Why are US employers increasingly turning to illegal child labor? Amid what is arguably the strongest labor market ever, with the unemployment rate below 4 percent for the two years preceding and following the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend is a troubling sign of weakness.
The rise in child exploitation is so sharp the US Department of Labor is struggling to keep up. Minors, some as young as 10, have reportedly been found working at McDonald’s franchises, cleaning slaughterhouses on overnight shifts and stamping metal for Hyundai cars.
Some Republican politicians are portraying this as the natural result of a tight labor market. Instead of cracking down, they are pushing to relax labor laws to allow more children to work. It is a policy response to shortage to create new workers, they said.
This logic is wrong, and its application abhorrent.
The US is not short on people willing and able to work. Last year, the unemployment rate for those without a high-school diploma was 5.5 percent, well above the 3.7 percent rate for all workers. For those with a disability it was 7.6 percent. For black men with a felony conviction, it was much higher. (Although the government does not consistently track their unemployment rate, the available data suggest that it typically exceeds 50 percent.)
US labor laws do not make hiring such legally authorized workers particularly burdensome. The federal minimum wage is just US$7.25 an hour. Employers are not required to offer paid sick days or holidays, let alone paid family leave. They are not even required to provide a work schedule in advance or a paystub after the fact, and they can fire employees at will.
Nonetheless, employers are turning to children. This is a choice, not a labor market result. The children being put to work are not just regular teenagers looking to flip some burgers after school. They are frequently migrants with no parents in the US, pulled from the waves of unaccompanied minors fleeing violence and poverty in Central and South America. Their exploitation is enabled by poor enforcement: The labor department has been underfunded for decades, with just one investigator per 200,000 workers.
I can see only two interpretations for such illegal opportunism: Either employers are deeply prejudiced against certain groups of workers, or they are dangerously addicted to extremely cheap labor — both weaknesses that threaten market efficiency and evolution.
When a 13-year-old kid is put to work using hazardous chemicals to clean machines sharp enough to slaughter thousands of animals a day, that is not a sign of strength. It does not indicate a capability to develop human capital, or to evolve with new technologies or challenges. It is weakness of a kind that one of the world’s wealthiest nations should never accept.
Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s