The Appalling Reality Of Child Labor

By Josh Crowell

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

Child labor has been on the rise since at least 2018. The recent New York Times article ignited a firestorm that has led the Biden administration to create a task force within the Department of Labor as an attempt to deal with this crisis. However, the reasons these children are being exploited is due to a lack of government oversight to begin with. The Department of Health and Human Services has failed to keep proper records of unaccompanied minors as they are placed with sponsors quickly to try to get them out of shelters. Only a third of these minors have any follow-up after placement with a sponsor, and even that limited support ends after a few months.

Hyper-exploitation Of Child Immigrant Labor

This is a crisis of poverty and immigration. Families and unaccompanied minors are fleeing desperate situations in Latin America to find only different conditions of desperation in the States. All families in the US right now are experiencing the pressures of our current economic crisis, from high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, to the ending of the child tax credit and the rollback of the COVID social safety net leaving many without access to food stamps and Medicaid benefits. While many minors who haven’t migrated are being put in situations where they have to work, many more immigrant minors, with or without their family, are forced to take up work once they arrive in the States, sending money back to their families in their home country or just to afford to survive in America. US immigration policy – under Trump and continued under Biden – criminalizes border crossings. The threat of deportation still hangs over the heads of immigrants and their families. With this stress, many unaccompanied minors also have debts accrued from their border crossing due to fees owed to those who helped them cross the border and additional money owed to their sponsors once they have been relocated out of the government’s custody. 

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This has led many children to take up jobs in very dangerous industries like meat processing plants, commercial bakeries, and construction. These children – some as young as 13 – work upwards of 14-hour shifts doing jobs that are classified as too dangerous for anyone under 18. While these jobs are difficult for any worker, these children must balance their school course load and full-time employment with the additional stresses of worrying about their families back in Latin America and knowing they are already burdened with debts they must pay. Some of these children are forced to drop out of school, many of which drop out unnoticed due to the lack of HHS oversight into their care once placed with a sponsor, if their sponsor enrolled to begin with.

As inflation continues to rise, especially with increases in rents, children and their families are forced to find ways to make ends meet, regardless of whether these survival methods skirt that law. While it is illegal for children to be working in these jobs, the bosses use these desperate circumstances to exploit these minors who are just trying to survive. With the Great Resignation, many sections of the working class no longer accept poverty wages which leads companies to look for workers who will accept these conditions as a way to continue to keep wages low and produce higher profits. Many immigrant children fit this role perfectly due to their need to assist their families back home and pay down their debts to sponsors here in the States. 

This Is A Fight For The Labor Movement

While this crisis is one of true desperation by these children and their families, it highlights the overall weakening of the US and Latin American labor movements. Almost a century ago, child workers and their families fought for an end to child labor and guaranteed education for all minors. This fight was won through mass action, with child workers and their families going on strike and protesting the intense conditions they were being forced to labor under. The bosses are not interested in enforcing labor law, especially when it comes to the hyper-exploitation that comes with migrant labor. The US labor movement must organize to protect all workers and that means fighting back against these trends of increasing child labor. If an injury to one is an injury to all then workers must stand up for these children and demand that they have adequate resources, safe sponsorships, and the ability to go to school and learn, not work as if they were an adult. 

While it is positive that the government is taking some action due to public scrutiny from the media, it will not solve this crisis. A lack of government oversight and the continuation of brutal immigration policies that set up immigrant workers for hyper-exploitation has led us to this situation. It will take courageous strike action from these child workers and their families, joined by the masses of organized labor, to win back what had been won a century ago. These children’s desperation cannot be used by the bosses to continue to exploit them. Workers should fight for guaranteed education for all minors, resources for unaccompanied immigrant children like food stamps and stipends, and for a process within HHS that actually protects children, not simply pushes them through the system.

Capitalists Return to the Past in an Effort to Gorge Themselves on the Fruits of Child Labor

[Pictured: Children working as miners in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo)]

By Conrad Dremel

Republished from Red Clarion.

Over the past few years, the countries of the imperial core — the United States and its junior partners in Canada and NATO —  have seen a startling reversal in what was once championed as a shining achievement of liberal democracy: child labor laws. History textbooks detailing the horrors of early industrial capitalism are replete with the soot-stained faces of child laborers. A relic, they claim, of a grim past, long since abandoned by today’s “enlightened” capitalists. Gone are the days of Dickensian chimney sweeps and adolescent black lung, banished to the dustbin of history by progressive reforms that ensured children could go to school and play and live carefree lives, unshackled from the horrors of exploitation.

