled the death accidental, and the younger Keller doesn’t blame the company for it.

But Keller said company leaders focused on safety primarily within their own departments. When problems came up elsewhere, he said, managers took a “not my monkey, not my circus” approach.

Keller left the company in May 2025, after repeatedly asking not to work around the employee who ran over his father.

“I was told by my management that he was an employee too, and that at some point I’m just going to have to deal with it,” Keller said. Braun’s campaign did not respond to that account.

Keller has since appeared in a Gluesenkamp Perez campaign ad, saying Braun “never called” after his father died. He agreed to the ad after first speaking to the Post in late September, when a friend connected him to the campaign. Braun has said he spoke to Keller twice the day of the death, gave him paid time off and personally delivered a homemade meal.

A former welder who left in 2013 told the Post that safety was “pretty lax” and that the company “had redneck ways of doing things.” He said workers sometimes stood on pallets hoisted by forklifts to reach high shelves, a practice OSHA warns against. Another former assembler said he saw it happen once.

Braun said that “simply doesn’t happen,” and the company has no record of penalties for it. He called the child labor citations an anomaly and described the teen’s finger fracture as “not a particularly serious accident.” He also said the company dropped the apprenticeship program over what he called a “heavy-handed regulatory approach.”

The injured worker, now 19, still works at the company and told the Post “the accident was nothing but my own fault.”

“I got nothing to be ashamed of in terms of our business record or our safety record,” Braun said in a recent debate.