[It seems unimaginable that we are backsliding into the era of
exploiting child labor. But that’s precisely what the GOP appears to
be doing. ]
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A NEW REPUBLICAN ASSAULT ON CHILDREN: OVERTURNING LABOR LAWS  
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Sonali Kolhatkar
May 5, 2023
Independent Media Institute [[link removed]]

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_ It seems unimaginable that we are backsliding into the era of
exploiting child labor. But that’s precisely what the GOP appears to
be doing. _

Marcie Estrella, 14: “I think colleges will be impressed I survived
being sucked into an industrial loom.”, The Onion

 

Two recent exposés about child labor in the United States highlight
how prevalent the once-outlawed practice has become. In February,
the New York Times
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an extensive investigative report by Hannah Dreier about scores of
undocumented Central American children who were found to be working in
food processing plants, construction projects, big farms, garment
factories, and other job sites in 20 states around the country. Some
were working 12 hours a day and many were not attending school.

A second story, revealed in a press release
[[link removed]] in early
May by the U.S. Department of Labor, found more than 300 children
working for three McDonald’s franchises operating dozens of
restaurants in Kentucky. The children were working longer hours than
legally permitted and tasked with jobs that were prohibited. Some were
as young as 10 years old.

If such stories
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becoming increasingly common, it is not because there is more
attention being paid. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis
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a nearly fourfold increase in labor violations involving children from
2015 to 2022.

While this says volumes about existing loopholes in labor law and
enforcement, and about the state of the U.S. capitalist economy more
broadly, there is another, even more disturbing dimension to child
labor in the U.S. Lawmakers, mostly Republican ones, increasingly want
to deregulate laws governing children in the workplace. According
to EPI
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“at least 10 states introduced or passed laws rolling back child
labor protections in the past two years.”

Among them is Arkansas, whose GOP governor is the former White House
press secretary under Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders
[[link removed]].
In March, Sanders signed a new bill removing employer requirements to
verify the age of children as young as 14 before hiring them, calling
such protections “burdensome and obsolete.” Her Republican
colleagues in Iowa
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passed similar laws. In Ohio, one Democrat even joined in
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loosen the state’s child labor laws.

It’s already legal
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teenagers to take on certain types of summer jobs and paid
internships. In an ideal world, such employment can offer
them valuable work experience
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a safe environment and allow them to earn extra spending money to save
up for nice things. Indeed, children from privileged backgrounds have
traditionally been able to land such jobs
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their less privileged counterparts, using family connections.

Republicans are invoking
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benign jobs as babysitting or lifeguarding to claim that deregulation
will help kids earn money to save up for a car or prom dress. But
children’s well-being is not driving their desires to ease child
labor laws. These lawmakers are hardly concerned about making it
easier for teens to deliver newspapers or wash cars during summer
vacation. We would be hard-pressed to imagine their 16-year-old
children or grandchildren serving alcohol for six hours a day at a bar
past 9 p.m. on a school night and letting the bar owner off the hook
if that child gets injured on the job—which is what Iowa
Republicans
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now legalized.

What they appear to care about is businesses having a larger pool of
vulnerable workers to exploit at a time when worker demands for
higher wages
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better working conditions are rising and strike activity has
increased [[link removed]].
Who’s more vulnerable than children, particularly undocumented and
low-income ones?

The idea to undo labor laws protecting children goes back at least a
decade when conservatives began dreaming about reviving the good old
days of children being able to legally work tough jobs. The Cato
Institute, a right-wing think tank that ought to be credited with
saying the unthinkable out loud, published an essay
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2014 unironically titled, “A Case Against Child Labor
Prohibitions.” In it, writer Benjamin Powell invokes an idea couched
in the world of Charles Dickens’s dystopian literature: “Families
who send their children to work in sweatshops do so because they are
poor and it is the best available alternative open to them.” He
added that the type of labor restrictions that protect children
“only limits their options further and throws them into worse
alternatives,” and that apparently “sweatshops play an important
role” in the economic growth of societies.

