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.
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