The race to put more children to work is dangerous

How Do We Know Children are Wrong? The Case of Child Labor Violations During the Great Depression, and How They’re Doing Business

The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. The Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of their staff because of the flat budget, and Ms. Nanda experienced a loss of more than 100 lawyers. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.

Jessica Looman said that their Wage and Hour division is doing more outreach and education. We are also looking into more things.

It’s not clear why the division is finding more minor cases. Investigators are also finding more minors working in hazardous occupations, where children could get seriously injured.

It’s important to hold employers accountable, “but this is also an issue that is community based. It’s based on school. It’s parent based, says Looman. “All of us together as a society and an economy have to come together and make sure that we are protecting our kids. We have to ask ourselves how we will allow the increase in child labor violations to occur in the next few years.

Part of the division’s focus is on prevention — educating teens about their rights and employers about their responsibilities and strategies to ensure compliance. The division has a number of mechanisms that can respond to violations of different levels of severity, from fines to injunctions.

Looman says most violations occur in places where it’s appropriate for minors to work, meaning teenagers are working too many hours at a grocery store or operating a fryer and staying too late at a fast-food chain. For example, in 2022, more than 100 kids across several McDonald’s locations in Pennsylvania were illegally scheduled to work too many hours or too late at night. Subway, Burger King and Popeyes restaurants in South Carolina were fined for similar violations in 2022.

There’s no excuse for “why these alarming violations are occurring, with kids being employed where they shouldn’t even be in the first place,” Looman says.

This month, Packers Sanitation Services paid a $1.5 million fine for employing 102 children to work in dangerous meatpacking facility jobs across eight states. A report last summer revealed that some children as young as 12 years old were hired to work in a metal shop.

The US generally has good child labor laws, but only for agriculture, according to the director of child labor advocacy for the National Consumers League. Minors as young as 12 can work long hours, and agriculture’s hazardous-occupation orders aren’t as strict as in nonagricultural industries.

Some kids are hurting, but they can do it, too: a warning warning against child labor in food processing and meatpacking facilities

“We walk a lot. That’s not easy. Sometimes your hands hurt,” a 13-year-old boy who picked tomatoes told the researchers. “And your back, sometimes it will be hurting.”

But immigrant children are vulnerable to other kinds of labor, too, from construction to meatpacking. Immigration raids in the early 2000s inadvertently revealed the children of migrant workers employed in meatpacking plants, and advocates like Maki have been concerned about child labor in those facilities ever since.

Minors who are allowed to work more jobs and work more hours can teach them responsibility, as supporters say it fills an economic need.

“Having kids get the opportunity to work is important,” Jessica Dunker, president and CEO of the Iowa Restaurant Association, said in testimony to Iowa lawmakers. She said that those who want to work should get the same level of choice as those who don’t.

Allowing children to work longer hours will lead to car accidents, and the jobs these bills allow kids to take are dangerous, he says.

There’s no safe area for people to disembark from the dock. With the provision in the Iowa bill that would lessen businesses’ civil liability if child laborers got sick, injured or killed on the job, “it’s as if they know that kids are going to get hurt.”

One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.

The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. The department would aggressively use that authority, as well as any other litigation tools available, according to Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer.

The administration says it will do more to protect children who migrate across the border alone by a parent, and who receive little supervision once they leave immigration shelters. H.H.S has lost contact with some sponsors and children, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation, as reported by The Times.