A Labor Department investigation found that more than 100 children were illegally employed in hazardous agricultural jobs.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, believes that the increase in child labor is related to the impunity with which big corporations operate in today’s economy. As companies consolidate and grow, she says, they are worth so much money that some find it easier to violate laws and pay minimal fines than to comply with laws. “They just figure it’s the cost of doing business,” she says.
Another factor is the tight labor market in the U.S., which has motivated lawmakers in some states to relax child labor laws. A bill recently introduced in the Ohio Senate, for instance, would allow teenagers to work longer hours with their parent’s permission.hat the goal of the bill is to address staffing shortages in the restaurant industry. But allowing kids to work longer hours also raises safety concerns—even if they don’t end up on the slaughterhouse floor, labor experts say.
The unemployment rate may be low now, but the DOL’s investigation took place over three years, and they were years in which millions of people lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Kids don’t do terrible work for no reason at all,” she says. There’s another thing that changed in the period that this investigation covers: immigration enforcement. Many families in the meatpacking industry have mixed documentation status. The Trump Administration had pledged, in 2017, toby Immigration and Customs Enforcement fourfold.
It’s very likely that those families are struggling even more now that the children lost their jobs, she says. DOL has very little follow-up, Levison says, to check in on the economic stability of families whose children are found to be working in violation of labor laws.
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