I was surprised to see this article about teens illegally working for PSSI, a company that cleans up for meat plants. So here we are in 21st Century USA where companies hire underage labor to do their work. In this case, the work also is dangerous because it requires the use of toxic chemicals and machines capable of killing a person.

PSSI claims that it did a thorough check. It is not their fault if these precocious teens used false documents to get their jobs. This argument will probably get them off the hook. The company may have to pay a fine, an upper management person might have to fall on his sword but when all is said and done the country needs people willing to clean the dirty floors of meat plants.

The teens in question were immigrants which makes me curious about this company’s HR practices. Being immigrants, I would think the company would be particularly careful when a prospective employee provides this information. The Federal Government requires every employee to prove that they can work legally in the USA. This is the whole reason for law. But 31 underage teens got employed. I mean I can give PSSI one or two teens getting through a rigorous vetting of the documentation but 31 suggests something altogether different. HR was either not checking them at all or not caring that they were fake. Also forget the documents, I suspect that some of these teens actually looked like teenagers. There were 13 year olds working at the meat plants. That someone in charge wasn’t a bit startled to see all these fresh face youths working in the plant and not question their age is alarming.

This raises another question for me. If PSSI wasn’t checking documentation to ensure the age of their employees, how well were they checking the adults they hired for their immigration status. I suspect not very well at all. Which gets us closer to the real problem — PSSI can’t get many American citizens to do this dangerous job for the wage they are paying. I mean why else would they overlook the law regarding underage employees. The company was taking a risk. The fines are probably minimal and, mark my words, there is probably a tidy sum set aside for just such an exigency. So if a company needs to pay low wages with little risk of getting caught and minimal financial hardship or legal punishment if they get caught, what is a company to do? Hire the most vulnerable and desperate people and hope they don’t get caught.

Capitalists are pretty adamant that prices must follow the market. If there is less of a product and high demand, the prices go up. If there is a surplus of a product and low demand, the prices go down. The same, at least in theory, applies to wages. Except it doesn’t. Companies set the wages they want to pay and then find the people who will work at those wages — even if they have to act illegally to get those employees. They would rather illegally employ children in dangerous jobs at low wages than up their wages in order to attract a legal adults. This is not how market capitalism is supposed to operate.

It makes me curious as to why the Republican Party has not latched on this particular problem. They oppose immigration. They say they want Americans in good private industry jobs. Enforcing child labor laws and immigration laws would seem like a no brainer. Make it difficult for companies to employ illegal immigrants and children. Hurt companies with hefty fines and imprisonment of executives who break these laws. If there are no jobs for immigrants, a large wall on the border would be unnecessary. They wouldn’t come.

Of course a large wall on the border would involve all kinds of construction and money, money, money for everyone and the immigrants would keep coming. Business secretly wants these low wage immigrants because they can control them better than American citizens. If the Department of Labor started enforcing labor laws, it would get messy fast. The Federal Government might see how business actually operate, the government might even try strictly enforcing these laws which might force companies to pay higher wages.

This is why we have children in 21st Century America working with toxic chemicals at dangerous jobs.