Child labor returns to the United States: A society moving in reverse
This past week, the Iowa Senate advanced a bill which would dismantle many child labor restrictions in that state, expand the types of jobs that minors can legally work, extend the maximum length of shifts and allow businesses to employ them late at night.
The bill was introduced in the Republican-controlled legislature on the grounds of “modernizing” Iowa’s child labor laws. In fact, it is the thin end of a wedge of a massive social regression. The United States, the world’s wealthiest country, never tires of lecturing others about “democracy” and “human rights.” But here, the barbaric practice of child labor, once thought to be consigned to the dustbin of history, at least in the advanced industrialized countries, is back.
In the 1800s, the capitalists justified the exploitation of child labor on the grounds that it would “prevent the habitual idleness and degeneracy” and teach “habits of industry,” as one study said. Today, virtually identical arguments are being made to justify the rollback of child labor laws. “That’s good experience,” Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said earlier this month. “You know, it teaches the kids a lot, and if they have the time to do it and they want to earn some additional money, I don’t think we should discourage that.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 10 states have considered bills to loosen child labor restrictions in the United States in the last two years. Eight bills have been introduced so far this year, including one bill in Minnesota which would allow children to work at construction sites. Another bill was recently signed into law in Arkansas.
The number of minors involved in child labor law violations skyrocketed nearly 400 percent between 2015 and 2022, according to the same EPI study, from 1,012 to 3,876. This includes a number of high-profile scandals, including the employment of dozens of children as young as 12 in an Alabama auto parts plant and more than a hundred children in dangerous jobs at a Wisconsin meatpacking plant. In both incidents, these children were overwhelmingly immigrants, who comprise one of the most super-exploited and oppressed layers of the American working class.
As a matter of fact, child labor was never fully abolished in the United States and remains widespread in rural areas. Approximately 500,000 children between the ages of 12 and 17 work in agriculture, and exemptions for farm work exist that allow children as young as 10 to work with their parent’s permission. Agriculture is also exempt from the federal minimum wage and, again, employs mostly immigrant workers.
And of course, US corporations make profits exploiting child laborers in sweatshops all over the world. In 2020 there were 160 million children worldwide—nearly one in 10—in child labor, nearly half of whom were employed in hazardous work, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The percentage of children in the workforce, which had been on the decline, has stagnated since 2016, and the total number of child laborers increased by 8 million.
The EPI’s report notes that the main consideration behind the drive to abolish child labor laws is the reversal of the sharp decline in the labor force participation rate for 16 to 24 year olds, which fell by more than 10 percentage points since the start of the century. This is “awful low,” one grocery industry lobbyist argued during an Iowa Senate hearing, adding that the bill would help to reverse the trend.
More young people choosing to finish school and go on to earn a college degree, rather than continuing to work in dead-end jobs with no prospects, is intolerable for the ruling class. More youth must be driven into low-wage jobs to counteract a tightening job market, which has led to modest pay increases. More troubling, it has encouraged a greater mood of defiance among workers, who are pushing for strike action in one industry after another. While the campaign to abolish child labor laws is being spearheaded by Republicans, it is of a piece with the economic policy of the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, who are using interest rate hikes to trigger mass unemployment and drive down wages.
No small consideration in the dismantling of protections for youth is the war policy of American imperialism. The trillion-dollar military budget and the tens of billions made routinely available for the US proxy war in Ukraine, as well as increasingly open preparations for war with China over Taiwan, require the development of a super-exploited war economy. Plans are being drawn up to send hundreds of thousands of young people, either drafted or induced by economic hardship to enlist, to fight and die for American imperialism in faraway battlefields against nuclear powers.
A basic litmus test for whether a society is moving forward or backward is its treatment of the most vulnerable, including the youth. What emerges in the US, therefore, is a picture of a country moving rapidly in reverse, driven by a deep and intractable economic, political and social crisis.
As a matter of fact, the ruling class has been systematically attacking the living standards of workers for nearly a half-century. But one gets a sense that particularly in the last few years, conditioned by the massive crisis unleashed by the pandemic, a certain inflection point has been reached.
The right of children to a childhood, a social achievement won only through bitter struggle, along with every social gain made over the course of more than a century, is now being junked. The conditions of life of the working class increasingly are coming to resemble those of the 19th century.
These include:
- The eight hour day and five day workweek. In factories across the US, it is not uncommon for workers to be kept on the job for weeks at a time without a single day off or work 12- or even 16-hour shifts. Railroad crews are on “on-call” status 24/7, leaving them without the ability to spend time with their families.
