July 28, 2023 • 37 mins
Mia and Shereen talk about the history of attempts to end child labor in the US and how their failure produced the unfathomable atrocities children suffer today
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's happening here. The thing that's happening here is fucking
child labor. I am. I am deeply angry this episode,
this is it could happen here. I'm your host, Mio
Wong and with me Sharen Hi Mia.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm so glad to join you on this really uplifting episode.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, it's gonna be great. So yes, all right, As
anyone who studied, like even a little bit of labor
history dos, the fight over child labor is very, very old.
It is. It's one of the first causes that sort
of liberal reformers to capitalism took up nearly eighteen hundreds.
Like it's like in the Communist Manifesto is one of
the things. It's actually it's one of the things people
point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things
(00:43):
that was in the original comedist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no,
we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's
also one of the things that like you get these
sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we
eliminated child labor. This is like this has proof the
system works. No, this, the battle over child labor or
is a battle that we are in the middle of losing.
We are losing it in worse and worse ways every day.
(01:09):
So okay, so why why why are we why are
we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in
this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One of
the big problems is that vast swaths of the US
sees child labor is morally good. You know, they see
something like, oh, this is like you teach your kids.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's like how you like, how they grow up and
get responsible, and.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, and then this and this is true in a
lot of parts of the world. It's also completely and
absolutely bonkers. It is just it's just nuts, Like people
shouldn't think like this. It's incredibly weird. And the other
thing that you get a lot is like there's you know,
there's sort of like different versions of like more or
(01:53):
less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think
most people agree if you're not running the business that
like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever.
But you know, there's like lots of things that people
are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like
that's completely fine, Like oh, it's like a like a
fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm,
(02:15):
Like that's fine, but.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's a slippery slope, right because it's starting to farm
work and then.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Down. Also, like I would argue that that's also not fine,
because what's what's essentially happening here is that there's this
basically like this sort of family loophole to people's understanding
if child labor were like, as long as child labor
is being done by like the family as an economic
unit instead of like capitalists directly, yeah, it's fine. It's like, no, no,
(02:45):
it's not. It's actually not fine to be working people
like be a child and then working for a living
for your family, Like that's not kay.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I think there's a difference between. I think there's a
difference between like child labor and like working in a
field for your family versus like a chore, you know
what I mean, Like, yeah, yeah, it's I think I
think that line gets blurred and people see their kids
as much more mature than they are and like able
to like no, I I I understand what you're saying,
(03:14):
and I think I agree.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I think I agree, yeah, and it's I don't know it.
It sucks. This has a lot of sort of knock
on effects. One of the big knock on effects his
Haus and this is this has been a thing for
like the entire history of child labor, right, is that
like capitalists use children as a way to write down
wages for everyone else. And this is you know, if
you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right,
one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is
(03:37):
that like, oh well, it's like it's like kids get
the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one,
it's not like children are not morally worth less and
their labor is also not worth less than an adult.
Like like if you if you're gonna explain them like this, like.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, things all are the same price for everybody. It's
not like less for a child.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, it's not. It's not like it like a kid
is like somehow less of a human being than an adult. Right,
Like this is this is this sucks, but you know
it's used to sort of hold down wages directly through
things like like opposing mineral wage increases, used to hold
you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because and
this is another reason like capitalists love child labor is
(04:15):
that children are, you know, like they're physically smaller than adults,
they're easier to control, they have less social power, and
because you know, because of that, you can pay them less.
And because of you know, because because people just in
our society don't fucking like kids, and because of that,
(04:37):
it's so it's it's just socially accessible to just pay
them less.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
All those reasons you listed are absolutely terrifying, though, like,
oh they will listen. Oh they're smaller, Oh they're like
cheaper or whatever it is that they're all like terrible
reasons to justify child labor.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
No, they're not good. They're not good. And yet, however, Comma,
it still persists. It has persisted. It's very old. I'm
gonna read something from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about
this fucking kid who was working in a mine. What okay?
This is from the early nineteen hundreds. One boy touchingly
(05:18):
recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mine
this way, I'll always think of my poor blind father
and my mother at home, but I won't never play
with the boys at all, And then the cracker boss
won't have to beat me like he does the others
this boy was nine years old. While stories like these
produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions,
there is no such concern the view that quote the
(05:40):
little devils like it, as one cold boss put it,
seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed
these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So
this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early
nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people, my people,
I mean capitalists and also people who are incredibly desperate
and don't have enough money to give by like love
(06:01):
child labor. There's you know, it takes a long time
for like an actual series anti child labor campaign to
get started in the US. And of course the exact
people who you would expect to oppose banning child labor
oppose banning child labor. I'm going to read this from
the also from the barrel laborististics. The chairman of the
National Association of Manufacturers said about a law to abolish
(06:24):
child labor. Quote this union, this labor union plot against
the advancements and happiness of the American boy is a ploy.
Is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion. And prosperity
in this country. So this is what their thing is.
Their argument is that is that children don't oppose child labor.
