“Once you backslide, strife will enter your life”
― Sunday Adelaja

The Washington Post on Sunday, April 30, 2023, has a top of the page story to lead off the Business section on The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite Child Labor Laws. See Wash. Post Section G, page 1. The Post reports that there is an entity called the Foundation for Government Accountability which is lobbying to maneuver various measures to water down state regulation of child labor laws. Exhibit A is the State of Arkansas’ recent measure to eliminate child labor work permits and age verification for workers under age 16. The impetus for the effort is to get the boot of the government off the backs of business with the theory that in today’s work environment these protections are archaic. Since the states are often thought of  as the laboratories of  experimentation in labor policies, some portion of the conservative movement apparently wants to take these steps nationally as well.  

I count myself as somewhat of a centrist politically and I don’t want to use my blog for partisan purposes. But in the charged arena of wage & hour law, everything has a partisan hue. However, the one historic consensus between Republicans and Democrats in the modern era was an agreement about the undesirability of child labor, the wish to firmly regulate it,  and a resolve to punish and deter transgressions. For example, during the administration of President George W. Bush, child labor became the enforcement priority of the U.S. Department of Labor. I am sorry to see even that small consensus fall to the wayside.

It pains me now to see the states engaged in watering down the child labor laws and putting up barriers to getting them enforced. Perhaps my views are formed in the crucible of my own experience, set one school night in my youth when the owner of the local restaurant I was working at demanded I sweep the floor before I went home around midnight. He then complained about the job I did, and I remember handing him the broom and telling him to finish it himself because I was quitting. I didn’t know then that requiring me to work that late in the evening on a school night was a violation of child labor laws. I think he stiffed me for my final paycheck, but no mind, I had a middle class childhood, and the job was not a necessity.

But today we have an exploding illegal immigration crisis. Some of these kids cross the border without parents. Many are not even being schooled. And they are increasingly finding their way into the work force, being employed by unscrupulous contractors and employers, and engaged at minimum wages or worse to perform duties that American workers don’t want to do. The public outcry over child labor abuse in the meat packing industry is just the latest  example of this phenomenon.

My view for what it’s worth is that this is wrong. And those who willfully traffic in child labor, or who aid and abet them, are morally culpable. We are better than that. And conservative Americans of good will and those who legitimately favor limited government need to confront the extremists who would move us back again. You can’t make America great off the backs of child labor.