This, of course, has always been a myth. Child labor persists both in the brutal exploitation in modern colonies, where children labor for little or no pay to produce chocolate and cobalt, as well as within the great imperialist countries themselves, where carve-outs for child agricultural workers were written into law from the very beginning. Even at its best, child labor has merely been constrained by the law, never abolished. And “its best” is quickly decaying as the empire falls apart and struggles to maintain its workforce. Those practices which were finally extinguished didn’t cease through the benevolence of the capitalists; the working class fought to keep our children out of the mines and the packing plants. This wasn’t a gift, but a hard-won victory.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, it quickly altered the landscape of every economy on the planet. Production was paused, consumption plummeted, workers stayed home to protect their lives, and in many places, the state stepped in to keep everyone afloat. Unemployment benefits and health coverage were expanded in even the most committed laissez-faire strongholds, such as the U.S. Measures such as eviction protection, aid payments, tax refunds and more were deemed necessary to prevent the entire working class from instantly collapsing into abject poverty and seeking more radical changes to the economic system. Top members of the Democratic Party have bragged that one measure, the expanded child tax credit, cut childhood poverty in the U.S. in half. Yet that truthful statement is undercut by an obvious revelation: this entire time, the state had been sitting on a tool to eliminate child poverty, used it only partially, and then, months later, opted to reverse the measure, thereby doubling childhood poverty.

Throughout the beginning stages of the ongoing pandemic, workforce participation stagnated. Workers were laid off en masse; some stayed home to protect themselves and their communities, others retired early, still more became unable to work due to disability, or simply died. The capitalists groaned and quailed, crying to their state and media cronies that “no one wants to work anymore!” Measures to protect these workers from both economic devastation and physical damage were instated only to be quickly reversed, replaced with harsh punishments for prioritizing their health. The pandemic was swiftly erased from public consciousness, meager reparations were rescinded, and unemployment began to fall, as desperate workers returned to the workforce en masse in order to make ends meet.

Still, the capitalists were not content. Unsatisfied with merely multiplying their wealth throughout this crisis, they demanded more. More production, more profit, more exploitation. So many workers dropped out of the labor market permanently, and so many are too sick to work on any given day, that the workforce availability declined by an estimated eight billion working hours in 2022 alone. This number is not captured in official unemployment metrics, but it is certainly noticed by the capitalists, who demand every hour of labor they can get. They demand not only an astonishingly high number of total working hours to keep their production running, but a massive reserve army of labor to undermine the negotiating position of existing workers. When they complain of a “tight labor market,” their grievance is not that there are no workers to be found, but rather that there are insufficient extra workers on the market to drive down wages. The capitalists need us to be desperate.

So with a shrinking population of adults willing and able to work, where do these predators turn their fangs? Our children. They have lobbied successfully for the loosening of child labor regulations -– easing restrictions on minimum age, hours worked, schooling requirements, sectors of employment, the need for parental permission, and even the mere enforcement of existing standards. These measures have been championed and signed into law by politicians across the bourgeois political spectrum. Across every capitalist state, every bourgeois party demands only one thing: the constant flow of profit, even at the expense of our youth.

The rising tide of efforts to expand the legal exploitation of children pales in comparison to the capitalists’ flagrant disregard for both law and decency, with violations of child labor law in the U.S. nearly quadrupling since 2015, and growing every year. Children as young as ten are working with dangerous machinery in car factories and handling caustic chemicals in meat-packing plants. This willingness to flout their own standards of morality while violating  labor laws has always been exacerbated by periods of economic strain : the last huge spike in violations happened during the 2008 financial disaster. In every crisis, the most despicable vultures swoop in and pick clean every carcass they can find. There is ample profit to be made by siphoning the blood of the most despondent workers. 

This combined assault on child labor protections — the degradation of regulations and the violations of existing ones — is so egregious that it cannot escape the notice of even pro-capitalist institutions. The Department of Labor has recently been investigating child labor violations by PSSI and Hyundai. The PSSI case in particular has generated so much public outcry because of its sheer brutality: children were expected to use caustic chemicals to clean industrial blades, leading directly to the injury of three minors. These injuries represent only a droplet in the rising tide of blood spilt by capitalists in their pursuit of profit. The investigations by federal agencies are themselves laughably pathetic; they carry no criminal charges, only fines. To the capitalist, this is only the cost of doing this depraved business. Still, the cost seems too much for them to bear, hence their push to scrap regulations altogether. Well-funded and highly-coordinated capitalist organizations, like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce have drafted and lobbied for bills toward this heinous end. So far, 10 U.S. states have proposed or enacted bills that expand working hours, lower working age requirements, lift restrictions on hazardous job duties, or even grant immunity to employers for workplace injuries or death. For children. The primary aim of this legislative blitz is to protect capitalists from legal action for the death and mutilation of children. The capitalists are enriched and empowered by their shamelessness, greed, and depravity. In their vampiric frenzy, not even children are spared the bloodlust.

The working class must act immediately to defeat this reanimated monstrosity. Child labor laws did not spring out of nowhere. They were the capitalists’ begrudging concession to a mobilized, militant labor movement. Our forebears told the bosses in no uncertain terms: release our children from this despicable practice, pay us enough to support our families, or you will not get our labor. United in solidarity, workers beat back the specter of child labor and other abuses, securing some level of dignity and power for our class. But their fight was incomplete. It was exclusionary, leaving gaps where the hyper-exploitation of racialized and colonized children could continue unabated. It was impermanent, leaving capitalists the profit stream to claw back all reforms. It was unambitious, unwilling to imagine and fight for a society built on true liberation. And now this old beast is now roaring back with a vengeance. This time, we must win not only the battle, but the war.

