Category: Child Labor

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Three 16 year old boys died in the past 5 weeks while working with big machinery.

One company explained that “the child ‘should not have been hired’ and that his age and identity were misrepresented on his hiring paperwork with an outside staffing company.” You don’t say. How innocent the company is acting? We were lied to and this poor unfortunate 16 year shouldn’t have been hired, we wouldn’t have hired him if only we had known his correct age.

For some reason I don’t believe it. Every employee has to provide proper documentation in order to work. The company has a responsibility to examine this documentation for validity. This is standard practice in place for some years. I used to do it in the 1980’s. HR departments should have this down. But OK, mistakes happen, perhaps a 16 year old was able to get a hold of a convincing fake document but a quick glance at the prospective employee might have set off some alarms. Somehow these boys with peach fuzz as beards were able to pass themselves off as older. Even if you accept that they are telling the truth, there is a frightening level of incompetence within the management of the company.

But I think this more than just an accident. One of the more illuminating giveaways that this is something more nefarious, is that it happened 3 teenagers at different companies and in different parts of the company met the same fate. This also might explain why Republican governors and legislatures, those champions of the working class, are loosening child labor laws. Companies are complaining that they are having trouble filling their open positions. Something must be done, so teenage labor is the solution to their problem.

Unfortunately, teenagers are banned from hazardous labor. No problem. These companies did a risk assessment about hiring underage employees. They figured out how much potential fines would be and then compared this to the price of raising wages and decided that paying the fines was the better deal. Higher wages are a sure thing while fines need only be paid if they get caught. Now that is a risk worth taking. They would probably have gotten away with it if nothing had gone wrong. This suggests that fines are too low. Fines should discourage companies from breaking the law, not be a factor in whether they are going to break the law or not.

But, saying that they can’t attract workers is misleading. These companies are having problems filling positions at the wage they want to pay. The wage isn’t enough to attract adults to perform an obviously hazardous job. When labor is scarce and the job is hazardous, the company needs to pay wages that attract the best workers. It is basic capitalism. They can’t just expect workers to risk life and limb for nothing. But, of course, these companies do.

What I find particularly irksome here is that these so called Capitalists only like Capitalism when it is to their advantage. When it isn’t, they moan to government for help — make the laws easier so we can hire people who will take the jobs at the rate we want to pay. Let in qualified immigrants who will take the lower wage. Hire teenagers who will take the lower wage. Boo hoo. Whatever they are, they aren’t good Capitalists.

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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.