(06:45):
This is this is being foisted upon them by outside
agitated labor unions. And also, if we're not allowed to
use child labor, if we're not allowed to have a
nine year old be put in a mine, the entire
American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's like making you like being like child labor because patriotism,
Like that's basically what that means.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, it's it's it's s genu widely terrible, like I
I don't know, it's so goulish. Like companies today have
figured out how to do this pr thing of like, oh,
we don't condone child labor. We crack down on it
very seriously. We also hire children literally all the time.
But it's fine, We're just we're gonna like you know,
but back in like nine hundreds, they hadn't really figured
that out yet, and so you know, there's there's a
(07:27):
sort of reform movement that happens. And one of the
sort of key moments of this reform thing is Laurence
Textile Strike and This strike is probably most famous today
for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too,
which is, you know, like wrung down the halls of
labor and socialist histories, like the names of newspapers, songs, poems,
and also like being the namesake of a truly dogshit
(07:49):
DSA caucus. We're not going to talk about this strike enormously.
Here the short, the very very short version of this strike,
and this this is a nineteen twelve strike. The short
version of it is that there's a law pass in
Massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours
that you could have women and children work from a
blistering fifty six hours to a leisurely fifty four hours
(08:11):
a week.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
This prompted the local capitalist to get so mad that
they did this like massive like industrial speed up, so
they forced everyone to work faster and then also doctor
everyone's paid for it. And this this set off a strike,
which what's relevant for like our stories that the workers
at this plan. You know, there's lots of coverage of
(08:34):
the fact that like most of these workers are immigrant
women of like from a bunch of different places. The
part of it that's not talked about as much is
that another huge person of the workers were just fucking children.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
And it seems to get glossed over.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah yeah, And it's like, I, I, you know, I
don't know, maybe maybe we should go back and talking
about that part because it's really important for like the
stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode.
That made me so angry. I was like physically punching
my pillow. What happens next is that the police cracked
down on the strike. It's more and more violence. And
(09:09):
as this goes on, the workers at like the adult
workers at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send
the children, who are both like both the child workers
and also like just people's kids to New York to
keep them safe and also to make a political point.
But like, hey, look they're running our children out of town,
and this goes great. The first way is this go
great for the children. Like a bunch of people in
New York show up but are like, yay, hey, we'll
(09:30):
take care of these kids. Like and this makes like
the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this.
It looks really bad for us. And so they they
like assembled outside of the next train that was trying
to leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god,
so she shouldn't be really mististics again. When the next
(09:51):
group of children prepared to depart the train station, they
were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to
let them board the trains and launch an attack on
the group. A seven year old was given a black
eye when she was picked up and thrown into a
patty wagon by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to
children being thrown around like rags. Oh my wait god,
(10:13):
like yeah, thin blue live baby, let's fucking go. This
is this is the thing the cops or the thin
blue line ordering chaos. That seventy year old girls. Yeah's
not gonna throw herself around, right, Like someone has to
beat up this children. And for that there is the few,
the proud, the American police.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
But they were scared for their lives, you know what
I mean, Like there are seven year.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Olds that that seven year old girl looked at me
really aggressively.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, I was scared for my life, That's what they said.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It's it's you know, it's this is bad. And like
you know, the the nineteen hundreds police can get away
with like nineteen hundred. Plice've talked about another episodes, like
they could get away with just like shooting people right,
like the like they could show up to like a
strike and just open fire into the crowd and it
doesn't do anything throwing around a bunch of children like rags. Finally,
(11:04):
it turned out was the thing that was bad enough
that it like started a congressional investigation.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Wow, I guess that's good and bad.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
But yeah, so's a college launched this investigation. And there's
like this fourteen year old immigrant girl named Kamela Tielli
testifies about how she was working at the mill when
a machine caught her hair and tore her scalp off
the police promptly and this is going and okay that
the police promptly arrested her dad, didn't do anything to
(11:33):
the company, arrested her dad for lying about her age.
Oh my god, what now this hold that wood in
your fucking mind, because we're gonna come back to that shit,
do I have to?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Unfortunately, because it's gonna get so much worse when Tyler's
episode is over. So the product of this is that
there starts to be like a really mainstream push against
child labor, which is, you know, a thing you would
have thought would have started earlier, because again we're on
like century two of child labor in the US by
this point, right, like in the in an entity called
(12:05):
the United States. But you know, apparently it takes this
to actually make people go, wait, maybe this is bad.
And the product of this is you get this thing
called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now,
as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness
of this law is that it, you know, it allows
kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the
(12:27):
family unit. So like if you're on a family you know,
and this is a very very broad category, right, so
it's you know, you can you can force your child
to work as long as like you're their parents, right
and you're the one making the money off of them
and not like a capitalist. But even this, even this
is considered too strong of a law, and in nineteen eighteen,
the Supreme Court rules that it's unconstitutional to ban child labor.
(12:51):
Wait what they do with the uiple times? Multiple times,
And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show.
