American Child Labor, An Unceasing Horror

point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things that was in the original comedist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no, we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's also one of the things that like you get these sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we eliminated child labor. This is like this has proof the system works. No, this, the battle over child labor or is a battle that we are in the middle of losing. We are losing it in worse and worse ways every day.

So okay, so why why why are we why are we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One of the big problems is that vast swaths of the US sees child labor is morally good. You know, they see something like, oh, this is like you teach your kids.

less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think most people agree if you're not running the business that like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever. But you know, there's like lots of things that people are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like that's completely fine, Like oh, it's like a like a fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm, Like that's fine, but.

it's not. It's actually not fine to be working people like be a child and then working for a living for your family, Like that's not kay.

wages for everyone else. And this is you know, if you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right, one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is that like, oh well, it's like it's like kids get the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one, it's not like children are not morally worth less and their labor is also not worth less than an adult. Like like if you if you're gonna explain them like this, like.

is like somehow less of a human being than an adult. Right, Like this is this is this sucks, but you know it's used to sort of hold down wages directly through things like like opposing mineral wage increases, used to hold you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because and this is another reason like capitalists love child labor is that children are, you know, like they're physically smaller than adults, they're easier to control, they have less social power, and

because you know, because of that, you can pay them less. And because of you know, because because people just in our society don't fucking like kids, and because of that, it's so it's it's just socially accessible to just pay them less.

This is from the early nineteen hundreds. One boy touchingly recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mine this way, I'll always think of my poor blind father and my mother at home, but I won't never play with the boys at all, And then the cracker boss won't have to beat me like he does the others

this boy was nine years old. While stories like these produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions, there is no such concern the view that quote the little devils like it, as one cold boss put it, seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed

these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people, my people, I mean capitalists and also people who are incredibly desperate and don't have enough money to give by like love child labor. There's you know, it takes a long time for like an actual series anti child labor campaign to

get started in the US. And of course the exact people who you would expect to oppose banning child labor oppose banning child labor. I'm going to read this from the also from the barrel laborististics. The chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers said about a law to abolish child labor. Quote this union, this labor union plot against the advancements and happiness of the American boy is a ploy. Is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion. And prosperity

in this country. So this is what their thing is. Their argument is that is that children don't oppose child labor. This is this is being foisted upon them by outside agitated labor unions. And also, if we're not allowed to use child labor, if we're not allowed to have a nine year old be put in a mine, the entire American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke.

sort of reform movement that happens. And one of the sort of key moments of this reform thing is Laurence Textile Strike and This strike is probably most famous today for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too, which is, you know, like wrung down the halls of labor and socialist histories, like the names of newspapers, songs, poems, and also like being the namesake of a truly dogshit DSA caucus. We're not going to talk about this strike enormously.

Here the short, the very very short version of this strike, and this this is a nineteen twelve strike. The short version of it is that there's a law pass in Massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours that you could have women and children work from a blistering fifty six hours to a leisurely fifty four hours a week.

women of like from a bunch of different places. The part of it that's not talked about as much is that another huge person of the workers were just fucking children.

down on the strike. It's more and more violence. And as this goes on, the workers at like the adult workers at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send the children, who are both like both the child workers and also like just people's kids to New York to keep them safe and also to make a political point. But like, hey, look they're running our children out of town, and this goes great. The first way is this go

great for the children. Like a bunch of people in New York show up but are like, yay, hey, we'll take care of these kids. Like and this makes like the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this. It looks really bad for us. And so they they like assembled outside of the next train that was trying to leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god, so she shouldn't be really mististics again. When the next group of children prepared to depart the train station, they

were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to let them board the trains and launch an attack on the group. A seven year old was given a black eye when she was picked up and thrown into a patty wagon by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to children being thrown around like rags. Oh my wait god, like yeah, thin blue live baby, let's fucking go. This is this is the thing the cops or the thin

blue line ordering chaos. That seventy year old girls. Yeah's not gonna throw herself around, right, Like someone has to beat up this children. And for that there is the few, the proud, the American police.

Oh my god, what now this hold that wood in your fucking mind, because we're gonna come back to that shit, do I have to?

And the product of this is you get this thing called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now, as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness of this law is that it, you know, it allows kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the

family unit. So like if you're on a family you know, and this is a very very broad category, right, so it's you know, you can you can force your child to work as long as like you're their parents, right and you're the one making the money off of them and not like a capitalist. But even this, even this is considered too strong of a law, and in nineteen eighteen, the Supreme Court rules that it's unconstitutional to ban child labor.

