“Many supporters of weakening child labor standards argue that they’re simply making it easier for kids looking for work to land jobs. They also argue that current child labor laws create too many obstacles for employers to hire workers.
But by proposing to expand the types of industries kids can work in or to eliminate the youth minimum wage — which the federal government and many states already set as lower than the standard minimum wage — it’s clear that states curtailing child labor protections are, at least in part, engaging in an effort to make cheap labor more available for businesses at a time when a tight labor market is driving wages up, including for young workers. It’s not a coincidence that so many industry groups have lobbied for rolling back basic child labor protections.
These changes in standards have coincided with a rise in child labor violations by companies across the United States. In a New York Times exposé last year, the journalist Hannah Dreier uncovered the various ways migrant children have been exploited in brutal working conditions that all too often lead to serious injuries. And she found at least 12 cases of migrant children being killed on the job.
“The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles,” Dreier wrote.
There’s a stark contrast between the often privileged kids who take a job scooping ice cream or lifeguarding the neighborhood pool for a few months and the migrant and often poor kids working dangerous jobs or ungodly hours. And the weakening of child labor laws has little, if anything, to do with encouraging the former.
“There’s often a disconnect, especially when in states where these lawmakers are proposing rollbacks, where they sort of describe this workforce as if it’s like teens who just want to earn a little bit of extra pocket change and work in movie theaters. Those are the same youth they bring to the hearings to talk about how meaningful and fun it is to work in these jobs,” said Nina Mast, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute who focuses on child labor standards. “They’re always ignoring the reality that a lot of the most dangerous and difficult jobs are being done by migrant youth or other marginalized young people who are not being represented in these conversations.”
That means that lower-income and marginalized kids who might work to supplement their families’ incomes are entering a labor force with eroding standards.
That could eventually lead to even more disparities: Teens who work more than 20 hours a week tend to perform worse academically than kids who don’t have jobs, in part because they have less time to dedicate to schoolwork, which ultimately impacts their educational trajectory and prospects for higher-paying jobs later in life.
The effort to weaken child labor protections, in other words, helps to “create this permanent underclass of workers,” Mast said.”
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/358193/the-death-of-the-summer-job-is-a-good-thing