The Supreme Court is and has always been just one
of history's greatest monsters.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Like, yeah, there, wait, I was right, then child labor
does equal patriotism. That's basically what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
So eventually FDR gets into this giant fight with Supreme Court,
and the first child labor law we get in federal
child labor law that gets that sticks, I like doesn't
happen till nineteen thirty eight when FDR threatens to pack
the court if the Court refuses to fucking stop stop
saying that that that the state that the state doesn't
(13:34):
have the government doesn't have the power to regulate child labor.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Wow, it's like literally less than a century ago. That
is like yesterday, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But but but you know, and this actually works, right,
but but and this is a real problem. And this
is a problem that we're gonna we're gonna talk about
later in this fucking episode. In the modern day, those
child labor laws don't get enforced. It doesn't act that
actual The nineteen thirty eight Fair Labor Act like basically
doesn't actually do shit to like reduce the amount of
(14:05):
child labor in the country. And here's the thing, Like,
even now, even before all the horror show stuff that
we're about to get to that's happening right now, like
not kids, Like we never actually dealt with child labor
through like the law, Like we just basically outsourced, you know, Okay,
we we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper
than like an American child, and we did. It's either
(14:26):
like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have legal citizenship status,
or just outsourcing. And then you know, our kids still
fucking do work, you know, like are like they're like
it's very common for ten and twelve year olds to work.
It's just that it's usually like babysitting or like bowing lawns.
And we've we've decided that like, no, this is actually fine,
(14:47):
Like it is actually fine to fucking put twelve year
olds in a labor market.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah. I mean I think most people today anyway, I
think the common person thinks that child labor happens like
in other countries over there, you know what I mean.
I don't think they think America is still that archaic
and stupid.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, and oh my god, yeah, so we need to
take an ad break. And then I'm not even gonna
make a joke about our sponsors and child labor because
like Jesus fucking Christ. This is good about to be
it's so bad. But yeah, here's some ads. Okay, So
(15:34):
you know, we never really got rid of child labor, right,
what we did basically was, to some extent we've been
able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know,
in the last twenty years there'd been a decline in
what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough, this is
the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the
(15:57):
labor markets. Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, vanilla of a way to say that.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
So return to present day, present day. The thing that's
been happening in the last few months is that in
a five week span in this country, three children died
or I you know, I would actually argue we're killed
by their employers on the job. Well, five children in
three children in five weeks. So sixteen these there, these
(16:26):
kids were all sixteen. Sixteen year old Duvn Thomas Perez
got killed by machiinery get a conveyor belt. Sixteen year
old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen
year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company.
There have been other child labor deaths recently, those are
just sort of the most recent ones. And I want
(16:47):
to get in to the shit that's been happening because
in the last really in the last been under like
eight years, things have gotten you know, like the Charlie
situation in the US was never good, and we'll talk
about that later, but like things have gotten so much worse.
There's been almost a factor of four increase since twenty
(17:10):
fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs. It's actually
probably well, it's unclear to me whether the numbers are
actually worse than that. I don't know, because I think
almost all of this these districts are being undercounted, like
dramatically because those numbers are just violations that are caught.
And go into that a bit later. But meanwhile, like
(17:31):
right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont
have already passed laws in the last two years that
weaken restrictions on child labor, and bills are appearing like
across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff,
like they want to allow fourteen year olds to serve
alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is, it is
(17:51):
truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant business associations
across the country who want to, you know, use child labor,
and that's bad. The fact there's more stuff that you
know is on the horizon is not good. But for
an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says,
the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times.
(18:13):
In many parts of the country, middle and high school
teachers in English language larner programs say it is now
common for nearly all of their students to rush off
to long shift after their classes end. They should not
be working twelve hour days, but it's happening here, said
Valeria Lindsay, an Arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle
(18:33):
School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every
eighth grader in her English learner program, about one hundred students,
was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a
massive surge since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering
(18:54):
the US. And this has been driven by a law
of sort of you know, it's been driven by sort
of pandemic driven poverty, a massive obsertion of violence in
a bunch of countries in Central America, a lot of
which has to do with like, you know, the the
US back to Cunel Salvador about a decade ago. You know,
(19:16):
there's a lot of stuff going on. It's all very
bad and it's been pushing people here. But you know,
like the the situation for immigrants getting into the US
is never good, but Biden specifically has managed to make
it worse because Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy
has been has been resting on getting kids out of
(19:38):
shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing
them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor, right,
And you know, this has gone about as well as
you would expect it would when someone like starts to
you know, one of the I think it was The
New York Times was talking about this woman who's working,
you quit working in a health human services like office
(19:59):
because they had a quota of getting rid of twenty
percent of their kids a week and if they didn't
do it, they would get digged. Yeah, they had a
quota for we need to get twenty percent of the
kids out of the shelter every week. Wow. In the
last two years they have lost track of a third
of the kids they send out, which is again, in
the last two years alone, at least eighty five thousand
(20:20):
children they've just lost. I don't fucking know where they are.
