Report - The increasing return of legal child labor to the US economy
Child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.
Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.
Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.
Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions into long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the government of the power to dictate what children can and can’t do, leaving parents in control — a claim already transformed into fantasy by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.
In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions,” arguing that such laws stifled opportunity for poor — and especially Black — children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers’ foundation, has joined in.
Here is a Robert Frost poem related to the subject of the article. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
I'm GenX and I worked as a teen, but my earliest jobs were babysitting, not industrial labor.
Yea this is a terrifying development and needs to be quashed ASAP. I worked starting at 15, but that was cleaning tables at a restraunt. Not roofing FFS.
Next up is gutting OSHA for being worthless whiners that decrease profits.
Given the rise of inflation, it's not difficult to see this becoming a dark lifeline for poor families. While I say lifeline, it's more like taking loans from the future.
Children taking on industrial work should not even be argued about considering how bad it is for their development, especially physically. And well, if the people needed their children to work to survive, you can be sure that they cannot afford the healthcare necessary later in life.
Pair an already poor family, with, in this context teenagers, having less time and energy for development, and then having a higher chance at disabilities later in life. At the start I mentioned inflation and well, throw that to the mix and you have a near perfect recipe for generational poverty through a feedback loop. Especially as it involves marginalized minorities and immigrants. :|
I am absolutely convinced that poor white kids will be in this game also.
Absolutely. To be clear, this wasn't an argument about which child suffers the most. Victimhood isn't a competition. My point was more about effects that we're going to see in already particularly oppressed groups.
I hear you.
This is capitalism trying to return to the it’s golden age of the Industrial Revolution in the mid to late 1800s where companies were making stupid amounts of money off the back of the lower class with little to no regulation. The GOP is going against education so people don’t learn about the past so they won’t understand why all these regulations were imposed in the first place. We need to continue to push back and try to vote out all the people pushing to roll back these regulations.
The maiming will continue until morale improves.
It's mind boggling that this nonsense is not only back, but that the conservative base is all about it
Gotta lower wages somehow! Too little unemployment. Can't let the poors build too much savings or they could avoid being trapped in a job they're too poor to quit.
I went and got culver's with a friend a month or two back. The kid behind the register literally looked 12 it felt really weird being served by someone that looked that young.
I don't even work in one of those ass backwards states so I'm hoping he was at least of legal age. I can't imagine going to work and having a 16 year old work along side me at my body shop.
As someone who was in the age range to work in 2012 era, this start doesn't surprise me. I wanted a job back then but couldn't get one because nobody was hiring.
Now, with unemployment so low I see lots of people that age who can get work. Arguably a bad thing since kids should be having fun and going to school, but if I were still 16 I'd be very happy about this statistic.
I'm a lot less concerned for the kids who are 16, than I am for the ones who are 14 and also allowed to work under these laws. Also I am strongly in favor of age limits for industrial work specifically. That shit is dangerous and kids don't develop their brains to properly assess and avoid risk until later.
Yea sure. I'm 100% behind allowing a 14 year old to run the cash register at Walmart. Gives them a chance to see their community at their worst.
Not in a soul crushing assembly line. It's also a valuable life experience, one I think should be 100% mandatory for a year or three. But not until they're at least old enough to die for their country.
My brother had a paper route at ten and I started babysitting around 11. I think it's fine if the hours are not excessive and adults can be reached to help if needed. But working around industrial machines is just a different level of risk and responsibility.
The slippery slope toward a cough 'volunteer' workforce.
https://www.pbs.org/show/slavery-another-name/
last week, a 16-year old boy was killed in a workplace accident in Michigan
he was working at a sawmill.
The working class is (rightly) demanding higher wages, an increased minimum wage. This is bad for business.
Solution? Find an even poorer class to exploit. Children.
Gotta please the shareholders.