In the 1800s, sustaining the family involved the entire family. Everyone worked. Some employers liked hiring children because they could pay the children less than they would have to pay an adult.
In 1938, New Deal Legislation changed that idea. People embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than factories. An education would allow them to be upwardly mobile, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living. An education guaranteed that they could be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy. The League of Women Voters advocated for child labor laws.
Today, the momentum is moving away from protecting children and toward making it easier to employ immigrant children, usually between ages 13-17 years of age. Basically, the law limits the number of hours a teenager can work on week nights and prohibits teenagers from working in jobs that are deemed dangerous. By 2023, twenty states had introduced or enacted bills to roll back child labor protections while the violations of child labor laws had increased 88 percent from 2019.
The children we’re talking about have usually come to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors. The Office of Refugee Services in the Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to provide temporary services to the children until they can be placed with a sponsor. However, it is not unusual for the sponsor to demand payment for room and board from the child. Sometimes, the child has to pay a coyote who has smuggled the child into the United States.
Consequently, the child feels pressure to find employment. Many immigrant children are recruited by employment services. They interview the children and then send them to the employer who wants to hire them. Often, the HR personnel are suspicious about the child’s age, but because the employment agency recommended the child, the employer is not culpable.
Many businesses like to hire these teenagers because they can pay them less. But even more disturbing is that the children are often placed in jobs that are very dangerous. Examples include working in meat packing to clean the sharp saws and the floor with dangerous chemicals; working in roofing, which involved carrying heavy bundles of shingles up a ladder; bussing tables in a restaurant where alcohol is served; working on a conveyer belt to put plastic bags of cereal into the box. For some of these jobs, the children are required to work late into the night, which is not legal under U.S. Child Labor laws.
These circumstances do not go unnoticed. Children who work late into the night or all night often fall asleep in school the next day. Their teachers are reluctant to report their concerns because they know the child needs the income. Child Protective Services are often understaffed and consider the referral a low priority. The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor enforces child labor laws, but in 2019 it had one investigator for 189,000 private sector workers. We need to be aware of the exploitation of these young immigrants and oppose weakening the standards for child labor.
Sources:
New York Times, February 2023
Heather Cox Richardson blog, June 14, 2023
Economic Policy Institute, Testimony by Terri Gerstein, Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Community, Before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, June 14, 2023