Here's some New York Times Again, it's getting to be
a business for some of these sponsors. And yet Pasilaqua,
who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida
last year. Miss Pasilochua said she saw so many children
put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling
to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead,
(20:44):
she settled for explaining to the children that they were
entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Wow. Wow, And you know, I.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Want to make really clear what we're talking about here, right,
This is not you know, like I don't think like,
you know, whatever your position is on like whether like
a twelve year old or a fourteen year old should
be working any job at all. We are talking about
twelve year olds working on factories. We were talking about
thirteen year olds cleaning up the floors of slaughter the
(21:16):
kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are talking about like, we
are talking about fourteen year olds who are like literally
making food that like you are eating yeah, and we're
still right. So this is happening in a large part
because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon
(21:37):
on a company miners. Well, it turns out a lot
of those miners are on a company because the Biden
administration wouldn't let their fucking parents into the country. And
this is where this is where we need to get
into the fucking like the whole sort of like sex
trafficking panic, right, because you know, one of the things
that this panic, specifically about sex trafficking has covered up
(21:58):
is that most humans trafficking is not sex trafficking. It's
almost all labor trafficking almost also huo strong a word,
but it's mostly by volume. Most of it is is
labor trafficking, which nobody gives a single shit about because
you know, there's no you can't you can't have a
moral panic around like you can't have a moral panic
(22:18):
around labor trafficking like people who aren't white. And simultaneously,
all the business groups who would normally fund these panics
like love this shit because you know, all of all
of these capital's ghouls drinking a thousand dollars bottles of
wine under thirty million dollar yachts. All of that shit
is paid for about child labor, so of course they
don't give a shit about it. In fact, they love it.
(22:40):
And the you know, the product of this is you
have a bunch of fucking twelve year olds who are
effectively in debt bondage, working twelve hours of fucking day
in a slaughterhouse or a paper bill. I'm gonna I'm
gonna read another thing from the New York Times, which is,
I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing,
but like, I think this is the most depressing thing
(23:03):
I've read in this entire I don't know, like in ages,
I didn't get how expensive everything was, says thirteen year
old Jose Vasquez, who works twelve hour shifts, six days
a week at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and
lives with his teenage sister. I'd like to go to school,
but then how would I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know,
(23:28):
and of course one of you know, like the everything
about this, right is these these are people dealing with
the fucking American housing market, right. The American housing market
is intolerable to adults who work full time, who work
like full time jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right,
this is a thirteen year old. How the fuck is
(23:48):
a thirteen year old? It's supposed to be paying rent? Right?
And you know, and every every sort of additional thing
just makes it worse because the more the more of
these kids. And one of one of the things happening
is these kids are getting funneled into very specific areas, right,
because they're getting You're getting funeled to like specific towns
because those specific towns have a bunch of like, have
(24:09):
a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these
migrant kids. And when they do that, that fucking continually
drives out the price of housing because all of these
people are competing for the same like fucking one Vegoe
apartment for sixteen hundred dollars a month, right, And so
every everything just sort of spirals in on each other
(24:29):
and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year
old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six.
This is the fucking like thing I talked about in
China is at nine am nine pm, six days a
week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know,
in any just world, people would die for this. In
(24:49):
this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this.
It's a bunch of children who are dying on their
fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,
the people who for this are children. And the Biden
administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking
all these kids out to their families, like they're kicking
all these people out to just like fucking anyone as
(25:10):
soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's families
into the country, and then doing literally nothing at all
to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into
this country like have a place to live or like
any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves,
you know, and we could, we could, fucking like, there
are there are individual people in the US who benefit
(25:31):
from this child labor who you could fucking like throw
into a box tomorrow, take all of their money, and
you could fund this entire program. They are individual people, right.
No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids,
They will let every single one of these kids die
before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single
cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child
(25:55):
laws that exists in this uh uh, you know that
that exists in the rutcher are completely useless because regulatory
agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing,
or they spend some time investigating so they can get
a cut of the child labor money by issuing a
fine to the company.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Oh are you fucking kidding me? It gets worse than worse.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Now and this is the fun part. Merely taking a
cut of the child labor money or doing nothing, those
are those might arguably be the best case scenarios. Because
the other thing that happens, and the Washington Post has
been talking you did a very good report about this,
is the other thing they do is, you know, either
they effectively enter the revshare agreement with the contractors who
(26:38):
are hiring these fucking human traffickers, or they do raids.
And the product of these raids is you put, is
they put the families of the kids who are doing
the child labor in prison or deport them, and then
they do nothing about the actual you know, so a
lot of what's happening is this is happening through contractors, right,
so they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will
(26:58):
fucking happen and the parents of these kids, who also
like cannot fucking survive, and in a lot of cases
are doing this because literally they do not have enough
money to pay rent or buy food for their kids.
Those people are getting fucking set to prison. Are the
only people, by the way, again, the only even even
though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they
(27:19):
are getting children killed. The only people going to prison
are the families of the fucking kids.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I not None of it makes sense, and it makes me.
I mean, I can't really recover from any of this episode,
and I and I shouldn'to that is the reality, but
I just I don't know. It's it doesn't feel like
billionaires uh will ever lose it. I guess capitalism.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
My analysis of this is that any world that allows
us to happen is intolerable and should be burned to
the ground.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I agree, Oh, I agree. I think we're ready for
the rapture. But by that I just mean like the
sun exploding into us and everyone dying.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, I'm gonna read a bit more, because you know,
the horrors never end. Here was in the Washington Post.
