At a time when violations of child labor laws are on the rise nationally, state lawmakers around the country are successfully rolling back child labor protections. Jennifer Sherer and Nina Mast from the Economic Policy Institute have authored an article that insists lawmakers must act to strengthen standards, not erode the existing minimal standards designed to safeguard children from exploitation. They share insights into why weakening child labor protections could have detrimental effects on the middle class and the overall economy.
Nina Mast is an economic analyst for the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) at EPI. She also worked on issue campaigns at The Hub Project and efforts to advance a progressive economic worldview at the Groundwork Collaborative.
Jennifer Sherer is the director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) State Worker Power Initiative. Her work focuses on expanding the ability of working people to achieve racial, gender, and economic justice through organizing, collective bargaining, and public policies that promote worker voice.
Twitter: @EconomicPolicy
Florida legislature proposes dangerous rollback of child labor protections https://www.epi.org/blog/florida-legislature-proposes-dangerous-roll-back-of-child-labor-protections-at-least-16-states-have-introduced-bills-putting-children-at-risk
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Nick Hanauer:
Child labor, who would’ve ever imagined that we would be talking about this again?
Jennifer Sherer:
Here we are in 2023, looking at multiple states proposing and in some cases enacting rollbacks of their existing child labor laws.
David Goldstein:
If you believe as we do that an economy grows from the middle out, you want an educated, well-trained workforce, and you don’t get that by working school-aged children
Podcast Announcer:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. I’m wondering, Nick, you and I are of different generations, I’m saying we’re old compared to some of our listeners. How young a child were you when you first started working in the coal mines?
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I was actually seven years old when I first started working in the coal mines for my family business.
David Goldstein:
Not actual coal mine-
Nick Hanauer:
No-
David Goldstein:
… metaphorical coal mine.
Nick Hanauer:
The pillow coal mine.
David Goldstein:
That’s right. The pillow mine.
Nick Hanauer:
My dad would take us to work and I’m not too sure what we did. We fooled around.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. My father was a psychiatrist, so I did not work in the family business.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s probably a good thing.
David Goldstein:
I was maybe worked on a bit on the side, which has made me immune to it. But it’s funny you say that because my father was poor. My grandfather was a shoe salesman, so my father waited tables and did odd jobs and stuff as a teen. My mother, there was a small retail business. She worked in the store, the whole family worked in the store. But my father always told me that one of the reasons why he worked hard and as a doctor, my God, he worked really long hours, was to give me the opportunities that he never had.
And one of those opportunities was not to have to help support the family through working jobs as a child. That seemed like a social advance. Now, later in high school and in college, I had a summer job. I was a lifeguard, but the truth is I didn’t need the money. That was money to spend on the side. It wasn’t money I required to feed and clothe myself or honestly, to pay tuition, and that’s because I grew up in that relatively privileged background like you did Nick, a relatively-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, no, for sure. What’s odd is that I started working for the family business when I was little, when I was in junior high school, and I worked summers obviously, but I went to work with my dad at 7:00 AM or 6:30 AM every day and came home with him. That was the only way I was going to get to work and work in the factory. I definitely didn’t need the money either. I have no idea what even happened to the money. Of course, I didn’t get paid very much, but it’s not like we needed the money or I needed money for some element of my life. For me, it was just kind of like my dad just said, “This is what you’re going to do for the summer,” and I complied. But today things are changing dramatically, and one of the really interesting ways in which you’re seeing industry panic in response to the tightening of the labor market is a full on assault on child labor laws because if you can’t exploit adults anymore, well, kids are the next best thing.
David Goldstein:
They’re not the next best thing, they’re the better thing-
Nick Hanauer:
They probably are the best thing.
David Goldstein:
… because you yourself said you went to work in the family business, you complied with your father. Children are more compliant.
Nick Hanauer:
They are. They are, they are. Yeah.
David Goldstein:
So if you want to boss people around and exploit people, it’s easier to exploit a child than it is somebody your own size.
Nick Hanauer:
It is. It is indeed true. And believe me, in the factory, they exploited the hell out of us. They made us do things that no one else would do and enjoyed it watching it too, as you can imagine.
David Goldstein:
The difference was you were inheriting the family business eventually, and most child workers are not. It’s not like you are working at a sub-minimum wage at 14 in a McDonald’s, and after a few years there you’ll own the McDonald’s.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. But anyway, this assault on child labor laws, which is taking place around the country… of course it’s not around the country, is it? It’s in all the red states.
