Back To The Mines!
The rollback of child labor laws is an assault on childhood. It's also an effort to bring the broader workforce to heel.
Duvan Pérez attended middle school during the day and spent his nights cleaning the Mar-Jac poultry processing plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Federal labor law prohibits minors from working in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, but recent investigations have found child-labor to be widespread in the meat industry, especially on overnight cleaning shifts like one Pérez worked. Last year, the Department of Labor found a Wisconsin-based slaughterhouse sanitation company to have employed more than 100 children in overnight cleaning jobs. That discovery came amid a surge in child labor violations—an 88 percent jump in DoL cases of illegal child employment between 2019 and 2023—and a parallel push by lawmakers to roll back child labor laws, making work more precarious for people of all ages.
In 2023, as the DoL reported an alarming spike in illegal child labor, state and federal lawmakers advanced legislation that would let children work younger and longer. In the first weeks of 2024, lawmakers in Florida and Indiana also moved forward with bills that would weaken child labor laws. A Florida bill would allow 16-year-olds like Pérez to work more than 30 hours per week when school is in session, while an Indiana bill (before an amendment this week) would have allowed 16-year-olds to obtain educational waivers to work with dangerous machinery, and would have exempted employers from lawsuits if one of those children was hurt or killed.
Those bills might someday become law for a new set of minors in their respective states. Pérez, himself a teen working with heavy equipment, will not see their outcome. He was killed in July when he was sucked into a machine on the Mar-Jac factory floor. His was the plant’s second worker death due to entanglement in machinery in just over two years. For the repeat offense, the Occupational Health and Safety administration this month proposed Mar-Jac pay $212,646 in penalties.
The rollback of children’s labor protections is foremost an assault on childhood. It is a license to exploit those with the least agency: young people who lack the power or the information to defend their rights as workers; children of poverty who deserve publicly funded relief rather than long working hours; immigrant children like Pérez who may face legal intimidation from employers; small people who can be hurt or harassed, the arcs of their early lives diverted away from education and toward wage work too unpalatable for many adults.
These retrograde policies should raise alarms even with adults who do not like or care about children.
The child labor proposals are part of an effort to tame the broader workforce, which is currently enjoying low unemployment and generally favorable conditions for job-seekers. Just as CEOs in creative fields threaten unruly workers with replacement by artificial intelligence, and conservatives taunt pro-union McDonald’s workers with replacement by computer kiosks, stingy employers have turned to child labor to keep costs low when faced with adult workers who can afford to demand more.
“A tight labor market has prompted many employers to search for the cheapest available labor,” CNN reported last year. “State legislators are even pushing bills that would limit legal protections for underage workers.”
Everyone knows work sucks. From youth, we’re socialized to accept it even grudgingly. But for a conservative movement bent on breaking worker power, the promise of a wide-eyed and unjaded new crop of employees remains alluring—so much so that business interests and conservative charities have poured money into massive workplace-readiness centers for young children.
These facilities, which operate like Chuck E. Cheese if the primary game was loan repayment instead of skeeball, funnel libertarian messaging to the elementary school set. With names like BizTown, these capital-themed playplaces encourage both an enthusiasm for workplace drudgery and the ingestion of a labor lexicon that “does not include mention of collective bargaining, labor laws, or profit-sharing cooperatives,” Anya Ventura writes in a new Baffler essay.
Ventura accompanies a fifth-grade group to a San Diego BizTown, where she sits in with a child who has been appointed CEO of the site’s pretend UPS store for the day. (Some of the child’s classmates are his employees.)
“As children, we are constantly told about a ‘real world’ that awaits us—a difficult, gleaming futurity for which our entire lives have only been a rehearsal,” Ventura writes. “But on this day, the CEO and I were at BizTown: a miniature city replete with miniature businesses staffed by miniature merchants, the market society writ small. Here, children are told they will finally get to experience the vaunted real world in all its mystery. Their primary mode of participation will be work.”
BizTown is operated by Junior Achievement USA, a workplace-prep company. On JA’s list of million-dollar-and-up sponsors are banks, financial groups, the libertarian Charles Koch Foundation, and Chick-fil-A.
Other companies have gone further to condition the worker of the future. In 2019, Amazon gave a California high school $50,000 to launch a class called “Amazon Logistics and Business Management Pathway.” The program, according to documents obtained by Vice, purported to offer a “career-driven logistics curriculum” that would also instruct teachers on “how to to establish and develop an effective industry partnership with Amazon.”
During a “worker motivation” unit, students were encouraged to brainstorm ways to encourage employees without paying them more. Students enrolled in the class wore “golf shirt[s] emblazoned with the Amazon logo,” the New York Times reported, and took field trips to an Amazon warehouse.
It’s a less-glamorous immersion into adult work than BizTown. It’s a job-training program for a “real world” that is already arriving for some teenagers, along with the intimation that this real world is about uniforms and logistics.