Another right-wing think tank called the Acton Institute
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one that obscures its agenda in religious thought, declared in 2016
that “Work is a gift our kids can handle.” The story is
accompanied by a photo of a smiling, well-dressed, young white boy
tending horses on a farm—a wholesome fantasy that is at odds with
the abuse that Human Rights Watch researcher Margaret Wurth documented
in a report on child labor in the U.S.
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“a 17-year-old boy who had two fingers sliced off in an accident
with a mowing machine. A 13-year-old girl felt so faint working
12-hour shifts in the heat that she had to hold herself up with a
tobacco plant. An eighth grader said his eyes itched and burned when a
farmer sprayed pesticides in a field near his worksite.” Wurth
points out the “racist impacts” of labor law loopholes
particularly on “Latinx children and families.”

The conservative organization Foundation for Government Accountability
has also played a central role, taking the lead in convincing GOP
lawmakers to loosen child labor laws. A Washington Post report
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the group for helping push through Arkansas’ new law and for
lobbying Iowa and other states to do the same.

Now, advocates of fair labor standards are aghast, watching in horror
at the Republican-led rollback of laws protecting children. Charlie
Wishman, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO, told the Guardian
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“It’s just crazy to me that we are re-litigating a lot of things
that seem to have been settled 100, 120, or 140 years ago.”

Indeed, the past is precisely where grim lessons abound about how
children suffer when there are no labor laws protecting them.
One history article
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in 2020 about the painstaking movement to regulate child labor begins
optimistically: “At least in the United States, child labor is
almost exclusively a thing of the past.” Stemming from a medieval
mindset that children were the patriarchal property of their fathers,
the young were pushed into servitude en masse during the Industrial
Revolution where their small size and nimble fingers were as
beneficial to employers as their inability to demand high wages or
organize their workplace.

It was through the critical narrative work of a teacher and
photographer named Lewis Hine
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whose never-before-seen images of abused child workers between 1908
and 1924 helped to move public opinion, that labor laws were
eventually changed. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act
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outlawed most child worker abuses at a federal level.

There was a time in the U.S. when, just a few decades ago, child labor
was seen as a global problem of poorer nations where exploited
children worked in unimaginable conditions making products for wealthy
Westerners. A 1996 Life Magazine article
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offered a horrifying glimpse into the life of a Pakistani child making
soccer balls for Nike. Child workers in Bangladeshi sweatshops making
designer clothing spurred activism
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the U.S. against such exploitation.

Garnering less attention were the loopholes in U.S. federal law
allowing for child labor in the agricultural industry where hundreds
of thousands of mostly immigrant children were found to be working
on tobacco farms
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elsewhere.

Rather than close these loopholes, like Democratic Senator Tammy
Baldwin wants to do with her newly introduced Child Labor Prevention
Act
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Republicans want to throw them wide open.

Debra Cronmiller
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executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said,
“The notion that we would be solving some economic turmoil by
allowing the expansion of child labor hours, is at best, ridiculous,
and at worst, very detrimental to young people.” There is no labor
shortage
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There is simply an unwillingness on the part of profit-seeking
companies to pay workers enough.

Republicans claim they care about protecting children
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But their actions speak louder than words: they have made it easier
for mass shooters to kill children
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schools, and they have attacked the rights of LGBTQ children
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sports
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to use the bathrooms of their choice
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to access gender-affirming care
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and to learn about their community
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They have barred children from learning accurate history about racism
and white supremacy
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unleashed police
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schools in spite of evidence
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school cops are targeting Black and Brown children.

Seen as part of this larger trend, the push to overturn laws
protecting labor abuses of children is perfectly in line with the
GOP’s agenda to harm kids.

_Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is
the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali
[[link removed]],” a weekly television and radio
show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her
forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing
Racial Justice
[[link removed]] (City
Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All
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the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil
liberties editor at Yes! Magazine
[[link removed]]. She serves as
the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan
Women’s Mission [[link removed]] and is a
co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan
[[link removed]]. She
also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center
[[link removed]], an immigrant rights organization._

_This article was produced by __Economy for All_
[[link removed]]_, a project
of the Independent Media Institute._

* child labor
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* exploitation
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* GOP
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* labor legislation
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* right wing
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