David Goldstein:
Red states.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s in the places, in the homes of confederate capitalism. All the places one would imagine, there’s this assault on these standards. And to find out more about it today, we have a couple of experts. Nina Mast and Jennifer Sherer are both with the Economic Policy Institute, our old friends there, and have just released a paper detailing some of this, in particular focused on the Florida legislature, which won’t surprise anyone who tracks Florida politics. But it’ll be really interesting to find out what the history of all these things are and what’s going on, so with that, let’s talk to Nina and Jennifer.
Nina Mast:
Hi, my name is Nina Mast, and I’m a state economic analyst on the economic analysis and research network team at the Economic Policy Institute.
Jennifer Sherer:
Hi, Jennifer Sherer. I’m director of our state worker power initiative at Economic Policy Institute.
Nick Hanauer:
So child labor, who would’ve ever imagined that we would be talking about this again? And yet apparently, it’s back in the news. So tell us about what’s happening and about the recent article you authored on the proposed rollbacks of child labor protections.
Jennifer Sherer:
So I’ll dive in just to step back for a second and say that we have had been having a lot of conversations with folks across the country about the issue of child labor in the past year, and I think increasingly, we’re finding it useful to remind ourselves that really, this has been an unsettled question in US policy and the US economy from our founding. The, US we have to acknowledge, was built on the labor of enslaved children and indentured children, and eventually families of children of families in poverty who worked the mines and the mills throughout the industrial revolution. And we have up to the present continued in our policies to sanction child labor in agriculture, where to this day we don’t have federal policies regulating child labor in agriculture due to longstanding occupational carve-outs in our federal labor employment laws.
So it’s really only been for about a century that we’ve had a very uneasy consensus around ensuring this notion that we want all children, regardless of their background, to have an equal shot at basic education and economic opportunity. And that has meant for about a century, we’ve had in place child labor laws and a requirement that free public education is available to every child. So here we are in 2023, really both looking at multiple states proposing and in some cases enacting rollbacks of their existing child labor laws, also looking at attacks on public education across the country and hearing a lot of the same arguments that employers were making a century ago about why they should have very stable access to a pool of low-wage workers, including children. And I will toss it to Nina to talk a little bit more about what we’re seeing in terms of specific state legislation and how alarming it is.
Nina Mast:
So we’ve been tracking state legislative developments on child labor since the beginning of 2023, and we know of bills in at least 16 states that have been proposed to weaken child labor protections. That’s in the past two years. Nine of those states have actually signed bills into law, and then in 2023, bills in three states have been enacted, Iowa, Arkansas, and Tennessee. And these bills are not being introduced in isolation, this is a coordinated and industry-led effort led by a constellation of business lobbying groups, particularly lobbying groups representing industries that would benefit to changes in child labor laws, as well as right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability.
And I’ll just note that the FGA’s agenda is actually much bigger than child labor. They’re really behind the effort to eliminate youth work permits, but at the same time, they’re simultaneously working in many states to erode the social safety net, to limit access to anti-poverty programs and to promote the defunding of public education. So this is really a much larger assault on working families with children and the attempt to exploit economically desperate families who are most vulnerable to recruitment for hazardous or excessive work.
Nick Hanauer:
Can one of you describe the kinds of legislation that’s getting proposed and passed? What are they angling for? Let’s start with that. What’s the ideal legislation these folks are looking to pass?
Jennifer Sherer:
I think it helps to take a look first at the way that we’ve regulated child labor over the past century, and then the four areas I would say that we’re seeing state legislation crop up in are, one, bills that are proposing to remove work permits, which have been an important role that states have played historically in regulating child labor because it’s not a function that the federal government plays. So this is a requirement that 14 and 15 year olds, the youngest teens who might be starting in the workforce for the very first time, need to fill out a form that documents the type of work they will be doing.
And the paperwork is important because it provides both the teen and their parents and the employer with a reminder of what the basic guidelines are in the state where they live for the number of hours per day and per week that they can be working, and the types of jobs and occupations that, based on lots of research, are considered safe for youth at that age. So one piece of state legislation that we’re seeing crop up repeatedly is a proposal to remove the requirement for that paperwork. The other trend that’s very clear cropping up repeatedly across the country is a push to expand the number of hours per day, per week that teens can work, including during the school year.
