The United States has a thriving new system of child labor, The New York Times reports. It’s made up of migrant children who arrive in the country alone and are placed with sponsors who may be distant relatives or family connections or may just be people who are trying to turn a profit on the labor of migrant kids, and the jobs involved are grueling and often dangerous. In some cases, kids are struggling to attend school while also working full-time hours or even more. In other cases, 12- or 14-year-olds are not in school at all, spending all their available time on construction sites or in factories.
“They should not be working 12-hour days, but it’s happening here,” a middle-school teacher near Miami told the Times, estimating that almost every eighth-grader of the about 100 in her English learner program was working full-time. A teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan, reported a student dropping out of school after passing out in class, being hospitalized twice, and having to choose between school and a job at a commercial laundry.
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A Guatemalan 15-year-old named Carolina Yoc goes to school at that same Grand Rapids school during the day, when she feels up to it, and works at night, putting bags of Cheerios into boxes as they go down a conveyor belt in a factory that has been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for having unsafe conveyor belts. Even conveyor belts that meet basic safety standards are considered too dangerous for 15-year-olds to work on. The product is Cheerios—sold by General Mills. The factory is run by Hearthside Food Solutions, a company that processes many brand-name foods including Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars, Cheetos, and more. Workers like Carolina are supplied by a staffing company.
The system is set up so that it’s never the fault of the brand name you know. It’s always the subcontractor, or the staffing company that provides temp workers to the subcontractor. That’s a common system of plausible deniability for a host of labor violations, not just child labor. It’s an important context for understanding how abuses like these happen, and how thousands of children end up working at dangerous jobs that either prevent them from going to school or make it all but impossible for them to succeed in school.
General Mills just has to tell the Times it understands “the seriousness of this situation” and is looking into it. It’s not their factory, after all. They’re probably going to have some discussions with the other company that runs the factory, which will maybe have a stern talk with the staffing firm that provided those workers. Or take this:
One company, Ben & Jerry’s, said it worked with labor groups to ensure a minimum set of working conditions at its dairy suppliers. Cheryl Pinto, the company’s head of values-led sourcing, said that if migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace.
That is a very bleak statement. It may in some sense be true that it’s better for children to work in dairy farms (a notoriously unsafe type of workplace) that have minimum labor standards than ones that don’t, but it’s f’ing bleak, especially coming from the head of values-led sourcing for a famously social-justicey company.
As the Times lays out, this is part of a crisis in how immigration is handled, with more minors arriving unaccompanied because their parents know that adults will be turned back at the border, and the Biden administration—under pressure not to have any more photos getting out of minors sleeping under foil blankets in inhumane settings—trying to process these kids as quickly as possible, sending them to live with sponsors who may or may not have been vetted adequately. For about one in three, they’re going with their parents. Others may be going to legitimate family members, but not necessarily close ones, or ones with an interest in or ability to support another household member. And others are going to people who intend to profit off of them.
“There were so many cases where sponsors had sponsored multiple kids, and it wasn’t getting caught,” Kelsey Keswani, a former contractor with the Department of Health and Human Services, told the Times. “So many red flags with debt. So many reports of trafficking.” Teens who call a hotline number they are given by the government to report abusive or exploitative conditions often find that it doesn’t result in any action by authorities.
It’s multiple broken systems—a broken immigration system, a broken labor system—colliding, and brutalizing these kids. Some of them are being killed, or horrifically injured, with the Times finding “a dozen cases of young migrant workers killed since 2017, the last year the Labor Department reported any.” The Labor Department, you see, tracks these deaths but doesn’t report them publicly. But even the kids who don’t come out with physical injuries are being abused if they’re working adult hours at adult jobs, sacrificing their education and their childhoods.
I’m just going to float the idea that if these jobs are currently going to migrant children, maybe it would be a net positive to allow their parents to immigrate and work legally while their kids go to school and get an education. The “nobody wants to work these days” crowd is also the “lock down the borders” crowd, though, as well as the “screw you, we don’t have to make sense as long as we’re loud and cruel enough” crowd. And the people who would fix the system cannot begin to keep up with the damage done whenever Republicans are in power.
But it’s a stain on the nation what’s happening to these kids. It’s not the first such stain, but it’s no less meaningful for having happened before.