- Workplace safety regulations. These have been gutted and regulatory agencies left underfunded, leading to a series of horrifying industrial accidents, such as workers falling into molten metal, crushed to death by machinery, incinerated by gas explosions and poisoned by massive chemical leaks.
- The right to an education. The public school system is being hived off into the private sector in the form of charter schools, an estimated trillion-dollar growth sector. In the cities of Detroit and New Orleans, the majority of schools are now charter. Meanwhile, school districts around the country are cutting programs and shutting down schools.
- Public health. The abandonment of the official response to the pandemic has led to more than 1 million deaths in the United States alone. Advances in medical science, which could have been used to contain the spread of disease and even methods known for centuries, such as contact tracing and quarantining, have been brushed off on the grounds that they are “too costly” to “the economy.”
One figure gives an indication of the cumulative results. A young American worker entering a factory earning a starting wage of $16 per hour, as is typical in the auto industry, makes less in real terms than the average production worker did in the United States in 1944. In other words, the entire postwar boom has been reversed for the younger generation.
Key assistance in this social counter-revolution has been provided by the union bureaucracy, which has become totally integrated with management and the government. They have bargained away all of the achievements of the past in order to secure their own positions and six-figure salaries drawn from workers’ dues money. In fact, wages are growing even more slowly among unionized workers than among nonunion workers.
Meanwhile, corporate profits are their highest on record, and trillions of dollars are made instantly available to the banks whenever their speculative ventures threaten to collapse on them. The hikes in interest rates, in addition to driving up unemployment, have also produced record profits for large banks like JPMorgan Chase, which made over $50 billion in its last fiscal quarter.
Youth have no future under capitalism. The continued existence of this form of society is predicated upon the cannibalizing of all the social and cultural achievements of the past. In the sense of technical and scientific developments, humanity long ago created the means to eliminate poverty, war, pandemics, environmental destruction and every other social problem. That all of these are reemerging today with a vengeance is for one reason only: the capitalist profit system.
The solution for youth is to take up the fight for the socialist reorganization of our planet and the abolition of capitalist exploitation, in order to clear a path for the resumption of human progress. The International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual May Day rally in order to build such an international movement. We urge our young readers: take up the fight for socialism! Attend the May Day rally, and join the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the Socialist Equality Party !
Washington Post: Mayorkas Plans Global Migrant Pipeline
President Joe Biden may open a welcome center for global migrants in the South American country of Colombia, according to a report in the Washington Post.
The wage-cutting migrants would be processed and then flown into the U.S. for jobs and homes that would otherwise be filled by Americans, including sidelined Americans.
The revelations come as Biden’s pro-migration officials are preparing to lift the Title 42 barrier for the roughly 600,000 waiting migrants in Mexico. That waiting population is roughly equivalent to one migrant for every six births in 2023.
The Washington Post reported April 21:
Biden officials have discussed establishing processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia for asylum seekers, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
The plan matches the administration’s strategy of redirecting cartel-managed illegal migration through government-run “processing centers” and quasi-legal loopholes in the nation’s border laws.
This loophole strategy has been used to welcome more than 4 million migrants over the Mexican border — and many more white-collar migrants via airports — amid minimal coverage on the evening TV shows.
“This administration views immigration limits to be equivalent of Jim Crow [racist laws], and they [see themselves as] therefore heroic if they are undermining those immoral laws,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. He added:
They see it as morally defensible to subvert the law if they consider the law to be immoral — and they consider … limits on immigration — regardless of what they are — to be morally wrong.
Congress’s 1990 immigration law sets legal immigration caps at roughly 1 million migrants per year. That very high cap delivers one migrant for every four U.S. births — not counting Mayorkas’ massive loophole inflow.
The South American loophole is being developed by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. The Post reported:
“It is very important to build lawful pathways for individuals to be able to access humanitarian relief in the United States so that they do not need to take the dangerous journey to the United States,” Mayorkas said, describing the administration’s general approach. “Our model is to build lawful pathways and then to impose the consequences that the law provides on those who do not avail themselves of those pathways.”
A Florida judge has already barred one of Mayorkas’s smuggling routes. The Supreme Court is expected to decide the legality of a second major route by June.
In mid-April, Mayorkas announced a plan to temporarily reduce the rising flood of global migrants through the deadly Darien Gap jungle trail between South America and Central America.