And one thing, again, that we know from research is that once teens are working more than 20 hours per week during the school year, they end up moving into a higher risk category for it affecting their academic progress and potentially higher risk of not being able to graduate from high school, which has long-term, very serious economic consequences for them and the rest of their careers. The third and four things, and I’ll say the third one is rolling back guidelines on hazardous work. We’re seeing that in a few places. And then the fourth category, again, a very widespread trend pushed primarily by the restaurant and hospitality industry is opening up more options for employers to put teens in jobs that involve either serving or busing alcohol. And Nina has really become an expert on that category of bills, so I’ll toss it to Nina if she wants to add more.
Nina Mast:
Sure. Yeah. On the alcohol service piece, since 2021, at least nine states have introduced bills to lower the age to serve alcohol in restaurants or bars, and seven states have enacted those changes. So this is a push that we really saw coming out of the pandemic and the attempt by industry groups to make it easier for employers to hire low wage youth workers to work in the presence of alcohol, which means either serving alcohol, busing tables where alcohol is served, or in the case of Tennessee, this year a law was passed that lowers the age for teens to work in establishments that receive at least 25% of their revenue from alcohol sales. Really, we’re noticing a coordinated push to make it easier for teens to work in the presence of alcohol, and that’s really being supported by groups like the restaurant industry as well as liquor and licensed beverage associations and other groups that benefit from child labor in the food industry.
Nick Hanauer:
Do you guys think that this big push is coming as a consequence of the fact that the labor market has firmed up so much and it’s just harder generally to exploit people these days?
Jennifer Sherer:
Well, yes, in the sense that it is very much a coordinated multi-industry lobbying effort to try to maintain access to or expand access to a pool of low-wage labor at a time when in order to attract and retain workers in low-wage industries, employers know that they have to be raising their wages and improving their conditions in this kind of labor market. So yes, I would say fundamentally in answer to your question, and I think it also converges with what some industry groups and the right wing think tanks that Nina mentioned earlier have been looking at as a potential priority for a long time and seeing a handful of states with legislatures where they have a high degree of influence as a moment of opportunity to pursue rolling back regulations related to labor standards.
There’ve been instances where they’ve been pretty clear that this is, for them, a state by state program to ratchet the standards down, with a longer term goal of rolling back the standards federally for the entire country. So it really is the latest sort of round in the long argument about the New Deal Era legislation included in the fair labor standards that set our minimum wage, regulated child labor for the first time federally, and employer interests ever since that law was passed, hoping that they could weaken or potentially someday eliminate it again.
Nick Hanauer:
We’re very familiar with EPI, know what you guys do. What you don’t do is polling, but I just wonder if you have a sense for how popular this is with the public. It’s an astonishingly brazen attack.
David Goldstein:
I need to remind you, Nick, that children don’t vote.
Nick Hanauer:
Maybe, but their parents do. Do you guys have any sense for how popular these things are?
Jennifer Sherer:
I don’t know of widespread polling on this yet. And also, this is a difficult issue to poll on in the sense that child labor or child work I guess we should say occurs on a spectrum. And there are lots of instances of safe, age-appropriate work experience that teens have access to that everybody, including parents, educators, and public health experts support expanding access to. So to ask parents or voters, “Do you support opportunities for youth to get work experience?” Is one type of question, and we would all say yes. And there’s also, of course, a real class and race dimension to this. When we’re talking about peeling back the regulations that protect youth from the most hazardous work settings and things like excessive hours.
So in other words, prohibiting work on overnight shifts during the school year or prohibiting work beyond a certain number of hours per week during the school year, I think most of us would say that is important because we want kids to be able to finish their educations and have enough rest and energy to be able to focus on their educations. There is, beneath a lot of these debates at the state level, often the unasked question about whose kids are we talking about? Whose kids are going to be vulnerable to ending up working more than full-time jobs in hazardous occupations?
And we know from some really incredible investigative journalism over the past year that we have thousands of kids working in manufacturing settings, working in meat packing plants, working on construction sites, working in situations that are certainly not legal for them to be in, and those kids are from families in poverty. Often they are immigrant children or migrant youth who are in limbo in our asylum system, where we have a terrible backlog that’s not providing the pathway to work authorization in a timely manner. And so they can’t access the safe, age-appropriate work opportunities that are out there right now in a grocery store or a movie theater after school, and they are ending up in the most hazardous and most exploitative conditions.