The Grand Island teens had been hired to scour blood
and fat from slippery quote kill floors, using high pressure hoses,
scalding water, and industrial foams and assets. According to the
Labor Department in federal court records, they sanitize electric knives,
(28:38):
fat skimmers, and one hundred and ninety pounds saws used
to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students,
and again when they say students, they're not talking about
college students, they're talking about middle and high school students
suffered chemical burns and we're so sleep deprived after working
their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to
a local prosecutor in court records. When about the children,
(29:01):
like the actual kids who were supposed to be, you know,
the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department
of Labor raids, the Department of Labor pulled a it's
not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we
don't know what happened to these kids. Hope they're okay,
have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington
Post article that I want to read just to sort
(29:23):
of like, I don't know. I think the big problem
with all of this coverage is that it's treating this
problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of
like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight
labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not.
Here's from the Washington Post. We have never in my
memory found the types of violations that are being found
(29:44):
and hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social
policy and management at Brandy's University who was a top
labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this
is bullshit, Dream Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a
shit ton of migrant workers and by specifically migrant children
workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and has in
(30:07):
his work. It's just that they were mostly in agriculture.
I mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like,
some of the ship was already happening and nobody paid
attention to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they
were also just a shit ton of kids fucking like
picking tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California.
That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama
specifically made it worse because one of again, one of
(30:30):
the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like,
if you commit a labor violation against one of these
against against, against, against someone someone who is undocumented in
a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right?
They can't go to the government. If they go to
the government, they get deported.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, and Obama, Yeah, the employers know that, I mean
employers yeah. Yeah, but like they know that they're control
of the situation.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, And Obama fucking helped them do it because he
deported so many people like Obama and this fucking guy
probably also too directly, was helping literally the worst abuses
of this system happen over and over and over again.
They were they were using you know, immigration. One of
the onli other things you can notice about these stories
is that if you if you look at the locations right,
most of the places with these not all, but a
(31:16):
lot of the place where these are happening are very
very anti immigrants. Southern border states, in southern states of
border states. And the reason or or places or some
places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a
lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right
is you know, if you're if you're like, uh, if
you're a politician, right, and you know, and your your
(31:37):
allies are local business owners. You get, you get you
get to play this sort of like you get you
get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.
On the one hand, you get to you get to
keep hiring a bunch of undocumented immigrants, and on the
other hand, you whip up this like enormous social hystoria
about them so that all these people, you know, can
can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And everyone
(32:00):
fucking knows how this game works, right, Like all the
all the people with any real power like actually understand this.
It's it's why. It's why like the Justice Department or
like you know, all all the immigration agencies never go
after the companies you hire people. They only ever go
after the actual workers themselves.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Just so upsetting because like the most in their mind,
like the most helpful like useful person is the person
that has like the most to lose, and they know
that and use it against them for that reason.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, it's just so it's just.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Fucked up in every possible way.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yeah, it's also just a little silly, like you said
to just like think this just happened, Like this is
something that has clearly been building to this, you know
what I mean, I think anyone with a brain can
figure that out, because this kind of intricate system doesn't
just like pop up in a year or two out
of nowhere. It's been building it on itself.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I don't know. Yeah, it's yes, like yeah, like you're
you're definitely right. It's not just like yeah, it's been
building for ages like it was just it was deliberately
designed by those white people who like make a bunch
of fucking money from it. Right, they make slightly more
money if they fucking force a twelve year old to
(33:15):
clean the floor of a slaughterhouse than they do if
they force like a twenty two year old to do it.
And so they do. And the last mad yeah, and
the last thing that I want to sort of mention
about this, right is that a lot of these a
lot of the states where this stuff is happening, a
lot of the states that are passing these laws are
(33:35):
asso states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous rass
of anti trans legislation, like as part of their sow
called like protect the kids thing and you know, you
can talk about their hypocrisy of it, right, but I
think the important thing to understand here is that protect
the kids was always racialized, Like they don't give a
shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because they
aren't white, right, their immigrant kids who these Freese want
(33:57):
to fucking kill anyways, and if those kids die in
the job, nobody gives shit, right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
So it makes it's it's upsetting also because the majority
of these kids, I don't want to say majority, I
don't want to speak for anybody, but I feel like
these kids also they need to work in their minds,
you know what I mean, Like they're like, I have
no other choice, no one's helping me. This is the
only option I have. And it just becomes this like
(34:26):
snaky in its own tail bullshit where it's just I
don't know, it's there's no there's no good out for
them because no one's fucking helping them and their family's
not there, and they need to fucking survive. So it's
this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in
a in a sick way, like not because they not
because they're consenting to it because they want to because
they need to to survive, and the people that are
(34:50):
in power know that and take advantage of it. And
I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board
is just inhumane and disgusting and I hate that.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
I don't know. That's that's all I have, other than
a general exportation that like every single part of the
system that produces this, the entire border regime, the US
labor regime, the regime, the sort of family regimes that
this stuff relies on, like, all of it needs to
fucking go, and we need to do it before another
kid gets fucking killed on a factory floor.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah. I have a hard time not feeling like it's
too big and it's I'm too helpless and there's nothing
to do. But I think stuff just raising awareness and
not pretending this doesn't happen here or just started happening,
I think that's a good step in the right direction.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I think one way to look at it is that
like there there there have been regimes that are a
lot more powerful and a lot sort of a lot
more willing to kill that have been brought down and
have COLLA don't exist anymore. So, you know, as as
(36:03):
as bad as everything looks on any given day, right,
Like people people have done this before, they'll do it again,
and you know it's at some at some point they're like,
we will hit a point where it's fucking too much,
it seased to be, You're right, and our responsibility is
to get everyone to that point.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah. I think it takes longer when the like insidiousness
or the evilness is more subtle quote unquote you know
what I mean, Like when it's not so outright in
your face. It's almost like it really takes longer to
burn out. And yeah, we're just in that burning out phase. Yeah,
(36:45):
well glad I enjoyed.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Yeah, yeah, this is going to make it happen here,
wage war against the capitalist system and the people who
kill children for money. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening
It's happening here. The thing that's happening here is fucking
child labor. I am. I am deeply angry this episode,
this is it could happen here. I'm your host, Mio
Wong and with me Sharen Hi Mia.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm so glad to join you on this really uplifting episode.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, it's gonna be great. So yes, all right, As
anyone who studied, like even a little bit of labor
history dos, the fight over child labor is very, very old.
