Twelve-year-olds are not the answer to the labor shortage — and they must be protected.
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
Being a kid today isn't what it used to be, and if you're a kid, that generally seems to be a good thing. Especially when it comes to working. |
Around the turn of the 20th century, children as young as 10, and sometimes younger, were working — in dangerous settings like factories and mines, on farms and in home businesses, according to a history of child labor by Michael Schuman, which was published in the Monthly Labor Review in 2017. |
Deaths and injuries were not uncommon, and some children were kept out of the classroom in favor of the factory or mill floor. |
Fixing this problem proved difficult because states, especially in the South, resisted. But hard-won reforms at the federal and state levels slowly changed the picture. The employment of young children was outlawed. And at least as of 2017, as Schuman noted, children were "seldom found in the manufacturing and mill operations that gave rise to the movement against child labor." |
But the clock may be turning back. |
As The Times's editorial board pointed out last week, Arkansas recently enacted legislation that would make it easier for companies to put younger children to work, and bills have been proposed in at least nine other state legislatures that "would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors." |
And as Terri Gerstein, a labor law expert, noted in a guest essay this week, these "enacted and potential rollbacks are happening just when the country is experiencing a surge of child labor violations on a scale and of a type that we hadn't heard about for many years." |
We are hearing about them in part because of recent reporting by The Times and Reuters revealing migrant children as young as 12 working at car factories, meat processing plants and construction sites. The U.S. Labor Department said last month that it saw a 69 percent increase in children being employed illegally since 2018. |
Why is this happening? Gerstein explains: "Facing a labor shortage that could have been avoided, it appears that some business interests and lawmakers would prefer to expand the pool of exploitable workers to vulnerable children rather than improve working conditions to attract age-appropriate employees." |
So what's to be done? We need better enforcement of labor laws, for one thing. And, as the editorial argues, "comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need." |
What Our Readers Are Saying |
People fought and died to end the kind of child labor that my grandmother experienced as an 11-year-old immigrant working in the textile mills of Fall River, Mass. I always thought that we could at least agree that this period was forever behind us. — Jo, Evanston, Ill. Right now there is low unemployment and a shortage of workers. When the inevitable business cycle changes this in the future, we will see businesses electing to hire lower paid, more exploitable 14-year-olds over unemployed adults. This is a horrific step backward. — MC, Maryland My head is spinning. I was just reading about a kid being grounded in her megamansion for trying to charter a helicopter with Daddy's plastic, and now I'm reading about kids working long hours in dangerous conditions for minimal pay. All these kids live in the same country, and it isn't Dickensian England. I'm so confused. — Mairi, Canada |
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