An investigative journalism piece from PBS recently uncovered evidence that migrant teens arriving at the U.S. border are being exploited by hiring agencies in the seafood processing sector as a source of cheap labor.
The Public’s Radio interviewed more than two dozen migrant teens who described working overnight shifts, killing, cleaning, and weighing crabs. The teens reported they got to sleep for a few hours before waking up to go to school, where they struggled to stay awake in class.
Then after school, they were picked up and taken back to the processing plant to work another overnight shift in an endless cycle of dangerous over-work and sleep deprivation.
An investigation by the Department of Labor found most of the migrant children are from Central America and are fleeing poverty and violence in their home country. They arrived under serious financial pressure including debts to smugglers and the need to send money home to their families in addition to supporting themselves.
Desperate to start earning money and without adequate protections, the children are extremely vulnerable to labor exploitation and debt bondage, and businesses know it.
This finding is just the latest in a spate of recent discoveries of migrant children working in exploitative and dangerous conditions. Migrant children have been found by state and federal investigators working overnight shifts at meatpackers in eight states and auto part manufacturers in Alabama.
This Summer in Mississippi, a 16-year-old migrant died when he became ensnared in a machine at a poultry processing plant.
David Weil, former administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, said “It’s a business model almost set up for violation. You can start preying upon the most vulnerable set of workers we have in this country, which are children.”
The Labor Department has seen a 69% increase in child labor violations since 2018, which coincides with the influx of migrant children, and sparking the agency to call on Congress to raise the civil penalties for companies that use child labor.
Marty Walsh, then-U.S. Secretary of Labor, says that too often, companies try to look the other way and place the responsibility on their staffing agency, subcontractor or supplier, but “everyone has a responsibility here.”
Protecting children from labor exploitation will require a raft of legislative fixes, including deeper fixes to the immigration system and individual states laws. Unfortunately, the existing small penalties for labor violations across federal agencies have led to a “cost of doing business” attitude from the sector.
However, instead of solutions to mitigate this issue, ten states have recently introduced or passed legislation that weakens child labor protections. Broadly, new laws propose to lower minimum wage for minors, allow minors to work longer hours, and permit their employment in hazardous occupations that are currently banned for minors.
Freedom United ask representatives of those states rolling back child labor laws to stop exploiting migrant children and all children! Say NO to child labor law rollbacks.
