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General News    H3'ed 7/6/23

Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Return of the Repressed

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, as TomDispatch regular and historian Steve Fraser, author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion, points out today, child labor is making a grim comeback in this country -- and immigrant children are leading the way. This brings to my mind a tale from my own past. My grandfather, born in what's now Ukraine, fled home at age 14, spent two years all too literally working his way north to Hamburg, Germany, where he got a job as a "scribe" -- he had beautiful handwriting -- and then boarded a boat for America. As his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote years ago, "A boy of 16, he arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship -- way down in steerage. Poor boy" and for the first few months in America I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody's kitchen."

She hardly needed to add that, as immigrant labor, he went right to work. His wife, my grandmother Celia, was born into a poverty-stricken family -- her parents had been immigrants -- two years before he arrived and, as Hilda reported, she completed just one year of high school before she, too, had to go to work "as soon as possible" The last job she had was with the telephone company as an operator. She was with them for a year or two when she left to get married" at age 17.

And that is indeed ancient history, personal and otherwise. But how unbelievably eerie that such a distant tale should once again be so desperately of this moment. Let Fraser explain. Tom

Caution: Children at Work
The Return of Child Labor Is the Latest Sign of American Decline

By

An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town. "Little children working," the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it's become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief's -- shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.

Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions into long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the government of the power to dictate what children can and can't do, leaving parents in control -- a claim already transformed into fantasy by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.

In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published "A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions," arguing that such laws stifled opportunity for poor -- and especially Black -- children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers' foundation, has joined in.

Nor are these assaults confined to red states like Iowa or the South. California, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, as well as Georgia and Ohio, have been targeted, too. Even New Jersey passed a law in the pandemic years temporarily raising the permissible work hours for 16- to 18-year-olds.

The blunt truth of the matter is that child labor pays and is fast becoming remarkably ubiquitous. It's an open secret that fast-food chains have employed underage kids for years and simply treat the occasional fines for doing so as part of the cost of doing business. Children as young as 10 have been toiling away in such pit stops in Kentucky and older ones working beyond the hourly limits prescribed by law. Roofers in Florida and Tennessee can now be as young as 12.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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