by Samuel Messidor
Over the last year, state lawmakers in ten states have passed or are pushing forward legislation that will loosen state-level child labor laws.
To name a few: New Jersey extended the maximum weekly number of hours a minor can work to 50 last year, while Iowa, Maine, and Michigan now allow children to work in freezers and meat coolers, and, as a special boon to restaurant capitalists, 18-year-olds can now work in bars. Iowa has a proposed bill that would allow children to work in meat processing plants and construction. Other state bills would allow capitalists to work children late into the night and to pay them a smaller minimum wage than adults.
These state-level laws move in the wide fields left open by the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act— particularly in the grisly agricultural industry, or with respect to the rules regarding slightly older children (16 and 17 years old). Bourgeois officials cynically employ educational terms and frame grueling jobs as internships to describe night shifts scrubbing down meat processing factory equipment.
These efforts to loosen child labor laws come at a time when the number of minors employed in violation of federal law has dramatically grown. According to the Department of Labor, this number has almost tripled between 2013 and 2022. The number of yearly Federal violations, meanwhile, has grown by 69% since 2018.
There is plenty of research showing that working children more hours and in more strenuous jobs is bad for their health and education. For instance, in agriculture, where the Department of Labor estimates half a million children work (many of them migrants from the oppressed third world) the rate of injury, cancer caused by agricultural chemicals, and death is disproportionately high for children.
The Biden administration, and some state legislatures as well, are assuring that there will be a crackdown on companies violating child labor laws, offering largely empty promises. The Fair Labor Standards Act at the Federal level leaves plenty of room to maneuver for state governments to legalize child labor. Violations of existing law are already on the rise because of the economic pressure the capitalists are facing in their economic crisis—what they term the “shortage of labor”. The drive to eliminate or curtail child labor laws is a sign that the laws of society are responding to the turmoil in the economic base of society. The capitalists ignoring the illegality of employing children in their industries is simply because they are ahead of the curve on their own lawmaking.
The politicians pushing these laws talk about the freedom to work and the educational benefits of work—what they mean is the freedom to be exploited. They mean to say that they need to break the rights earned by the people in hard struggle and impose greater regimes of misery and exploitation so that the capitalists can claw their way out of their regular, cyclical, and deepening crisis.
Capitalists have various means of increasing the rate of surplus value extracted from the worker’s labor. One of these is to lower wages below the value of the labor power the workers sell to the bosses when they are employed. They do this for instance by employing women and children who throughout history and up until today are paid less than men, lowering the overall “family wage”.
As more children enter the workforce, and with fewer industry restrictions, wages will be lowered for the entire proletariat, because the value of the entire proletariat’s labor power will be decreased. Misery will spread even faster while fabulous wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. This is the tendency arising from the capitalist economic crisis.
The whole proletarian class has a stake in fighting against these laws which will spread misery, injure and kill children on the job, and rip them away from school. But the ruthless calculus of the capitalist system which throws children into dangerous working conditions to drive down wages and increase profits cannot be opposed only by economic actions and protective legislation. What is needed is organization and ultimately socialist revolution to strike at the very heart of the society that generates such crimes.