So I think the popularity on the one hand and the importance of providing young people with work opportunities is something that all of us can get behind and support, and partly we have our regulations in place so that we can do that in a way that still supports children’s health, development, education and eventual career success. So I think that’s the part of the debate that at the state level has often been very obscured. Folks who are proposing getting rid of the rules on work hours are often coming with their arguments and trying to make it sound like, “We’re just opening up opportunities.” Well, we’re in a tight labor market where those opportunities are already there, so it’s a very disingenuous argument on their part.
David Goldstein:
I’m wondering, I’ve been working with Nick for over nine years now and-
Nick Hanauer:
I hired Goldie when he was 13 years old.
David Goldstein:
… that’s right. Yeah, I wish. Okay. But our first battles was over minimum wage, the $15 minimum wage, and there were a lot of issues going on back then. I can tell you, Nick, we never, never discussed child labor laws. That was not part of the public debate at all nine years ago. There was nobody at any serious level trying to dismantle our child labor laws, other than maybe having that teen minimum wage. That was the extent of the conversation back then. When did this start? When did this coordinated campaign to undermine child labor laws really kick into high gear?
Jennifer Sherer:
So I would say it kicked into high gear within the past year to two years, but I think it’s also accurate to say this is always sort of simmering right beneath the surface. So it’s worth remembering, it was just a decade ago when Newt Gingrich very publicly as a campaign in an election said that child labor laws were fundamentally stupid and that really, students should be staffing their own schools and becoming the janitors themselves. So the view, again, of whether we should have a minimum wage at all or whether we should have in place any guardrails against exploitative forms of employment of children is just beneath the surface, I would say ever since our 1930s labor and employment laws get passed at the federal level. Those arguments have never completely gone away, and what we’re seeing right now is really the latest round of very accelerated attempts to roll some of those back.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s so interesting. Of course you’re right, those arguments have never gone away completely, but is interesting what kind of arguments come and go from social acceptability. And I think Goldie’s point is right, that I think this new trend is really incredible. So can you also clarify for us if children are also covered by other labor standards? So you can’t pay kids less than the minimum wage, can you?
Nina Mast:
Actually, yes, you can pay youth less than minimum wage, both under the Fair Labor Standards Act and under state laws in most states. So in terms of the youth subminimum wage, youth can be paid a training wage, so youth under 20 can be paid $4.35 cents an hour for their first 90 days of employment, but there are also other exemptions based on age and student status under which youth can be paid either 75% or 85% of the minimum wage both at the federal level and at the state level. And then many states have additional exemptions, so there are at least 15, 16 states that have complete exemptions from minimum wage law for youth at a certain age. So say minors who are not emancipated, who are in school-
Nick Hanauer:
What’s emancipated mean?
Nina Mast:
So if you’re a young person who still is in a parental relationship in your family, if you’re not emancipated under state law, if you’re providing for yourself independently. In any other case, those young people can be exempt from minimum wage law, so they can be paid basically any wage at all theoretically, since they’re not covered by minimum wage law. But there are lots of exemptions for youth, depending on the types of work they do, their age or student status. And the teen minimum wage, as Goldie mentioned earlier, those have cropped up again this year as well. Multiple states actually introduced new bills to implement subminimum wages for youth. So for example, there was a bill in Nebraska. In the wake of Nebraska’s decision to pass a higher minimum wage, there was a proposal this year to actually allow youth to be exempt from that new higher minimum wage and to be able to pay youth a lower minimum wage.
Nick Hanauer:
What is youth defined as?
Nina Mast:
In the case of Nebraska, I believe it was youth under 18. But it typically is just minor status, so youth under 18, but in many states the subminimum wage applies to 15 and 16 year olds or sometimes 14 year olds. So it kind of depends on the state, but in general, it’s youth under 18.
David Goldstein:
Do we have an idea of how many children are actually working in the US?
Nina Mast:
We know that youth employment really peaks around the summer months, and so most data points around the number of youth employed really focus on that summer time period when there’s a large increase in youth working. But I don’t have that number on hand.
Jennifer Sherer:
And I would just add one other thing that Nina has taken a look at, are the labor force participation rates of 16 to 19 and 16 to 24 year olds. And underneath this push from industry to try to employ more children for longer hours is an interesting trend that they’re not talking about often publicly, although some of them have really been vocal in their lobbying, saying that their concern is that the labor force participation rate among youth is too low. They really want to see more children in the workforce. What we can see when we look at labor force participation among teens is that for one thing, it’s already returned to pre-pandemic levels, so the same percentage of youth who were working before the pandemic are now back at work.
