At breakfast this morning I asked my wife, "How is it possible these companies, and the people who run them, are okay about employing children in dangerous jobs? Has America really become that bad, that immoral? I mean how do you sit down for breakfast as we are doing knowing you have 13-year-olds working the night shift in your slaughterhouse cleaning up the guts and blood of dead animals? Doesn't the morality of it make you ashamed?" Her response: "They don't think as you do. They just think they are better than anyone else, anything they want is okay, kids are cheaper, so why not employ them? Morality in this country doesn't come into it anymore." I have been thinking about this all day. Has the United States really gone back to the 19th century with the racism, the child exploitation, the drive to push women into a subordinate second class, and Congress members advancing the idea that the Red states should secede? Is that really the United States in the second decade of the 21st century? Apparently, it is.
Migrant children in Roma, Texas. Credit: Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.
About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.
The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos — all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.
