US bosses pursue child labour

The right and far-right in the US are emboldened and on the attack. Having already flooded state legislatures this year with hundreds of bills aiming to smash the rights of LGBTQ+ people, many of which explicitly target the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, the conservative right are likewise aiming for an unprecedented expansion of child labour. As the cost of living spirals, the right are waging amongst the most flagrantly abusive forms of class warfare; rolling back weak laws at the state and federal level to force kids from poor families into work.

Over the past three years, at least ten states have proposed or passed new bills that extend the hours minors [under-18s] can work, the occupations they can work in, lowering their minimum wages, and in the case of Arkansas, the removal of age verification checks and parental/guardian permissions to work. These bills appear concentrated in the “Midwest” states (such as Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas and Iowa), regions of the US heavily dependent on industrial logging, meat-packing and manufacturing, are or were heavily backed by companies and industrial lobbyists, and presented largely by Republicans, though supported in many states by Democrats.

A good question to ask is “why now?” There are three connected reasons. Firstly, hyper-exploitative age-dependent minimum wage laws mean that children are a cheaper form of labour. Secondly, over the past 20 years young people are increasingly opting to stay in school for longer. And thirdly, rising levels of child labour law violations across the US mean that companies are facing an increase in penalty fines.

As reported by the Economic Policy Institute, in 2022 there were over 3,800 child labour law violations, a tripling of minors being employed illegally since 2015, at a net cost to companies of over $4 million. The obvious solution for the business owners to avoid fines and maintain or extend profit margins is thus sweeping changes to the laws, to keep kids in work for ever-longer hours.

Fines

Currently, individual child labour violation fines cost companies up to an approximate measly $15,000 (or around $69,000 where a child is seriously injured or killed). But instead of tackling the root causes forcing working class youth into work, or simply outright banning child labour, Democrats in Congress have recently introduced a bill to increase this maximum federal penalty to $700,000.

Although companies are likely to more energetically avoid violating child labour laws, there appears no focus whatsoever from the Democratic Party to stop or reverse the erosion of laws the companies might be in violation of, nor provide adequate social support for young people at risk of hyper-exploitation. For the two dominant forces in US politics, this isn’t a question of whether or not kids should be in the workplace at all, but how much companies should be forced to pay if their employment breaches flimsy rules, written by the interests of industry, and backed by members of both parties in their states.

Contradictory

The US right offers perhaps the most contradictory, double-edge view on children’s role in society. In one sentence, they demand children be prevented from hearing stories from drag artists in the name of “protection”. Yet in the next, to defend profits and demand US economic growth, minors need forcing into ever-more deadly working environments and longer working hours.

175 years have now passed since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. The cotton mills, dependent on child labour, as analysed then by Marx and Engels, are now the logging forests and manufacturing/meat-packing plants of the current era. Their demands to tackle child labour exploitation in 1848 remain just as timely now: “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form”.