State-level efforts to roll back child labor laws are surely a sign of the times — not only of a tight labor market, but of contemporary American capitalism’s ceaseless erosion of basic principles of morality and basic humanity in the quest for profit. As the Washington Post recently reported, a proposed law in Iowa would legalize integrating children into some of the roughest and most exploitative industries in the U.S., most notably by allowing “children as young as 14 to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers.”
The Iowa law, not coincidentally, also seeks to make sure that businesses face no sanction for any harm that comes to working kids, as it “would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.” Such a provision, in fact, gives the game away as to why businesses would want an enhanced ability to hire kids — not simply to relieve labor shortages, but to assure a pool of easily exploited workers without rights or recourse. It is a dream of perfect exploitation, and a nightmare of human rights.
Labor experts make a distinction between jobs that young adults can hold safely and that increase skills that might help them down the road, and scenarios where kids work in dangerous industries and gain largelyu non-transferable skills. Think of it as the difference between baby-sitting and hosing down the blood from slaughtered cows in a 40-degree meat packing plant. Likewise, there’s a crucial distinction between working a few hours a week and working a schedule that impacts a child’s ability to attend school and learn effectively.
It’s more likely that children will be exploited than adult workers, given their natural deference to adult authority, as well as their lesser knowledge of workplace regulations and what to expect in the way of fairness. The power dynamic is not nearly that of two equals coming to a fair arrangement; in fact, you could argue that it’s impossible for a child to ever enter into an equal hiring arrangement in a workplace.
In fact, the facts on the ground bear out these dangers. According to a labor expert who spoke to The Guardian, “Young workers have much higher rates of non-fatal injuries on the job and the highest rates of injuries that require emergency department attention [ . . ] She argued that due to the vulnerability and inexperience of young workers, data on these workers is likely an undercount due to fears or barriers in being able to speak up and report dangerous situations or child labor law violations.”
Recent incidents shine a light on the reality of children’s vulnerability in the workplace. The Guardian reports that, “Several high-profile investigations involving child labor have been exposed over the past year, including the use of child labor in Hyundai and Kia supply chains in Alabama, at JBS meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Minnesota, and at fast-food chains including McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts and Chipotle."
The most striking of these may be Packers Sanitation Services’ payment of $1.5 million in fines for “illegally employing at least 102 children to clean 13 meatpacking plants on overnight shifts.” The Washington Post reports that the company:
allegedly employed minors as young as 13 to use caustic chemicals to clean “razor-sharp saws,” head splitters and other dangerous equipment at meatpacking facilities in eight states, mostly in the Midwest and the South, in some cases for years [. . .]
Investigators learned in recent months that at least three children suffered injuries, including a chemical burn to the face, while sanitizing kill floors and other areas of slaughterhouses in the middle of the night.
Such exploitation was against the law, but still went on for years (it is also notable that though the company is paying a fine, apparently no actual people are paying the price of harming children by facing charges or jail time). Yet now, states like Iowa appear set to ensure such horrors will not only continue, but proceed under the veneer of legality.
It’s no surprise that the charge to repeal and reduce child labor protections is largely being led by Republican-held statehouses and legislators, though some Democrats have also been getting in on the act. As a party that has long allied itself with business interests, the GOP now seems to be carrying corporate water in an effort to return us to the unregulated marketplace of the early 20th century and beyond.
It seems to me that politically and morally, prioritizing a pushback against this revivalist child labor movement should be a no-brainer for the Democratic Party. As the Republican Party blathers on about the non-existent dangers of “CRT” to children’s education, it would serve the Democrats well to start talking a lot more about the danger of GOP-enabled child exploitation to not only children’s education, but to their health and welfare. This would seem like the perfect time to move to strengthen child labor laws; as just one example, one child expert notes the need to close violations “existing loopholes that permit young workers, some as young as 12 years old, to work unlimited hours in many jobs in the agriculture industry with parental permission when school is not in session.” Such moves to restrict and protect child labor make even more sense in the wake of a pandemic that severely disrupted the educations of million of kids; now is certainly not the time to distract children from the ongoing work of educational catch-up.
And against the obvious counter-argument that some families need their children to work in order to make ends meet, Democrats can point to the urgent need for legislation that supports working families, such as an expanded child tax credit. The solution to poverty isn’t exploiting children, but cultivating an economy (including a fair minimum wage) and building a safety net that ensure that adults can properly provide for their kids.
We should note how advocacy for child labor not only ties into the Republicans’ identity as the party of business, but equally so into what is arguably its dominant contemporary identity — as the party enmeshed with a broad reactionary conservative movement in the U.S. that advocates a mix of white Christian nationalism, reestablishment of patriarchal values, and a hatred for anyone perceived to deviate from gender norms. In such a right-wing conservatism, a family’s sway over its children is seen as more or less absolute, lending support to the notion that a child can work so long as the parents are fine with it, and suggesting the illegitimacy of legal protections perceived as interfering with parental rights. And with the movement's distaste for those of the non-white persuasion, the idea that immigrants from across the southern border might help fill our labor gaps runs a distant second to sending legions of teens to scrub out the slaughterhouse.
Relatedly, the resurgence of pro-child labor sentiment is further evidence that we’re living through a conflict of fundamentally conflicting values, one in which compromise isn’t really an option. It is hideous that we have to defend hard-won rights and protections, but here we are. To do so, we need to be able to articulate the basic principles at stake — in this case, the idea that children deserve fundamental protections, and that the government has an obligation to legislate and enforce those protections.