It is. It's one of the first causes that sort
of liberal reformers to capitalism took up nearly eighteen hundreds.
Like it's like in the Communist Manifesto is one of
the things. It's actually it's one of the things people
point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things
(00:43):
that was in the original comedist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no,
we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's
also one of the things that like you get these
sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we
eliminated child labor. This is like this has proof the
system works. No, this, the battle over child labor or
is a battle that we are in the middle of losing.
We are losing it in worse and worse ways every day.
(01:09):
So okay, so why why why are we why are
we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in
this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One of
the big problems is that vast swaths of the US
sees child labor is morally good. You know, they see
something like, oh, this is like you teach your kids.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's like how you like, how they grow up and
get responsible, and.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, and then this and this is true in a
lot of parts of the world. It's also completely and
absolutely bonkers. It is just it's just nuts, Like people
shouldn't think like this. It's incredibly weird. And the other
thing that you get a lot is like there's you know,
there's sort of like different versions of like more or
(01:53):
less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think
most people agree if you're not running the business that
like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever.
But you know, there's like lots of things that people
are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like
that's completely fine, Like oh, it's like a like a
fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm,
(02:15):
Like that's fine, but.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's a slippery slope, right because it's starting to farm
work and then.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Down. Also, like I would argue that that's also not fine,
because what's what's essentially happening here is that there's this
basically like this sort of family loophole to people's understanding
if child labor were like, as long as child labor
is being done by like the family as an economic
unit instead of like capitalists directly, yeah, it's fine. It's like, no, no,
(02:45):
it's not. It's actually not fine to be working people
like be a child and then working for a living
for your family, Like that's not kay.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I think there's a difference between. I think there's a
difference between like child labor and like working in a
field for your family versus like a chore, you know
what I mean, Like, yeah, yeah, it's I think I
think that line gets blurred and people see their kids
as much more mature than they are and like able
to like no, I I I understand what you're saying,
(03:14):
and I think I agree.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I think I agree, yeah, and it's I don't know it.
It sucks. This has a lot of sort of knock
on effects. One of the big knock on effects his
Haus and this is this has been a thing for
like the entire history of child labor, right, is that
like capitalists use children as a way to write down
wages for everyone else. And this is you know, if
you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right,
one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is
(03:37):
that like, oh well, it's like it's like kids get
the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one,
it's not like children are not morally worth less and
their labor is also not worth less than an adult.
Like like if you if you're gonna explain them like this, like.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, things all are the same price for everybody. It's
not like less for a child.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, it's not. It's not like it like a kid
is like somehow less of a human being than an adult. Right,
Like this is this is this sucks, but you know
it's used to sort of hold down wages directly through
things like like opposing mineral wage increases, used to hold
you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because and
this is another reason like capitalists love child labor is
(04:15):
that children are, you know, like they're physically smaller than adults,
they're easier to control, they have less social power, and
because you know, because of that, you can pay them less.
And because of you know, because because people just in
our society don't fucking like kids, and because of that,
(04:37):
it's so it's it's just socially accessible to just pay
them less.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
All those reasons you listed are absolutely terrifying, though, like,
oh they will listen. Oh they're smaller, Oh they're like
cheaper or whatever it is that they're all like terrible
reasons to justify child labor.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
No, they're not good. They're not good. And yet, however, Comma,
it still persists. It has persisted. It's very old. I'm
gonna read something from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about
this fucking kid who was working in a mine. What okay?
