US faces ‘scary’ child labor spike as states look to loosen guardrails

WASHINGTON

The US is witnessing an explosion of child labor violations as legislative overhauls in Republican-majority states seek to remove safeguards intended to prevent a return to what was seen during the Industrial Revolution and Great Depression.

Child labor itself is not a novel problem for the US, but data from the Department of Labor released earlier this year indicates an explosion in violations across the country.

The department tracked a 69% increase in children being employed illegally since 2018, including 3,800 violations across 835 companies in the 2022 fiscal year.

Much of the increase is tied to migrant children who entered the US illegally and who do not have a parent in the country, the department said in February.

Over 600 child labor investigations are ongoing.

Part of the dramatic spike can be explained by a lack of resources that went toward the Labor Department during former President Donald Trump’s administration, which in turn may have created a lax enforcement environment, said Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff at the agency’s workplace safety office.

“Under the Trump administration, all enforcement was weakened, and the number of inspectors dropped to very low levels,” said Berkowitz, who is a former Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) official.

“It is possible that when enforcement was curtailed — especially before and during COVID — by the Trump administration, some low-road employers felt they could get away with it, and thus it (violations) has increased,” she told Anadolu.

Those sentiments were echoed by Tim Ryan, the chairperson of the Global March Against Child Labor advocacy group, who said the Labor Department had been “until recently” constrained in its enforcement actions due to highly limited resources, contributing to a “sense of impunity” among business owners.

“The weakening of the rule of law, that whole sensibility, I think, winds up creating a dynamic where folks think that it’s been going on, so therefore we can kind of continue the status quo,” he said.

Rolling back curbs

The sharp increase in child labor violations tracked by the Labor Department comes, however, as Republican-held states primarily in the Midwest and South enact new laws seeking to curtail child labor protections.

In Iowa, lawmakers approved legislation earlier this month allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work in meat freezers and industrial laundries, “perform light assembly work,” and work longer hours year-round, including two additional hours during the school year and four during the summer.

That law may run afoul of federal legislation, which under the US Constitution has supremacy whenever there is conflict.

Just a week after the bill passed, senior officials from the Labor Department penned a letter in response to an inquiry from Democratic Iowa state senators in which they warned the legislation “appears to be inconsistent with federal child labor law in several respects,” including violations of federal law intended to outlaw “oppressive child labor.”

It pointed in particular to the new sectors in which the law seeks to allow younger teenagers to work, as well as the extended work hours, which Seema Nanda, the Labor Department’s top attorney, and Jessica Looman, the principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, said are not permitted under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

“Therefore, if Iowa law were to conflict with the FLSA and the Department’s regulations by permitting minors to work in occupations and during or for hours that they are otherwise prohibited from working under federal law, those state law provisions would be inconsistent with FLSA and the Department’s regulations when the employer or child is covered by the FLSA,” the officials wrote.

Governor Kim Reynolds has yet to sign the bill into law, but said she intends to do so.

Iowa is not alone in seeking to rollback protections.

This year alone, six Midwestern states — Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota — and Arkansas have introduced legislation to water down child labor restrictions, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

‘A feature of American capitalism’

The bills are being pushed by prominent industry groups, and Berkowitz pointed in particular to a conservative Florida-based think tank and lobbying group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, as being behind the Iowa and Arkansas laws.

The organization, headquartered in Naples, bills itself as a “powerhouse for policy wins in the areas of welfare, unemployment, workforce, election integrity, and healthcare.” The Washington Post newspaper tied the foundation to the laws in Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas.

The Arkansas bill signed into law by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in March makes it easier for children to be hired by eliminating state requirements mandating minors under 16 receive documentation from the state certifying their age, describing the work they will do, and ensuring parental consent.

That presents an “arbitrary burden,” a spokesperson for Sanders said.

Berkowitz, the ex-OSHA official, said the new laws in Arkansas and Iowa represent a “tragedy.”

“The public didn’t ask for this. There are plenty of jobs kids can do now — and they can work plenty of hours,” said Berkowitz. “This is scary, and I am hoping that there will be enormous pushback.”

In April, a group of 25 Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate and House of Representatives introduced legislation seeking to increase accountability for corporations who are found to have exploited children in the food industry. But the bill is limited in scope, and its chances of passing Congress appear dim with Republicans firmly in control of the House.

Ryan, the chairperson of the Global March Against Child Labor, said there was a need now for Congress to pass stronger child labor protections, but acknowledged that this is a tall order given the “corporate world in which the Republicans, and lots of Democrats, operate in terms of being able to get campaign donations and so on and so forth.”

“The notion that a country like the United States, which is based on freedom and rights, should have different freedom and different rights for you depending on where you live in the country strikes me as an 18th-century political construction,” he said in reference to state child labor laws.

“When it comes to child labor laws like this, this is kind of the sharpest edge of the example of how you benefit some people in society who are at the upper end of the spectrum, and penalize people at the lower end of the spectrum,” he added.

“It’s a feature of American capitalism.”

• Child labor
• OSHA
• US