Insidious legislative changes in child labor laws are ignoring the health and well being of children

Republicans blame the rise in illegal use of child labor on an insecure southern US border, but that is a red herring! By politically avoiding the issue and creating a diversion, they are deliberately ignoring the well being of children.

Child labor exhibit in Lewiston Maine at the Museum L/A

Echo opinion published in The New Yorker by William Finnegan:

Child Labor Is on the Rise: State legislatures across the country are making it easier to hire minors in low-paid and dangerous jobs.

Legally, child labor in the U.S., was abolished a century ago. But, that was never quite true. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed during the New Deal, outlawed “oppressive child labor”, but exempted agricultural work from many of its restrictions, which, in the decades since, has left hundreds of thousands of children in the fields. 

In every industry, enforcement of the law has been uneven. States have always been free to strengthen protections, which some did, but challenges to the federal standards have been rare. The Reagan Administration, in its pro-business zeal, proposed lowering the standards, but abandoned the idea under fire from teachers, parents, unions, and Democratic lawmakers armed with Dickens references.

Today, however, child labor in America is on the rise. The number of minors employed in violation of child-labor laws last year was up thirty-seven per cent from the previous year, according to the Department of Labor, and up two hundred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. (These are the violations caught by government, so they likely represent a fraction of the real number.) 

This surge is being propelled by an unhappy confluence of employers desperate to fill jobs, including dangerous jobs, at the lowest possible cost; a vast wave of “unaccompanied minors” entering the country; more than a little human trafficking; and a growing number of state legislatures that are weakening child-labor laws in deference to industry groups and, sometimes, in defiance of federal authority.

In the past two years, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, at least fourteen states have enacted or proposed laws rolling back child-labor protections. Typically, the new laws extend work hours for minors, lift restrictions on hazardous work, lower the age at which kids can bus tables where alcohol is served, or introduce new sub-minimum wages. In Iowa, a new law allows children as young as fourteen to work in industrial laundries, and, with approval from a state agency, allows sixteen-year-olds to work in roofing, excavation, demolition, the operation of power-driven machinery, and other dangerous occupations. Jennifer Sherer, a co-author of the E.P.I. report, said, “Iowa’s new law contains multiple provisions that conflict with federal prohibitions on ‘oppressive child labor.’ ” It also limits employer liability for the injury, illness, or death of a child on the job. Adolescents are almost twice as likely as adults to be injured at work.

The reasons offered to justify these initiatives often emphasize child welfare. In Ohio, where Republican legislators are also proposing weaker laws, a spokesman for the Ohio Restaurant Association testified that extending work hours for minors would cut down on their screen time. (The lawmakers offered a concurrent resolution urging Congress to lower federal child-labor standards to conform with Ohio’s proposed rules.) Arkansas’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, recently signed a law ending a requirement that fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds obtain a parent’s consent and a state permit before starting work. Linking the bill, strangely, to parental rights, the governor’s office called the permit “an arbitrary burden on parents.”

“It was a one-page form,” Nina Mast, the other co-author of the E.P.I. report, said. “It contained basic information and informed parents of a child’s rights. Removing it eliminates a paper trail, makes enforcement and monitoring much more difficult. It opens the door to exploitation.” Sherer said that a lobbying template being used in state legislatures to gut child-labor laws had been provided by conservative groups such as the Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank based in Florida.

Many employers are clearly not waiting for the laws to change. Fast-food chains, which rely on teen-age workers, seemingly treat fines for violating the laws as a cost of doing business. (It’s the franchisees who actually break the laws, while the parent corporations pay lobbyists to help loosen them.) In February, the Labor Department announced that it had found more than a hundred children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses, in eight states, for Packers Sanitation Services, one of the nation’s largest food-sanitation companies. The facilities themselves are owned by major corporations, including Tyson Foods and JBS. (All three companies denied that they had engaged in any wrongdoing.) The children worked overnight shifts at such jobs as cleaning bone saws and head splitters with hazardous chemicals. At least three were injured. Packers, which is owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, paid a civil fine of a million and a half dollars.

Social-service agencies were frustrated that the Labor Department referred none of the children from Packers to them. The Times reported that some had found jobs at other plants. It was clear, in any case, from a range of reports, that they were all, or nearly all, drawn from the great underage labor pool of children who have crossed the border in recent years. “Unaccompanied minors” who arrive from non-neighboring countries—which, in effect, means Central America—are permitted to remain in the U.S. and are remanded to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which delivers them as quickly as possible to a sponsor while asylum applications are processed. The asylum processing typically takes years.

In 2022, a hundred and thirty thousand unaccompanied minors entered the H.H.S. system, nearly half of them from Guatemala. In the rush to house such numbers, sponsors are barely vetted. Some are relatives, some are traffickers, some are a combination. Follow-up by H.H.S. has been tenuous—the agency loses track of a huge number of children within a month of their placement. But one thing is certain: although these kids, like all children, are required to go to school—until the age of sixteen in some states, eighteen in others—and many want nothing more, they also need to work. There are debts to be repaid, living expenses, and remittances to be sent home. If employers ask for an I.D. or a Social Security number, faked documents can be easily bought; many employers do not ask.