The portion of teens who say they’re not working are primarily answering that question in the labor force participation surveys with all the same answer, and you can probably guess what it is. They’re not working because they’re going to school, and that is true all the way through age 24. And it is also true that over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen more and more youth in those 16 to 24 year old category answering that question increasingly that they are not working because they’re going to school. And most folks look at those numbers as a sign of progress, as in we have decreased across the country the high school dropout rate, so more students are graduating from high school today than they were 20 years ago.
We consider that a good thing for their economic prospects in an economy where having a high school degree dramatically increases your lifetime income and your job opportunities. Low-wage industries are in a bit of a panic about the reality that they’re in a labor market right now where if they want to staff their restaurants, staff their temp jobs in their factories, they have to pay people more. And rather than doing that, they’re trying to look for a way to bring back teenagers into jobs and at excessive hours that we long ago decided should not be acceptable for kids if we want them to finish high school and go on to have a full range of career opportunities later in life.
David Goldstein:
Well, as an employer, this makes perfect sense. Not only can you pay them less, but it’s easier to bully children. I’m sorry, am I mischaracterizing employers, Nick?
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s true. It’s true.
Nina Mast:
And that’s why the bill that just passed in California is really so important, is because it will inform high school students of their rights at work and their rights to join and form a union. And so that kind of education is really important for young people because for many of them, it is their first job. They may not know what their rights are or they may feel fear of retaliation or fear of speaking up, and so bills like the one that recently passed in California are an important step in really educating youth about their workplace rights.
David Goldstein:
It really says a lot about how political this is because you just mentioned California as an example of some positive legislation, but your piece actually focuses on, surprise, Florida as a state where you see some of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor protection.
Jennifer Sherer:
And I don’t want to linger on California too long, but one way to look at that California bill too is as a response to the reality that they’ve seen some really disturbing violations. Overall, violations of child labor laws just based on Department of Labor data are up 59% in the last five years, another dramatic jump looks like in the new data that just came out for this year. And just to go back to what you said about children being vulnerable to employer bullying, one of the most illustrative cases recently did come from California, where an owner of multiple Subway franchises has now been ordered…
This, I’ve never seen it in my lifetime, unprecedented, but the Department of Labor found this case so egregious, child labor violations, wage payment violations, and then in the course of the investigation, the employer was bullying, coercing, threatening the children not to cooperate with the investigation. And the DOL found it so egregious that they’ve now ordered not only that employer to pay back pay to the affected children and fines for their child labor violations, but they’re being ordered to close their businesses, sell their 14 stores. It’s a really dramatic enforcement action-
Nick Hanauer:
That’s great.
Jennifer Sherer:
… that we don’t see very often, maybe a little bit more of a deterrent than we see usually, but I think it is also an illustration of how imbalanced the power can be. We know there’s an imbalance of power between employers and workers to begin with, but when we’re talking about teens as young as 14 in a restaurant, that imbalance of power can be even more extreme.
David Goldstein:
I don’t know how prevalent it is today. I’m 60, I remember my teenage friends, the girls constantly complaining about being hit on by their bosses when they were in high school.
Jennifer Sherer:
It’s a huge problem. It’s a huge problem. And to go back to what you were asking earlier about what has the public response to this been, the public outcry and sort of shock at these kinds of policy changes being proposed has been pretty widespread. I guess to your point about the question of sexual harassment and how endemic it is for teens in the workplace, one thing that I think Nina and I were both shocked by is the degree to which there was so much public pushback in Iowa, where they passed a very extreme child labor rollback this year even over a huge public outcry, that one of the many amendments that legislators added to that bill was a requirement that employers offer some sort of sexual harassment training because they heard this criticism again and again.
They said, “Well, you’re opening up hazardous work to teens who shouldn’t be there. You’re increasing the number of hours teams should work, which is not good for their education, and you’re changing rules on exposure to alcohol in the workplace, which is just going to put young people in even more situations where they’re vulnerable harassment.” The legislators passed the bill anyway, but with these strange concessions, sort of admitting and acknowledging, “Well, we know this is going to be an even bigger problem, therefore we’ll mandate some training,” which whether that’s happening or not in workplaces across the state now is an open question.