This is from the early nineteen hundreds. One boy touchingly
(05:18):
recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mine
this way, I'll always think of my poor blind father
and my mother at home, but I won't never play
with the boys at all, And then the cracker boss
won't have to beat me like he does the others
this boy was nine years old. While stories like these
produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions,
there is no such concern the view that quote the
(05:40):
little devils like it, as one cold boss put it,
seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed
these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So
this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early
nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people, my people,
I mean capitalists and also people who are incredibly desperate
and don't have enough money to give by like love
(06:01):
child labor. There's you know, it takes a long time
for like an actual series anti child labor campaign to
get started in the US. And of course the exact
people who you would expect to oppose banning child labor
oppose banning child labor. I'm going to read this from
the also from the barrel laborististics. The chairman of the
National Association of Manufacturers said about a law to abolish
(06:24):
child labor. Quote this union, this labor union plot against
the advancements and happiness of the American boy is a ploy.
Is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion. And prosperity
in this country. So this is what their thing is.
Their argument is that is that children don't oppose child labor.
(06:45):
This is this is being foisted upon them by outside
agitated labor unions. And also, if we're not allowed to
use child labor, if we're not allowed to have a
nine year old be put in a mine, the entire
American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's like making you like being like child labor because patriotism,
Like that's basically what that means.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, it's it's it's s genu widely terrible, like I
I don't know, it's so goulish. Like companies today have
figured out how to do this pr thing of like, oh,
we don't condone child labor. We crack down on it
very seriously. We also hire children literally all the time.
But it's fine, We're just we're gonna like you know,
but back in like nine hundreds, they hadn't really figured
that out yet, and so you know, there's there's a
(07:27):
sort of reform movement that happens. And one of the
sort of key moments of this reform thing is Laurence
Textile Strike and This strike is probably most famous today
for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too,
which is, you know, like wrung down the halls of
labor and socialist histories, like the names of newspapers, songs, poems,
and also like being the namesake of a truly dogshit
(07:49):
DSA caucus. We're not going to talk about this strike enormously.
Here the short, the very very short version of this strike,
and this this is a nineteen twelve strike. The short
version of it is that there's a law pass in
Massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours
that you could have women and children work from a
blistering fifty six hours to a leisurely fifty four hours
(08:11):
a week.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
This prompted the local capitalist to get so mad that
they did this like massive like industrial speed up, so
they forced everyone to work faster and then also doctor
everyone's paid for it. And this this set off a strike,
which what's relevant for like our stories that the workers
at this plan. You know, there's lots of coverage of
(08:34):
the fact that like most of these workers are immigrant
women of like from a bunch of different places. The
part of it that's not talked about as much is
that another huge person of the workers were just fucking children.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
And it seems to get glossed over.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah yeah, And it's like, I, I, you know, I
don't know, maybe maybe we should go back and talking
about that part because it's really important for like the
stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode.
That made me so angry. I was like physically punching
my pillow. What happens next is that the police cracked
down on the strike. It's more and more violence. And
(09:09):
as this goes on, the workers at like the adult
workers at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send
the children, who are both like both the child workers
and also like just people's kids to New York to
keep them safe and also to make a political point.
But like, hey, look they're running our children out of town,
and this goes great. The first way is this go
great for the children. Like a bunch of people in
New York show up but are like, yay, hey, we'll
(09:30):
take care of these kids. Like and this makes like
the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this.
It looks really bad for us. And so they they
like assembled outside of the next train that was trying
to leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god,
so she shouldn't be really mististics again. When the next
(09:51):
group of children prepared to depart the train station, they
were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to
let them board the trains and launch an attack on
the group. A seven year old was given a black
eye when she was picked up and thrown into a
patty wagon by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to
children being thrown around like rags. Oh my wait god,
(10:13):
like yeah, thin blue live baby, let's fucking go. This
is this is the thing the cops or the thin
blue line ordering chaos. That seventy year old girls. Yeah's
not gonna throw herself around, right, Like someone has to
beat up this children. And for that there is the few,
the proud, the American police.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
But they were scared for their lives, you know what
I mean, Like there are seven year.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Olds that that seven year old girl looked at me
really aggressively.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, I was scared for my life, That's what they said.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It's it's you know, it's this is bad. And like
you know, the the nineteen hundreds police can get away
with like nineteen hundred. Plice've talked about another episodes, like
they could get away with just like shooting people right,
like the like they could show up to like a
strike and just open fire into the crowd and it
doesn't do anything throwing around a bunch of children like rags. Finally,
(11:04):
it turned out was the thing that was bad enough
that it like started a congressional investigation.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Wow, I guess that's good and bad.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
But yeah, so's a college launched this investigation. And there's
like this fourteen year old immigrant girl named Kamela Tielli
testifies about how she was working at the mill when
a machine caught her hair and tore her scalp off
the police promptly and this is going and okay that
the police promptly arrested her dad, didn't do anything to
(11:33):
the company, arrested her dad for lying about her age.
Oh my god, what now this hold that wood in
your fucking mind, because we're gonna come back to that shit,
do I have to?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Unfortunately, because it's gonna get so much worse when Tyler's
episode is over. So the product of this is that
there starts to be like a really mainstream push against
child labor, which is, you know, a thing you would
have thought would have started earlier, because again we're on
like century two of child labor in the US by
this point, right, like in the in an entity called
(12:05):
the United States. But you know, apparently it takes this
to actually make people go, wait, maybe this is bad.
