Unaccompanied Migrant Child Labor Those That Fell Through The Cracks

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   Sharlee01posted 2 years ago

   
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/us/p … biden.html
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/u … ation.html
   
   "Supply chains across the United States are imbued with the labor of migrant children.  Migrant children produce the food we eat and the clothes we wear, working for household names like Cheerios and J. Crew.  They work in extremely hazardous conditions in factories, construction sites, and slaughterhouses.  Exhausted from this grueling work, some drop out of school.
   
   So revealed a recent New York Times investigation by journalist Hannah Dreier, which has led legislators to call for increased penalties and even criminal liability for offending employers.  Solely punishing employers without benefiting the child victims, however, risks moving children from one exploitative working environment to the next.  Instead, legislators must address how a lack of legal work permitting pushes migrant children, even those above the working age who could work safe jobs under-regulated hours, into the shadow economy.  Additionally, to allow working-age minors to find safe work, legislators must ensure they can access immediate financial support through unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation — without regard to their authorized work status.
   
   Structural Causes for the “New Economy of Exploitation”
   
   The causes for the exploitation of these migrant children’s labor are structural and multifold.  Over the past two years, 250,000 unaccompanied children, frequently from Central America, have entered the United States.  First, children are provided little support after entry.  The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is responsible for placing these children with families in the United States, has reduced protections like background checks and offers little if any case management services.  In an illustrative secret recording, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra derided staff for not processing children more efficiently: “If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich.”
   
   Second, migrant children feel pressure to work, as children often enter the country with plans to send remittances to their families.  Others are expected to contribute financially to the households they have been placed in America.  Still, others are pushed into labor as a result of human trafficking. Many of these children are not of legal working age.  Those who are, though, are eligible for work authorization but often have difficulty navigating the permitting system on their own.  Thus, migrant children frequently obtain employment via fraudulent documentation, and as unauthorized migrant workers, they are already particularly vulnerable to poor labor conditions.
   
   Coupled with a tight labor market, employers looking to child labor for “cheaper and more docile workers,” and some states attempting to loosen child labor laws, it comes as no surprise that these migrant children have become part of “a new economy of exploitation.”  As Dreier stated, “people often say that this is something that’s hiding in plain sight. But, I mean, it’s barely hiding. It is in plain sight.”
   
   Penalties for Employers, but Little Remedies for Victims
   
   The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulates minimum age, maximum hours, and types of employment for those under the age of 18, and permits certain types of employment for minors; for example, children above the age of 14 can typically work nonagricultural jobs outside of school hours.  Thus, while some migrant children Dreier interviewed were as young as 12 or 13, others above the age of 14 are able to legally work certain jobs.  However, under FLSA § 212(c), minors cannot be employed in “oppressive child labor” conditions, a flexible standard defined under § 203(l) as conditions that are “particularly hazardous for the employment of children [of certain ages] or detrimental to their health or well-being.”  For example, regulations bar minors of any age from most meat-slaughtering and -packing work, which can cause serious injury and death.
   
   The Department of Labor (DOL) has two main tools to combat child labor violations.  First, under § 216(e)(1)(A), violations of the FLSA are subject to civil penalties of approximately $15,000 per employee in violation or approximately $130,000 per violation that causes a child’s “death or serious injury” (both inflation adjusted).  Importantly, these civil penalties are not paid to the children employed in violation of the Act but rather “deposited in the general fund of the Treasury.”  Second, under § 212(a), goods produced in violation of child labor laws within the past thirty days can be subject to seizure.  Known as the “hot goods” provision, § 212(a) empowers the DOL to seek an injunction from a district court.  It is among the FLSA’s most forceful tools and has previously been used to seize goods in the garment and agricultural industries.  While employees may bring suit to recover wage and hour violations under the FLSA, no such private cause of action is available for victims of child labor violations.  Thus, under the FLSA, the only “remedy” for victims is removal from illegal employment.
   
   The Department of Labor plans to leverage these civil penalties and hot goods enforcement powers against offending suppliers and corporations, and Congresspeople have called on HHS to explain and audit its child placement process.  While critics have rightly lambasted the FLSA’s provisions as woefully insufficient, calls for increasing civil penalties or even levying criminal charges against employers zero in on the wrong problem." Please read on
   https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2023/ … terhouses.
   https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/feds-e … -rcna72930
   
   What kind of country are we becoming?
   
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