There are signs that the Biden Administration has begun to face the child-labor crisis—the announcement of a crackdown, a request to Congress to increase penalties against employers. And yet strengthening enforcement when the budget of the regulatory state is shrinking under pressure from the debt-ceiling negotiations seems unlikely. Republicans say that the problem is an insecure border. Certainly, crumbling economies in Central America intensify this crisis. But the immediate problem is a broad indifference to the well-being of children when profits are at stake. 

Published in the print edition of the June 12, 2023, issue, with the headline “Child’s Work.”

Thank you President Joseph Biden: Take credit for this public policy success! #COVIDRelief

What President Franklin Delano Roosevelt can teach President Joe Biden: Opinion echo published in the MinnPost nonprofit news by Professor Colette Hyman. 

Democrats will need to make sure that voters know who is responsible for the extension of unemployment insurance; the $300 per child, per month cash benefit; and the $1,400 relief check that will be making for a brighter spring, for so many.

Sometimes, the stars align and what is happening in the world mirrors what my students and I are studying in U.S. history. Such is the co-incidence of the impending passage of the American Rescue Plan, and the place of the New Deal on our syllabus. So this week we are discussing what lessons we might draw from the New Deal to understand this expansive piece of legislation, and also use knowledge of that historical moment and its consequences to speculate about what might be in store in the weeks, and months, and years to come.

Much of what the New Deal accomplished — e.g. the minimum wage and Social Security — and has become part of what Americans take for granted over the course of their lives, was wildly popular with Americans mired in the unemployment, bankruptcies, and evictions of the Great Depression. These programs helped FDR win re-election to the presidency three more times, and helped the Democratic Party maintain strong majorities in one or both houses of Congress for much of the following decades.

The success of the social safety net woven by Roosevelt and the Democratic Party was so powerful that it set the rules of engagement in domestic policymaking, for both parties, until 1980. As I like to point out to my students, the “New Deal consensus” was so irresistible that even Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president, supported increases in the minimum wage and extensive infrastructure projects, including the beginnings of the Interstate highway system, recently renamed Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.

Taking credit in effective outreach

Rural electrification, protections for unions, and above all, jobs, went a long way to improving the lives of millions of people living in the United States, but the secret to the success of FDR and the Democratic Party lay in the fact that they made sure that those who benefited from those initiatives knew where they were coming from. Roosevelt himself held weekly “Fireside Chats,” each Sunday night entering the homes of the women and men who now had the means to keep a roof over their heads, and electricity to run the radio. Roosevelt was an affable character, who loved nothing more than to meet with members of the public and hear their concerns and tell them about what he was doing for them.

FDR’s outreach efforts were well matched by those of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a syndicated newspaper column in which she responded to readers’ letters asking about how, for instance, to sign up for Social Security. The first couple were without doubt deeply compassionate and empathetic national leaders. At the same time, they fully understood the value of making sure that American voters understood how their lives were made better by the policies that the Roosevelt administration and a Democratic Congress adopted.

Unfortunately for the nation, President Barack Obama did not sufficiently study his U.S. history. He should have followed in the footsteps of FDR. How many Americans were aware that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Democratic initiative, helped them get back on their feet after the collapse of the housing market and ensuing Great Recession? How much energy did he spend publicizing the accomplishments of that stimulus package or, for that matter, “Obamacare”?

Has Joe Biden learned?

What kind of student of history will Joe Biden be? For starters, he can take a page from the playbook of his predecessor, who made sure that his signature appeared on their $600 pandemic relief checks last spring. How many recipients of those checks filled in the bubble by the name of Donald J. Trump because his name was on the check that helped them through the pandemic?

Biden’s relief plan is remarkably popular among Americans, across political differences, because it addresses so much that ails the nation right now, from imminent evictions to inadequate public-school budgets to woefully lacking health care, in the midst of a pandemic. In order for Democrats to continue the work begun by the American Rescue Plan, they will need to make sure that voters know who is responsible for the extension of unemployment insurance; the $300 per child, per month cash benefit; and the $1,400 relief check that will be making for a brighter spring for so many.

If Democrats have any chance of passing a $15 minimum wage, they need to study their history and pay far more attention to bipartisan support among voters than to duplicitous partisan ideologues who, without fail, prioritize politics over people.

Dr. Colette Hyman teaches U.S. history at Winona State University.

Republican tax cuts for the rich - not a lot of support out there

Regardless of how much Republicans pretend they accomplished "something" when the GOP Congress passed the "tax cuts for the rich", without Democratic support, the fact is....Americans don't support this terrible plan.   

Here's yet another, in a series, of letters to the editor, found while I've cruised the nation's newspapers, written by thoughtful people who have expressed their published oppositions, in local newspapers.....

It feels like a death in the family. 

The Republican tax heist has officially put Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on life support. 

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio tells us the party is now eager to "restructure" the New Deal social contract. (This is a terrible statement!)

Strategically, that will be delayed so that poisonous cause and deadly effect aren't too conspicuously close. (Do not restructure the New Deal, expecially when Cuban immigrants, the relatives of Senator Marco Rubio, are among the beneficiaries.)

My representative, John Faso, voted against this bill three times, but don't be deceived by his show, either. 

Representative John J. Faso- Republican  

His no votes didn't prevent him from attending a Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting in Hudson (New York) to promote the massive wealth transfer to his business backers.

As for Democrats, they now need to oppose this sacking of the public treasury as vociferously as Republicans opposed Obamacare. 

Democrats can no longer pretend to serve two masters, corporations and the people. It's time to choose.

Patricia Goldsmith, Hudson New York