Wait what they do with the uiple times? Multiple times, And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show. The Supreme Court is and has always been just one of history's greatest monsters.

child labor in the country. And here's the thing, Like, even now, even before all the horror show stuff that we're about to get to that's happening right now, like not kids, Like we never actually dealt with child labor through like the law, Like we just basically outsourced, you know, Okay, we we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper than like an American child, and we did. It's either like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have legal citizenship status,

or just outsourcing. And then you know, our kids still fucking do work, you know, like are like they're like it's very common for ten and twelve year olds to work. It's just that it's usually like babysitting or like bowing lawns. And we've we've decided that like, no, this is actually fine, Like it is actually fine to fucking put twelve year olds in a labor market.

able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know, in the last twenty years there'd been a decline in what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough, this is the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the labor markets. Wow.

got killed by machiinery get a conveyor belt. Sixteen year old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company. There have been other child labor deaths recently, those are

just sort of the most recent ones. And I want to get in to the shit that's been happening because in the last really in the last been under like eight years, things have gotten you know, like the Charlie situation in the US was never good, and we'll talk about that later, but like things have gotten so much worse. There's been almost a factor of four increase since twenty fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs. It's actually probably well, it's unclear to me whether the numbers are

actually worse than that. I don't know, because I think almost all of this these districts are being undercounted, like dramatically because those numbers are just violations that are caught.

And go into that a bit later. But meanwhile, like right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont have already passed laws in the last two years that weaken restrictions on child labor, and bills are appearing like across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff, like they want to allow fourteen year olds to serve

alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is, it is truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant business associations across the country who want to, you know, use child labor, and that's bad. The fact there's more stuff that you know is on the horizon is not good. But for an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says, the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times.

In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English language larner programs say it is now common for nearly all of their students to rush off to long shift after their classes end. They should not be working twelve hour days, but it's happening here, said Valeria Lindsay, an Arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program, about one hundred students,

was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a massive surge since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering the US. And this has been driven by a law of sort of you know, it's been driven by sort of pandemic driven poverty, a massive obsertion of violence in a bunch of countries in Central America, a lot of which has to do with like, you know, the the US back to Cunel Salvador about a decade ago. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's all very

bad and it's been pushing people here. But you know, like the the situation for immigrants getting into the US is never good, but Biden specifically has managed to make it worse because Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy has been has been resting on getting kids out of shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor, right, And you know, this has gone about as well as

you would expect it would when someone like starts to you know, one of the I think it was The New York Times was talking about this woman who's working, you quit working in a health human services like office because they had a quota of getting rid of twenty percent of their kids a week and if they didn't do it, they would get digged. Yeah, they had a quota for we need to get twenty percent of the

kids out of the shelter every week. Wow. In the last two years they have lost track of a third of the kids they send out, which is again, in the last two years alone, at least eighty five thousand children they've just lost. I don't fucking know where they are. Here's some New York Times Again, it's getting to be a business for some of these sponsors. And yet Pasilaqua, who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida

last year. Miss Pasilochua said she saw so many children put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead, she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.

kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are talking about like, we are talking about fourteen year olds who are like literally making food that like you are eating yeah, and we're still right. So this is happening in a large part because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon on a company miners. Well, it turns out a lot of those miners are on a company because the Biden

administration wouldn't let their fucking parents into the country. And this is where this is where we need to get into the fucking like the whole sort of like sex trafficking panic, right, because you know, one of the things that this panic, specifically about sex trafficking has covered up is that most humans trafficking is not sex trafficking. It's almost all labor trafficking almost also huo strong a word,

but it's mostly by volume. Most of it is is labor trafficking, which nobody gives a single shit about because you know, there's no you can't you can't have a moral panic around like you can't have a moral panic around labor trafficking like people who aren't white. And simultaneously, all the business groups who would normally fund these panics like love this shit because you know, all of all of these capital's ghouls drinking a thousand dollars bottles of

wine under thirty million dollar yachts. All of that shit is paid for about child labor, so of course they don't give a shit about it. In fact, they love it. And the you know, the product of this is you have a bunch of fucking twelve year olds who are effectively in debt bondage, working twelve hours of fucking day

in a slaughterhouse or a paper bill. I'm gonna I'm gonna read another thing from the New York Times, which is, I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing, but like, I think this is the most depressing thing I've read in this entire I don't know, like in ages, I didn't get how expensive everything was, says thirteen year old Jose Vasquez, who works twelve hour shifts, six days a week at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister. I'd like to go to school,

but then how would I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know, and of course one of you know, like the everything about this, right is these these are people dealing with the fucking American housing market, right. The American housing market is intolerable to adults who work full time, who work like full time jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right, this is a thirteen year old. How the fuck is a thirteen year old? It's supposed to be paying rent? Right?