Many well-meaning people, not all of them business leaders, enthuse about trade-based job training for young people, elevating technical education over less obviously marketable subjects like English literature. But while some of this argument is rooted in the legitimate value of some job-specific training, other elements help bolster an ongoing right-wing attack on the humanities. Where open idealogues on the right might cast the arts and history as degenerate and woke, a gentler, business-minded argument against these same subjects might posit them as indulgent, impractical, useless in the workplace compared to hard sciences or technical trades.
“On one page of the BizTown ‘Citizen Guide’ workbook, under the heading ‘Education Pays Off,’ students can color in a graph comparing the average earnings per hour of STEM employees vs. non-STEM employees,” Ventura reports from her trip to BizTown.
It’s unfortunate, and perhaps not coincidental, that the subjects under attack are the same fields that encourage creativity, empathy, critical thinking, and argument. The subtle (or open) discouragement of these fields, even in grade school, helps to divorce education from its abstractions, and labor from the dreams and curiosity of the future worker.
While arguing for a bill that would expand the allowable school-year work hours for children as young as 14, an Indiana lawmaker this month criticized schools as not giving children the education that a workplace could.
The bill “is actually a tool, as I see it, that is supporting everything we have going on in education, where we are taking students that maybe don’t have some of the skills, they’re not getting some of those experiences in school that they’re getting in the real world and in the workplace that is honestly making them better students,” Republican State Sen. Andy Zay said, asking an opponent of the bill “how do you rectify that conflict, where you have the workplace supporting our schools, supporting the intent of our schools and supporting the development of some of our schools’ work, but you’re opposing it?”
“Well for one, again, it’s in violation of federal law,” the opposing witness replied.
***
I am not proposing that minors be barred from all paid work. If nothing else, it would be hypocritical of me, someone who started working at 16, albeit always on reasonable shifts and never in a dangerous environment.
I held jobs in childcare and fast food until my late teens when I started landing media internships that snowballed into a media career, which I chose over childcare and fast food jobs because who wouldn’t pick a better-paid desk job over minimum wage work at Moe’s Southwest Grill? Certainly not the lawmakers proposing to weaken child labor laws.
Work can have value, or at least it pays money, and god it’s so good to have some money, especially when you’re on the threshold of the real world, staring down all its expenses and logistics, yes, but also its freedoms and its possibilities. Imagine if, instead of drafting bills to remake children into model workers, legislators wrote laws to make the workplace worthy of young people as they aged into it.
But without pro-labor interventions, even in a tight labor market, I fear that future workers stand to inherit the same precarious conditions facing current workers.
This month, the media industry has experienced catastrophic layoffs, amounting to the closure or complete gutting of some outlets, and the massive depletion of others. The tech and gaming industries have seen similar start-of-year bloodletting.
As often happens when journalists lose jobs, the layoffs were accompanied by sneering from billionaires and bad-faith actors: the kinds of people who have something to fear from a robust media industry. But this round of layoffs, in tech and media, alike, were also haunted by the specter of AI, which bosses hope might function as a cheaper, more docile replacement for flesh-and-blood employees.
Automation cannot replace journalists, although it can put a technological sheen over poor labor practices, much like the computerized kiosks that business leaders have long threatened as replacements for food workers who demand higher wages. Some fast-food giants have gone further, attempting to sideline workers with new AI gimmicks, like a fleet of AI delivery robots recently purchased by Chick-fil-A. Perhaps the first generation of Chick-fil-A workers forced to stack sandwiches in the delivery bots will be young adults who were once inspired by BizTown, which Chick-fil-A sponsors.
Or perhaps the robots will be loaded by people who are still children. Most child labor violations in the 2023 fiscal year came from the food service industry, much of it fast food franchises like Chick-fil-A, the Washington Post reported this month. Chick-fil-A has recently received fines for child labor issues in Utah, North Carolina, and Florida.
Chick-fil-A is also the best-known customer of Mar-Jac, the chicken-packing company where Duvan Pérez worked and died. It is not inconceivable that, while he cleaned away chicken scrap on the night shift, parts of those same birds were cooked and handled by other illegally employed minors in Chick-fil-A restaurants.
I’m reminded that both industries—journalism and meatpacking—handle something they call “pink slime.”
In meatpacking, pink slime refers to the hyper-processed byproduct of some animal, sometimes added back to consumer foods as filler. In journalism, it’s the churn of outsourced or AI-authored articles through a network of inauthentic news sites posing as more legitimate media organizations with real authors and editors. The tactic is popular among Republican strategists hoping to launder right-wing talking points through fake, hyperlocal-sounding websites in areas where more credible media institutions have gone out of business. But it’s not far removed from another, newer ploy of buying those defunct media sites and converting them to clearinghouses for AI articles. Those articles, in turn, are composed by a computer program that hoovers up the writing of actual workers and reconstitutes it as something legible but useless.
The AI is an author who demands no pay, requires no sleep, and can form no union. The AI homogenizes existing workers’ output, as if running those people and their labor through a meat grinder. It’s the ultimate vision of a disposable worker for an unaccountable employer.
But an AI cannot perform the work still needed of human hands. And with fewer laws to stop them, employers will increasingly exploit the next-most defenseless workers on the market. They’ll turn, as they already do, to poor children.
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