Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.
The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.
You've only shown that my question is not answerable by simply legalizing child labor, not that my question is unanswerable full stop.
> Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?
Sadly, I don't know how to phrase questions in a way that invites discussion; I only know how to ask questions that I want to know the answer to. But here's my question, restated, in case it helps:
@lupire said that support systems in "the entire civilized world" are successful at making it so that no family needs to have their kids work. By what measure do we know that these support systems are successful at this job?
In general, I can think of three different policies that all work to reduce child labor:
- a general ban on child labor, which obviously is a stick mechanism to prevent child labor
- compulsory education, which is another stick mechanism to make sure children do not work all day
- child benefit payments, which is a carrot mechanism to make sure parents have the means to feed and clothe their children
Then there's indirect policies like unemployment benefits, health insurance, and child abuse laws that also help parents to stay afloat and keep children out of labor. But the only measures we have are child labor incidence rate and school attendance rate. Neither of those measurements specifically measure the need for children to supplement the family income, nor do they measure the effects of the carrot policies alone.
So that's why I said your question is unanswerable: you're asking for the effects of specific policies on the decisions of parents, while the statistics will only give you the effects of the complete policy on the outcome of those parental decisions.
(edit: see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incidence-of-child-labour... for example. If you can find a way to compare the child labor policies of e.g. Argentina, Mexico, Serbia, Peru, and Nigeria and correlate them with this graph, maybe you'll be able to get closer to an answer to your question)
That is an oxymoron given how "education" is currently defined in the US. The only way this could be achieved is if the whole system is torn down to absolute zero and rebuilt as something entirely different. That is, of course, not possible.
It is extremely unusual for this kind of labor abuse to be carried out by American companies. As the articles note, these are Korean-owned and Korean-operated companies.
FTA: "Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13."
There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world, so that the company can put the all important "Made in USA" label on the product. There's at least one all-Chinese factory outside of Las Vegas. There was a Chinese-run industrial marijuana farming operation shut down in Arizona last year.
And this is not unique to the United States. There are similar operations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
Lots of newspaper articles about it over the last ten years or so.
A friend who worked for a union that organized poultry plant workers said some of these plants– all large, American companies with names you see in every grocery store— essentially ignored labor laws entirely. One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees.
This seems like a fairly easy thing for the media (or the union) to expose - so is there any evidence this is true? Seems more likely to be union FUD if the union doesn't expose the evidence
https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...
https://revealnews.org/blog/response-to-labor-camp-investiga...
He said the union absolutely used it to pressure management into a more favorable stance towards Unionization, and the plant is now unionized.
That doesn't make it ok, does it? What you're describing sounds a lot like the conditions that migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are working in.
The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil, no matter who operates them and where the workers are from.
In fact, no country caring about human rights should. I'm from Germany and in the early Covid phase in 2020 it became clear that there are a lot of east European workers in our slaughterhouses, with them living in very tightly packed quarters (for which they had to pay exaggerated prices to their employers) leading to a massive spread of the disease. At the time, many politicians cried that something will have to change, but of course nothing happened and the whole thing was forgotten as quickly as it had come to light.
Nor for any company the USA law has reach over. Y'all stop copyright all around the World, but that protects executive wages so it's pretty clear where the morals lie here.
If there's anyone involved in a company, and that person can reasonable be expected to know human trafficking, or forced child labour are happening under the auspices of that company, any where in the World, if those people are in reach of Western countries extradition agreements then they should be prosecuted. The companies should be fined a minimum of a years [recent average] profit, and all execs fined a minimum of a years wage.
At what point did I say it was OK? You're railing against a comment that agrees with your position.
The one's in Milan are terrifying, and often have some mafia (often southern) and triad affiliations, an Italian movie about the Camorra briefly goes into he detail of just how dark that part of the fashion industry is. I lived in Italy during the later end of the financial crisis and it was pretty common to see hordes of Han-Chinese come to Emilia Romanaga who had fled Milan and look for work on farms and restaurants.
Seeing tons of refugees living in parks and waiting all day in the piazzas made it feel like I was living in the 21st century version of Salo, which is a fucked up sordid tale from the 20th Century.
Criminals are going to bribe, sure, undestandable.. but people, government employees, who should be working for 'us', the taxpayers, are taking bribes... the punishment for them should be a vastly higher than for someone just offering a bribe... and somehow, (usually) nothing ever happens to them... maybe someone loses their job, but that's it.
That factory should have a managers at least. They should be in jail.
Or, in some cases, they use illegal labor. I doubt that the federal government gave a work visa to the 13-year-old in the article.
I find this incredibly interesting and somewhat surprising, can you substantiate the scale of this problem a little bit more, or link 3-5 map locations?
If there's enough "other stuff" that can bring a company who's existence causes death and disease as its main impact on society to 79/100, I don't really care about the scoring system.
Not all of it is illegal. There is an exception for tobacco farming, which employs children as young as 10.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/child-lab...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/09/teens-tobacco-fields/c...
It varies from state to state and industry to industry.
And if they’re unpaid then you have much more leeway!
ESG is not needed to not have child labor.