To shift, I think the one silver lining that we’ve seen in this debate nationwide is that having a spotlight on the really shocking bills that are cropping up in states has refocused people on the reality that we’ve got pretty extensive systemic problems, whether we’re talking about sexual harassment of teens in the workplace, wage payment violations, which teens are disproportionately vulnerable to as well. And of course, that disproportionate, the way that we don’t regulate teen work in certain occupations like agriculture, where we think about 400,000 teens as young as 12 or 13 are still working in hazardous conditions in the fields and that’s considered completely legal still.
Nick Hanauer:
Amazing.
Jennifer Sherer:
So we’ve got lot of room for improvement.
Nick Hanauer:
So we always ask this benevolent dictator question, which is if you guys were in charge, what would you do? What’s the policy answer to this conundrum?
Nina Mast:
Well, we have a long list for changes both at the federal and state level, and I can mention a few. One is certainly around enforcement and increasing funding to the Department of Labor for enforcement of all kinds of wage and hour violations, including those related to child labor violations. The DOL’S capacity and ability to be able to investigate violations of this kind and other types of violations as well is really just limited and constrained by their staffing and funding. So funding levels, that’s an important piece. We definitely need to end our two-tiered system for the way agriculture workers are treated under federal law, so for children and youth who work in agriculture, we need to align the law in agriculture with other industries.
We need to pass the PRO Act, the Protect the Right to Organize Act, and strengthen workers’ rights to organize through reform like this. And we need to address our broken immigration system in order to protect migrant children who are stuck in this asylum backlog and this limbo of the inability to seek safe or legal work, and we need to raise minimum wages at the state level so that we are really lifting the floor for all workers, including youth. And then any state that has weaker laws than the Fair Labor Standards Act can certainly act to at least bring their laws in line with the federal standards, but of course, they can always go higher. The FLSA is meant to be a floor, not a ceiling, and so there are lots of changes we can make to strengthen protections at the state level.
Nick Hanauer:
And final question, why do you guys do this work?
Jennifer Sherer:
I’ll say first of all, I’ve worked in the labor movement for going on 25 years, since I came to EPI, and I have seen what it looks like when workers have a voice in their workplace, including young workers, have a seat at the table, can help work with their employer to shape conditions and use a union and their collective bargaining process to do that and come up with a workplace that is fair, equitable. Never perfect, but that creates both profits for their employer and fulfilling career opportunities that support them as productive workers and human beings. I have seen that in practice, and I believe more workers ought to have that, including young workers. So that’s what motivates me.
Nina Mast:
I guess I can answer the more specific question about why we are doing this work specifically. And I think we noticed that when these bills started to crop up early this year, there wasn’t really anyone else who was doing the tracking work on the state legislative side to really to look into the trends we’re seeing in these bills and to understand who’s behind them. And so I think it’s been really eyeopening to be able to understand the coordinated effort that’s behind these bills and how we can instead work with our partners in states across the country to strengthen protections for youth at work and oppose these harmful bills that we’re seeing crop up and continue to crop up in states across the country.
David Goldstein:
Well, thank you for doing that work because we know from experience how often things on our side slip through for lack of somebody tracking these issues.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, thank you both for being with us and thanks for your work.
Jennifer Sherer:
Yeah. Thanks for having us. Take care.
Nina Mast:
Thank you.
David Goldstein:
So it’s interesting, Nick, near the end, Nina was talking about how this is particularly a problem with agricultural workers, and I’m happy she raised that because it gets back to some of the historical context for child labor laws. And folks should understand that this goes back a long way. In England-
Nick Hanauer:
It goes back to the beginning of history, let’s be clear.
David Goldstein:
… right, but I mean child labor laws, protecting children, having protections against child labor, it really starts with the industrial revolution in England first. And so the first attempts at this were in 1803, and more profound child labor protections in England came in the 1840s. Now, we didn’t get our first child labor law in the US until 1916, and part of that was because we were in that Lochner Era, where the courts basically prohibited any type of government interference in the workplace. But it’s telling, that’s still the middle of it. So even in 1916, the courts allowed some protections against child labor. And as Nina and Jennifer said, you didn’t get the current regime until the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was a New deal program. But she brings up agriculture. And agricultural workers have long been exempt, and you have to understand the idea why we allowed child labor in the US, and that is because-
Nick Hanauer:
Well, because their fingers are so tiny.