However, that supposed 60-day enforcement plan was announced just as Mayorkas doubled his reception capacity for migrants at the northern exit of the jungle trail between Central and South America.
Biden is expected to lift the Title 42 border barrier on May 11. The policy will allow myriad economic migrants to use Mayorkas’ catch-and-release asylum loopholes to walk into the United States, despite the huge number of Americans who have been sidelined and impoverished by prior waves of migrants and free-trade outsourcing deals.
“I think next week we’ll have more to say about our preparation and some of the things we are going to be doing,” Mayorkas told establishment reporters at a meeting Thursday.
Mayorkas is zigzagging between pro-migration groups and the public.
For example, on Thursday, he met with sympathetic media outlets, such as the Hill, which reported:
Mayorkas said the department is considering a new rule to more easily deny asylum claims. Migrants who have not applied for asylum in other countries on their way to the U.S. or have crossed the border illegally would not be eligible for asylum.
But in March, he reassured pro-migration groups that the planned curbs would have many loopholes:
There are exceptions in the proposed rule. If one for example, has no access to CBP One [agency online portal] … if one is in imminent risk of danger by reason of the threat that one seeks to escape, [or] an acute vulnerability, an urgent medical or other humanitarian exemptions.
Almost 1 million migrants are living in Mexico, according to a United Nations document. Many of the migrants have reached Mexico because of economic aid provided by Mayorkas to international agencies. The funding comes from U.S. taxpayers, despite the public’s deep opposition to migration.
Most migrants come from Central America, but an increasing share is arriving from South American and far-away countries, such as Congo, Cameroon, India, and China. Each successful migrant uses their cell phone to advertise their success to more migrants, so creating more business for the criminal and the government-run networks.
Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot. who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’ demands imply equity between U.S. citizens and foreign citizens, and he has opened many loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States.
Amid the massive inflow of roughly 2 million global economic migrants in 2022, Mayorkas insisted the border is “secure,” and rejected any criticism of his deadly, elite-backed wealth-shifting policies.
“We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeing humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News on January 1:
Mayorkas is also using building the migration networks to deliver cheap labor, taxpayer-funded consumers, and room-sharing renters to investors and CEOs. In January, he said:
The labor shortage in the United States is one powerful example of how desperately we need to fix our broken immigration system. You know, we look to the north … Canada realized that it has a 1-million-person labor shortage there, and they are bringing in approximately 1.4 million migrants this year to address that labor shortage. Our programs — our H-2A, our H-2B, our skilled worker programs — are far outdated to really meet the economic needs as well as the economic opportunities [for migrants] that immigration can provide.
The population replacement reduces the political clout of native-born Americans because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
WATCH: DHS Chief Mayorkas Forced to Face Family of Grandmother, Granddaughter Allegedly Killed by Human Trafficker:
House Homeland Security Committee
Eric Adams: New York City Is Being ‘Destroyed’ by President Joe Biden’s Migrant Crisis
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said New York City is being “destroyed” by President Joe Biden’s migrant crisis during a panel discussion in Washington, DC, hosted by the African American Mayors Association.
“The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” Adams bluntly stated.
Adams was joined on the panel by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D), and outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D).
Adams seemingly took a shot at other New York City officials, accusing them of not fighting hard enough to get federal resources to the city.
“And none of my folks came to Washington, DC, to fight for the resources that’s going to undermine every agency in our city,” Adams added.
Adams’ remarks came days after he took aim at Biden, accusing the president of abandoning New York City and causing “one of the largest humanitarian crises that this city has ever experienced.”
“The national government has turned its back on New York City,” Adams said. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted by the asylum seeker crisis.”
New York City has spent $817 million to address the migrant crisis between July 2022 and March, according to the Office of Budget and Management. Estimates show the city will spend $4.2 billion on costs related to the migrant crisis from June 2023 through the end of fiscal year 2024.
New York City officials have applied for a $654 million grant from FEMA, and a decision is expected on May 31.
Adams also met with White House officials and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell on Friday to discuss the migrant crisis.
However, New York Immigration Coalition executive director Murad Awawdeh accused Adams of using “inflammatory rhetoric” to blame the migrants for the city’s “inability” to manage the budget, amNewYork Metro reported.
“He is throwing NY’s Congressional membership and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams under the bus – all of whom were just in DC this week to lobby on behalf of the city – by stating he is a lone wolf fighting to save his city,” Awawdeh told the outlet.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
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