Child labour violations on the rise in America
The child labour violations surged to 37% in 2022 as six states loosen the child labour laws to exploit the children
According to
American Department of Labour (DOL), the number of minors employed in violation
of child labor laws in fiscal year 2022 increased 37% over 2021 and 283% over 2015.
The number of minors employed in violation of hazardous occupation orders
increased 26% over Financial Year 2021 and 94% over Financial Year 2015.
Remarkably,
this year, legislators in 6 states have proposed 8 bills that make it easier to
exploit kids for profit. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed the infamous
bill to expand child labor in the state. The legislation allows kids as young
as 14 to work six-hour shifts on school nights, and to work dangerous jobs in
demolition, on assembly lines, operating power saws, and more.
At a time
when serious child labor violations are on the rise in hazardous meatpacking
and manufacturing jobs, several state legislatures are weakening or threatening
to weaken child labour protections. The trend reflects a coordinated
multi-industry push to expand employer access to low-wage labour and weaken
state child labor laws in ways that contradict federal protections, in pursuit
of longer-term industry-backed goals to rewrite federal child labor laws and
other worker protections for the whole country. Children of families in
poverty, and especially Black, brown, and immigrant youth, stand to suffer the
most harm from such changes.
Both
violations of child labor laws and proposals to roll back child labor
protections are on the rise across the country. The number of minors employed
in violation of child labor laws increased 37% in the last year and at least 10
states introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections in the
past two years.
The Chicago
Workers Collaborative, which is a workers’ rights group, found workers as young
as 13 years old working through third-party staffing agencies at a factory for
Hearthside Food Solutions factory in Bolingbrook, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.
Hearthside Food Solutions is an Illinois-based contract manufacturer and
private bakery that makes and packages products for several name-brand cereal
and snack brands. In early March protesters gathered outside a warehouse of
Hearthside Food Solutions to call attention to the problem.
In February
2023 the U.S. Department of Labour (DOL) issued new findings on an ongoing
investigation of Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. (PSSI) for illegally
employing over 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 in hazardous occupations
at 13 meatpacking facilities owned by JBS, Cargill, Tyson, and others (DOL
2023). These children worked illegally on overnight shifts cleaning razor-sharp
saws and other high-risk equipment on slaughterhouse kill floors. At least
three of them suffered injuries, including burns from caustic cleaning
chemicals.
Multiple
factories in Hyundai-Kia’s supply chain in Alabama are also under DOL
investigation for employing children as young as 14. Many of these children are
from Guatemalan migrant families. Like meatpacking plants across the Midwest, many
of the Alabama [auto] plants relied on staffing firms to recruit low-wage
assembly line workers.
Violations
uncovered in recent federal enforcement actions are not isolated mistakes of
ill-informed individual employers. PSSI, one of the country’s largest food
sanitation services companies, is owned by the Blackstone Group, the world’s
largest private equity firm (PESP 2022). DOL investigators found PSSI’s use of
child labor to be “systemic” across eight states, “clearly indicating a
corporate-wide failure.
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 MacDonald’s 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.
The U.S.
generally has good child labor laws, except for agriculture, says Reid Maki,
director of child labor advocacy for the National Consumers League and
coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, which works to end abusive child
labor. Minors as young as 12 can work long hours, and agriculture's
hazardous-occupation orders are not as strict as in nonagricultural
industries .
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