It’s January, when we can stop oohing over the urchins waiting for Santa to heap toys into their living rooms. We can erase those commercials where doting parents smile at said urchins. And let’s trash all the holiday family newsletters, detailing Joe Jr’s early acceptance to Yale, Susie’s soccer prowess, the twins’ first prom. (The letters rarely mention the depression, the anorexia, the anxiety that may plague the teenagers.) Enough!
The season of clear-headedness has returned. We are in a modern iteration of Charles Dickens’ world, where employers use children as labor.
For proof, see the recent reports — not in Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, and all the places we link to child labor, but in the United States. Our country has a long history of child labor. The 1880 census showed that children ages 10 to 15 comprised 40% of the workforce. Liberals, humanitarians, and many politicians objected, but the laws introduced early in the century to curb the abuse were generally overturned, often by the Supreme Court. At last the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 outlawed the worst abuses, yet today some employers still use children as “tools” of production. Since employing them is illegal anyway, employers can pay them less, work them more hours, with fewer workplace protections.
Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services, for instance, employed “oppressive child labor;” specifically, the company hired at least 31 children, ages 13 to 17, to clean equipment with corrosive cleaners during overnight shifts at their slaughtering factories. In Tennessee, a Schlotzky’s restaurant hired six teenagers to clean and operate a deli meat-slicer. In Idaho, in a Super 1 Food store, young teenagers were operating power-drive trash compactors. In Oregon, three Fred Meyer supermarkets were letting teenagers load power-drive box balers.
In Alabama, children as young as 12 have worked at a subsidiary of Hyundai.
As for their parents, they are not bragging of their children’s exploits. They are hard-pressed to survive, which explains the ease with which employers scoop up their children into abysmal workforces.
For factories, restaurants and slaughter-houses, we do have laws, we do have regulations, and we do have a hard-pressed Department (Wage and Hour Division) in the United States Department of Labor to track the instances, to fine the employers. In year 2021, the division found 2,819 minors employed in violation of the law, and fined employers with nearly $3.4 million. Perhaps the employers found the fines worth it.
For agriculture, we have no stringent legal restrictions. Instead, we have legal loopholes, set into place in the 1938 law. Legally, a 12 year-old can work unlimited hours on a farm, so long as the parent agrees and the child doesn’t miss school. Sixteen year-olds can do “hazardous” work (outside agriculture, the threshold is age 18). Not surprisingly, in a tight labor market, employers have seized those loopholes.)
One estimate of the numbers of children working in agriculture pegs it at 500,000. Another estimate holds that 40% of farming accidents involve children.
Charles Dickens would recognize the dismal plight of these children. He also would recognize the privileged status of others. We continue to overlook the cruel disparity.
This is not to suggest that childhood must be an Edenic time, free from work. Children have historically worked in family businesses; and teenagers regularly work after school, on weekends, on holidays, while going to school. They earn money (which in some cases helps the families), they learn responsibility, they recognize the nexus from employee to consumer. Children in upper middle class families, those with helicopter parents (a phrase that would mystify earlier generations) might thrive with a stint of working, as a respite from building their college application resumes.
But for too many young Americans, particularly immigrant and nonwhite Americans, work is perilous.
We need laws to protect children. To date, Congress is considering the CARE Act (Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety), introduced this past March, which would raise the minimum hiring age in agriculture to 14, to age 18 for hazardous machines, and the Children Don’t Belong on Tobacco Farms Act, introduced in June 2021, which would bar children under 18 from tobacco farms. We need Congress to pass them. We also need a strengthened enforcement division within the Department of Labor that can investigate, fine, investigate.
Finally, we need consumers to rise up against employers who abuse children. Liberals have railed against the perilous hiring practices of American employers overseas; we can also rail against the perilous practices of employers here.
Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2023
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