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Sunday, March 26th, 2023

Child Labor Is on the Rise as Republicans See an Answer to Labor Shortages

Author:     Tyler Walicek
Source:     truthout
Publication Date:     March 23, 2023
 Link: Child Labor Is on the Rise as Republicans See an Answer to Labor Shortages
Stephan:  

The International Labour Office defines child labor as “work that deprives children of their childhood, potential and dignity” and that is “harmful to (their) physical and mental development.” Last summer I started tracking this trend after seeing research reports about child labor in the United States in the professional and academic literature. If you had asked me before that if such exploitation of children existed in America I would have said, "No, that was all outlawed in the early years of the 20th century." And I would have been wrong, as this report spells out. Even more disgusting is the linkage between children being made to work in factories and slaughterhouses, and the actions of the Republican Party to make this possible. I just can't process this, have we really sunk back to this level? Apparently, we have.

For some formal research on child labor and its effects see the Baylor College of Medicine paper: Child labor: What are the health and social implications?

Credit: Ayo Walker / truthout

A grim truth underlies U.S. industry: the appalling practice of child labor, widely perceived as an anachronism, is far from a thing of the sooty industrial past. U.S. consumers may have a hazy sense that children labor somewhere in foreign sweatshops to manufacture their goods — but such faraway tragedies are too easily forgotten at the checkout.

But child labor persists domestically as well. Because the practice has long been obscured from view, recent exposures of its real scope have elicited public surprise. In the past year, journalistic and governmental investigations of Southern manufacturers turned up systematic violations, while in February, The New York Times published a powerful exposé that highlighted migrant children who’d been steered into grueling work in manufacturing and agriculture. Still, these were mere glimpses. In the last fiscal year alone, the Department of Labor discovered 835 companies illegally employing more than 3,800 minors.

Those figures are startling enough — but the actual extent of legal U.S. child labor is truly vast. At present, enormous numbers of minors, many of them migrant children, are legally employed […]

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