Today, we honor Dr. King by paying attention to the well-being of children and the protection of working people. He strongly believed in unions. When he was murdered in Memphis, he was there to support the Black men who were sanitation workers in their fight for a living wage and their demand for a union.

Since his death, powerful politicians have rolled back collective bargaining in many industries and have sought to eviscerate unions altogether. Now these same red states that ban unions are abandoning their child labor laws. These laws were passed over the last century to protect children, to limit the age at which they are allowed to work, to keep them in school so that they could be educated, to prevent them from working in hazardous industries.

Republicans in many red states are looking at children as a source of low-wage workers. Many industries need workers—especially since some states don’t want migrant workers—and they care whether they are 14 or 15.

Our regular readers Christine Langhoff wrote Cc this comment about Indiana, where employers are eager to hire child labor.

She wrote:

I want to scream.

Indiana is introducing legislation to allow kids to leave school after the EIGHTH grade to work on CAFTA farms.

On Monday, the opening day of Indiana’s legislative session, Republican Rep. Joanna King filed a bill that would allow kids as young as 14 to effectively drop out of school following 8th grade and go to work full-time on a farm. If the teenager “has been excused from compulsory school attendance after completing grade 8” and obtains their parents’ permission, they can work up to 40 hours a week all year round, including during school hours.

That comment is the tip of a large iceberg.

In this post, Peter Greene reviews the history of child labor laws and the current effort to gut them.

Greene writes:

One of the big under-covered stories of 2023 was the rolling back of child labor laws.

The major restrictions on child labor were part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and from there the states passed their own versions of protections for children. Many of these laws distinguish between agricultural labor and other sorts, in part so that junior could work on the family farm without getting Ma and Pa fined or arrested. But the idea was that maybe putting children in harm’s way or depriving them of the chance to get an education was a Bad Thing and maybe as a nation we should knock it off.

We didn’t get those laws easily. Lots of folks thought that child labor was double plus good. Opponents of the laws denied the existence of a problem, argued that work was good for the young ‘uns. “I am really tired of seeing so many big children ten years old playing in the streets,” was a real thing that a real “prominent lady citizen” said in opposition to child labor laws. And of course the ever-popular complaint– “How can we stay in business and remain profitable if you pass these rules?”

The Camella Teoli Story

I’m going to digress for a second to tell a lesser-known story that illustrates what the need was.

Camella Teoli went to work in a Lawrence, MA mill at the age of 11. Early on in her career, a machine used to twist cotton into thread caught her hair and ripped off part of her scalp. At the age of 14, she was standing in front of Congress in March 1912. The conditions in the mill were famously horrific; low wages and a life expectancy of 39.6 years, with one third of workers dying before age 25. If your workforce is going to die off in their twenties, of course you need to start them young.

Teoli was in front of Congress in March because in January, a new law had reduced the legal hours for women and children from 56 to 54 per week. The pissed off mill owners responded by speeding up the machines; so harder work, less pay. That kicked off the Great Lawrence Textile Strike, in which adults and children walked off the job.

The strike got ugly. Workers sent their children out of town, both for safety and as a publicity move, and the city officials decided to counter the bad publicity by deploying police and soldiers at the railroad station to keep children from getting in trains out of town, ultimately physically attacking the group of children. And Congress called a hearing, and Camella Teori, a 14 year old Italian immigrant testifying before First Lady Helen Taft, who invited Camella and other child laborers to lunch at the White House and contributed to the strike fund. Teoli became a national sensation, the face of our labor problem.

Massachusetts passed some child labor laws that were aimed not so much at the inhumane conditions of the work, but at the fact that child workers were being deprived of any chance for education. But the states (particularly the southern ones) dragged their feet hard, because for a huge part of US history, lots of people have been okay–even more than okay–with child labor, as long as it’s Those People’s Children.

Teoli went back to work in the mill. She was never promoted. She never told her own children about her role in labor history, even as her daughter had learned to help her arrange her hair to cover a large bald spot.

So here we are again

My point? The desire to use young bodies as part of the industrial machinery of our country is not particularly new, nor has it always been obvious that children should not be required to work in dangerous conditions or to the detriment of their own education.

In 2023, around a dozen states rolled their child labor protections back.

Some, like Arkansas, teamed up the gutting of child labor protections with laws set to kneecap public schools. Iowa removed protections that kept young workers out of more physically dangerous jobs while expanding the hours they could be asked to work. Missouri similarly shotfor increasing working hours for teens. Minnesota said yes to teens working in heavy construction.

Many off these rollbacks have especially troubling features. Arkansas removed the requirement for age verification. Many of the states have eliminated the requirement for a work permit. The work permit is dismissed as a piece of troublesome paperwork, but it is also the checkpoint at which the school or some other responsible adult can say, “I’m not sure this is such a great idea for this particular teen.”

In some cases like Arkansas, the permits had a requirement for parents to sign off, but now Arkansas doesn’t care to give parents a voice in this particular decision. Ohio’s Senator Bill Reineke expressed a similar concern over child labor, arguing that kids who really want to work shouldn’t be hampered because “they can’t get their parents to cooperate with them.” Parents–they only matter sometimes.

Please open the link and finish the rest of this excellent article.

A month ago, The New York Times published a horrifying story about the use of children—teenagers—to install roofs in new construction or to replace old roofs..

A few snippets:

Federal law bars anyone under 18 from roofing because it’s so dangerous. But across the U.S., migrant children do this work anyway.

They call themselves “ruferitos” on social media. In videos like these, they talk about being underage and pose on rooftops and ladders, often without the required safety gear.

One slip could be fatal.

The New York Times spoke with more than 100 child roofers in nearly two dozen states, including some who began at elementary-school age. They wake before dawn to be driven to distant job sites, sometimes crossing state lines. They carry heavy bundles of shingles that leave their arms shaking. They work through heat waves on black-tar rooftops that scorch their hands.

The rise of child roofers comes as young people are crossing the southern border alone in record numbers. Nearly 400,000 children have come to the United States since 2021 without their parents, and a majority have ended up working, The New York Times has reported in a series of articles this year.

The most common job for these children is under-the-table work in roofing and construction, according to teachers, social workers, labor organizers and federal investigators. Roofing is plentiful and pays better than many of the other jobs these children can get.

In New Orleans, Juan Nasario said he had been replacing roofs during 12-hour shifts nearly every day since he arrived from Guatemala four years ago, when he was 10. He would like to go to school or at least join a soccer team, but he needs to pay rent to his older cousin.

In Dallas, Diego Osbaldo Hernández started roofing at 15, after coming to the United States from Mexico last year to live with an older friend…

Children working on construction sites are six times as likely to be killed as minors doing other work, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Roofing is particularly risky; it is the most dangerous job for minors other than agricultural work, studies show.

Labor organizers and social workers say they are seeing more migrant children suffer serious injuries on roofing crews in recent years.

A 16-year-old fell off a roof in Arkansas and shattered his back. A 15-year-old in Florida was burned all over after he slipped from a roof and onto a vat of hot tar. A child in Illinois stepped through a skylight and fractured his spine….

Juan Ortiz, 15, was installing metal roofing at a plant in Alabama in 2019 when this patch of insulation gave way and he fell onto a concrete floor.

After his death, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that the employer had “nine laborers on the crew, but only six harnesses.”

It’s a long story. It’s a shameful story.

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