And you know, and every every sort of additional thing just makes it worse because the more the more of these kids. And one of one of the things happening is these kids are getting funneled into very specific areas, right, because they're getting You're getting funeled to like specific towns because those specific towns have a bunch of like, have a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these

migrant kids. And when they do that, that fucking continually drives out the price of housing because all of these people are competing for the same like fucking one Vegoe apartment for sixteen hundred dollars a month, right, And so every everything just sort of spirals in on each other and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six. This is the fucking like thing I talked about in China is at nine am nine pm, six days a

week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know, in any just world, people would die for this. In this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this. It's a bunch of children who are dying on their fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,

the people who for this are children. And the Biden administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking all these kids out to their families, like they're kicking all these people out to just like fucking anyone as soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's families into the country, and then doing literally nothing at all to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into this country like have a place to live or like

any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves, you know, and we could, we could, fucking like, there are there are individual people in the US who benefit from this child labor who you could fucking like throw into a box tomorrow, take all of their money, and you could fund this entire program. They are individual people, right.

No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids, They will let every single one of these kids die before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child laws that exists in this uh uh, you know that that exists in the rutcher are completely useless because regulatory

agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing, or they spend some time investigating so they can get a cut of the child labor money by issuing a fine to the company.

And the product of these raids is you put, is they put the families of the kids who are doing the child labor in prison or deport them, and then they do nothing about the actual you know, so a lot of what's happening is this is happening through contractors, right,

so they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will fucking happen and the parents of these kids, who also like cannot fucking survive, and in a lot of cases are doing this because literally they do not have enough money to pay rent or buy food for their kids. Those people are getting fucking set to prison. Are the only people, by the way, again, the only even even though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they

are getting children killed. The only people going to prison are the families of the fucking kids.

to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students, and again when they say students, they're not talking about college students, they're talking about middle and high school students suffered chemical burns and we're so sleep deprived after working their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to

a local prosecutor in court records. When about the children, like the actual kids who were supposed to be, you know, the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department of Labor raids, the Department of Labor pulled a it's not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we don't know what happened to these kids. Hope they're okay, have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington Post article that I want to read just to sort

of like, I don't know. I think the big problem with all of this coverage is that it's treating this problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not. Here's from the Washington Post. We have never in my memory found the types of violations that are being found and hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social policy and management at Brandy's University who was a top

labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this is bullshit, Dream Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a shit ton of migrant workers and by specifically migrant children workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and has in his work. It's just that they were mostly in agriculture. I mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like, some of the ship was already happening and nobody paid

attention to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they were also just a shit ton of kids fucking like picking tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California. That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama specifically made it worse because one of again, one of the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like, if you commit a labor violation against one of these against against, against, against someone someone who is undocumented in

a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right? They can't go to the government. If they go to the government, they get deported.

very anti immigrants. Southern border states, in southern states of border states. And the reason or or places or some places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right is you know, if you're if you're like, uh, if you're a politician, right, and you know, and your your allies are local business owners. You get, you get you get to play this sort of like you get you get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.

On the one hand, you get to you get to keep hiring a bunch of undocumented immigrants, and on the other hand, you whip up this like enormous social hystoria about them so that all these people, you know, can can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And everyone fucking knows how this game works, right, Like all the all the people with any real power like actually understand this.

It's it's why. It's why like the Justice Department or like you know, all all the immigration agencies never go after the companies you hire people. They only ever go after the actual workers themselves.

And so they do. And the last mad yeah, and the last thing that I want to sort of mention about this, right is that a lot of these a lot of the states where this stuff is happening, a lot of the states that are passing these laws are asso states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous rass of anti trans legislation, like as part of their sow called like protect the kids thing and you know, you can talk about their hypocrisy of it, right, but I

think the important thing to understand here is that protect the kids was always racialized, Like they don't give a shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because they aren't white, right, their immigrant kids who these Freese want to fucking kill anyways, and if those kids die in the job, nobody gives shit, right.

only option I have. And it just becomes this like snaky in its own tail bullshit where it's just I don't know, it's there's no there's no good out for them because no one's fucking helping them and their family's not there, and they need to fucking survive. So it's this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in a in a sick way, like not because they not because they're consenting to it because they want to because they need to to survive, and the people that are

in power know that and take advantage of it. And I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board is just inhumane and disgusting and I hate that.

have COLLA don't exist anymore. So, you know, as as as bad as everything looks on any given day, right, Like people people have done this before, they'll do it again, and you know it's at some at some point they're like, we will hit a point where it's fucking too much, it seased to be, You're right, and our responsibility is to get everyone to that point.