David Goldstein:
… you see, that’s why employers wanted them in the mills, and they were small enough to fit down air vents in the coal mines and so forth. But understand the philosophy that said that child labor was good, and we still have that, that it’s good for kids to get a summer job. They need to learn some work ethic, like you actually get any real useful training. As a lifeguard, like I learned anything that I applied to my adult work life, nothing at all except hating work. But understand that deep in the American ideal is this idea of America as a nation of yeoman, farmers and workmen, craftsmen, yeoman farmers and craftsmen. That’s largely what this country was at its founding. And even when we get to the time of the Civil War and the fight between free labor and slave labor, Abraham Lincoln, this is still the big part of the Industrial Revolution.
When you read the words of Abraham Lincoln when he’s talking about workers, again, he’s imagining this country of yeoman farmers and craftsmen, and what that meant was that people owned their own capital. They had their own businesses. They largely weren’t wage laborers. When children worked on farms, they were working with and for their parents. They were part of the agricultural workforce. And so we had these exemptions built in for agricultural workers that allowed children to work in the fields, picking fruits and vegetables and weeding and so forth. Again, their tiny hands are useful getting in between the rows and picking weeds because the idea was they’re working on the family farm, but that’s not where these children are working today. They’re working on industrial farms. They are the children of migrant workers, working in the fields with their parents, and so to have exemptions for that is to ignore the current reality.
In the same way that we ban children from working in dangerous factories because clearly that was not a home workshop, we need to protect children from working in industrial agriculture. There’s absolutely no justification for this whatsoever. Nick, the title of their piece is Florida Legislature Proposes Dangerous Rollback of Child Labor Protections. It’s not surprising that we’re seeing this in Florida, that we’re seeing it coming from somebody like DeSantis, because the truth is, I don’t think that this is an economic issue, this is a political issue. This is about dismantling as much as possible the entire progressive agenda of the past century and a half, this progress that we’ve made towards a more humane economy and a more humane country. This is a finger in the eye of Democrats when you see this coming from Republicans, and that’s why you see it in red states more than anything else.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I don’t doubt the mendacity. I think it’s less conspiracy. It’s just-
David Goldstein:
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a-
Nick Hanauer:
… labor costs have gone up and those outsized profits that industry has been earning for a long time are threatened, and the folks who have power in these industries are working as hard as they can to try to protect those profits by finding ever more people to exploit. I think it’s as simple as that. And I think we can expect more of the same, particularly as the middle out economic agenda of the Biden administration continues to have success because as corporate consolidation gets throttled back, as the power of monopoly declines, as standards are raised, as the labor market continues to strengthen, a lot of folks at the tippy top of these big companies are going to go into panic mode because their big bonuses are predicated on continuing to be able to pay people nothing for their labor. And so I think that we can just expect a lot of this over the next few years as this unfolds.
David Goldstein:
So even if you accept that this is a response to economic conditions, higher labor costs, tighter labor market as opposed to what I think, a dangerous sociopathic ideology trying to exert its dominance, let’s talk just for a moment about how shortsighted this is from an economic perspective, because let’s be clear about the politics and history of this. One of the reasons why industry relented eventually and allowed child labor laws was because as our economy developed, we needed a more educated and trained workforce. And that didn’t just mean relying on educated, trained adult workers who were more productive in our advanced economy, it also meant giving children time to stay in school full-time so that they could learn, so they could be the educated workforce of the future.
So while there may be some parasitic employers out there who are looking for short-term gain by employing easily bullied children at subminimum wages, in the long run, this isn’t just bad for these children, it’s bad for the economy because it means these kids, their workplace experience aside, they’re going to be less educated. They’re not going to have the same educational opportunities if they’re working overnight shifts on school days. So if you believe, as we do, that an economy grows from the middle out, you want a well-trained, educated workforce, and you don’t get that by working school aged children when they should be in school, when they should be studying. When they should be taking advantage of that opportunity during their childhood to better themselves later in life.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s true, but our trickle down opponents have rarely thought about the world in that way.
David Goldstein:
No.
Nick Hanauer:
Not great long-term thinkers.
David Goldstein:
Well, I think actually, there is some long-term thinking from the political example because you know what I see here, Nick? One of the things we did with minimum wage was we always understood that it was about more than minimum wage, that the $15 minimum wage was this wedge issue that really undermined the old orthodoxy. And I have this inkling that they’re using child labor laws the same way, because if you can take down child labor protections, then nothing’s sacred.
Nick Hanauer:
That is true.
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