Maternal and Child Health in the Face of Natural Disasters

By Cherise Charleswell

Ironically, just three months after the unqualified, unethical, and unstable narcissist who occupies the White House, decided to pull out of the Climate Accords/Paris Climate Agreement , the United States has been struck by a number of natural disasters from the uncontrollable fires raging in Oregon and California, and other parts of the west coast, to hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the states of Texas and Florida, respectively. Irma first wreaked her damage on the Caribbean islands, leaving a trail of devastation, where in some places, such as the tiny island of B arbuda, where there was a reported 90% destruction of all structures. Both hurricanes have been recorded among the worse or most virulent in recorded history, in the past 150 years. There has also been hurricanes, flooding, and horrific mudslides in the countries of Nepal, Bangledash, and India, as well as Sierra Leone; where poverty and the lack of sustainable infrastructure has resulted in the deaths of thousands.

What is clear, and what has been long understood by scientists and those in public health, is that "climate change and environmental degradation is real". We have been sounding the horn for many decades now, and there has been many attempts to silence and discredit us. However, despite being climate change deniers, such as Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Governor Rick Scott , have both called for federal aid, and declared a state of emergency. All while refusing to to truly address the root causes of this devastation. These climate change deniers and the internet trolls that they help to create through propaganda, misinformation, lies, and false promises of re-opening mines - which have likely already been stripped of all of its natural resources., continue to convince enough members of the public that climate change is a hoax. 45 (One seriously cannot refer to that man as President) even went as far as to claim that it was a hoax started by the Chinese to undermine US business interests.

Americans are now learning that they should be doing more than sending "thoughts and prayers" when a natural disaster occurs, and should instead do something to prevent or reduce the harmfulness of the next one, by voting into office legislators that would enact the necessary policies that address climate change and environmental degradation. Recognizing that climate change has become the most pressing public health issue impacting the lives of people globally, the American Public Health Association (APHA), as well as a number of its affiliates, such as the Southern California Public Health Association (SCPHA) have choose to make climate change the theme of their 2017 conferences. In fact, in January APHA has declared that 2017 is the Year of Climate Change and Health, APHA actually has an ongoing climate change initiative that has included monthly themes, webinars, and resources for advocacy. While SCPHA just established its Resolutions, with the first titled Resolution on Oil & Gas Development, Climate and Health . Again, the experts agree that "climate change is real".

Another issue that is not being openly discussed in these responses to natural disasters is the fact that, like most aspects of life, intersectionality is at play, and having an identity that encompasses any combination of the following factors, increases the degree of impact that a natural disaster has on one's health and wellbeing: being located in the global south, being a person of color, having a disability, being an immigrant or refugee, being a woman, being a mother, and being low income.

Further, the fact of the matter is that while Western nations, especially the US, utilize most of the natural resources and carry out activities that have increased pollution, environmental degradation, and have hasten climate change, nations in the Global South are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, and suffer the greatest degree of destruction and burden. And again, what complicates matters is that these nations are among those without the wealth and resources to protect and provide services to its citizens, fortified their structures, and readily rebuild following the devastation; putting citizens at risk for disease and injury.

Whether abroad or within the US, due to those aforementioned intersections, those who are the most impacted by natural disasters are women and children ; particularly mothers. During the wake of Hurricane Harvey there were images of many mothers trying guide their children to safely. One could not helped to notice that many were single mothers, or simply had no men in sight who were able to assist. On a CNN interview there was an African American mother who lashed out at interviewers for their insensitivity in wanting to know all of the details about the trauma that she and her children went through trying to navigate the storm, and there was the tragic story of a three year old child being found alive, grasping to the body of her deceased mother . It is easy to talk about evacuation when there is available income to readily do that, as well infrastructure that can accommodate a mass exodus of people from major metropolitan areas; however it becomes far more difficult when

All of this points to a subset of maternal & child health that public health truly needs to consider more intently, and that is wellbeing during and after a natural disaster. This consideration needs to ask the questions:

• Are communities being effectively assisted in preparing for a natural disaster?

• Are special considerations being given to helping to evacuate and shelter single mothers and their children, knowing that they do not have any other support in the home?

• Are resources to withstand natural disasters being made available to those who may not be able to afford the, or have access to reliable transportation to gather them? The central argument is that more resources need to be invested in disaster preparation and not just focus all monies and other resources to disaster response.

• Are shelters being stocked with supplies that will be most needed by mothers of infants, toddlers, and small children: diapers, bottles, etc.?

• Are precautions being carried out to accept pregnant women into shelters, and assist if they go into labor?

Of course, we would want to ask where are the fathers, and the answer may be that they work a distance from their homes, particularly in the global south, have fell victim to the natural disaster, which was the case with the 2004 tsunami that pulled millions of people into the Indian Ocean, or that they were literally off saving themselves; leaving women to fulfill the traditional role of nurturer and protector of their children. One that they are showing that they are ready and willing to give their own lives to fulfill.