And the product of this is you get this thing
called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now,
as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness
of this law is that it, you know, it allows
kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the
(12:27):
family unit. So like if you're on a family you know,
and this is a very very broad category, right, so
it's you know, you can you can force your child
to work as long as like you're their parents, right
and you're the one making the money off of them
and not like a capitalist. But even this, even this
is considered too strong of a law, and in nineteen eighteen,
the Supreme Court rules that it's unconstitutional to ban child labor.
(12:51):
Wait what they do with the uiple times? Multiple times,
And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show.
The Supreme Court is and has always been just one
of history's greatest monsters.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Like, yeah, there, wait, I was right, then child labor
does equal patriotism. That's basically what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
So eventually FDR gets into this giant fight with Supreme Court,
and the first child labor law we get in federal
child labor law that gets that sticks, I like doesn't
happen till nineteen thirty eight when FDR threatens to pack
the court if the Court refuses to fucking stop stop
saying that that that the state that the state doesn't
(13:34):
have the government doesn't have the power to regulate child labor.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Wow, it's like literally less than a century ago. That
is like yesterday, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But but but you know, and this actually works, right,
but but and this is a real problem. And this
is a problem that we're gonna we're gonna talk about
later in this fucking episode. In the modern day, those
child labor laws don't get enforced. It doesn't act that
actual The nineteen thirty eight Fair Labor Act like basically
doesn't actually do shit to like reduce the amount of
(14:05):
child labor in the country. And here's the thing, Like,
even now, even before all the horror show stuff that
we're about to get to that's happening right now, like
not kids, Like we never actually dealt with child labor
through like the law, Like we just basically outsourced, you know, Okay,
we we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper
than like an American child, and we did. It's either
(14:26):
like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have legal citizenship status,
or just outsourcing. And then you know, our kids still
fucking do work, you know, like are like they're like
it's very common for ten and twelve year olds to work.
It's just that it's usually like babysitting or like bowing lawns.
And we've we've decided that like, no, this is actually fine,
(14:47):
Like it is actually fine to fucking put twelve year
olds in a labor market.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah. I mean I think most people today anyway, I
think the common person thinks that child labor happens like
in other countries over there, you know what I mean.
I don't think they think America is still that archaic
and stupid.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, and oh my god, yeah, so we need to
take an ad break. And then I'm not even gonna
make a joke about our sponsors and child labor because
like Jesus fucking Christ. This is good about to be
it's so bad. But yeah, here's some ads. Okay, So
(15:34):
you know, we never really got rid of child labor, right,
what we did basically was, to some extent we've been
able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know,
in the last twenty years there'd been a decline in
what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough, this is
the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the
(15:57):
labor markets. Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, vanilla of a way to say that.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
So return to present day, present day. The thing that's
been happening in the last few months is that in
a five week span in this country, three children died
or I you know, I would actually argue we're killed
by their employers on the job. Well, five children in
three children in five weeks. So sixteen these there, these
(16:26):
kids were all sixteen. Sixteen year old Duvn Thomas Perez
got killed by machiinery get a conveyor belt. Sixteen year
old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen
year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company.
There have been other child labor deaths recently, those are
just sort of the most recent ones. And I want
(16:47):
to get in to the shit that's been happening because
in the last really in the last been under like
eight years, things have gotten you know, like the Charlie
situation in the US was never good, and we'll talk
about that later, but like things have gotten so much worse.
There's been almost a factor of four increase since twenty
(17:10):
fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs. It's actually
probably well, it's unclear to me whether the numbers are
actually worse than that. I don't know, because I think
almost all of this these districts are being undercounted, like
dramatically because those numbers are just violations that are caught.
And go into that a bit later. But meanwhile, like
(17:31):
right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont
have already passed laws in the last two years that
weaken restrictions on child labor, and bills are appearing like
across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff,
like they want to allow fourteen year olds to serve
alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is, it is
(17:51):
truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant business associations
across the country who want to, you know, use child labor,
and that's bad. The fact there's more stuff that you
know is on the horizon is not good. But for
an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says,
the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times.
(18:13):
In many parts of the country, middle and high school
teachers in English language larner programs say it is now
common for nearly all of their students to rush off
to long shift after their classes end. They should not
be working twelve hour days, but it's happening here, said
Valeria Lindsay, an Arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle
(18:33):
School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every
eighth grader in her English learner program, about one hundred students,
was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a
massive surge since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering
(18:54):
the US. And this has been driven by a law
of sort of you know, it's been driven by sort
of pandemic driven poverty, a massive obsertion of violence in
a bunch of countries in Central America, a lot of
which has to do with like, you know, the the
US back to Cunel Salvador about a decade ago. You know,
(19:16):
there's a lot of stuff going on. It's all very
bad and it's been pushing people here. But you know,
like the the situation for immigrants getting into the US
is never good, but Biden specifically has managed to make
it worse because Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy
has been has been resting on getting kids out of
(19:38):
shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing
them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor, right,
And you know, this has gone about as well as
you would expect it would when someone like starts to
you know, one of the I think it was The
New York Times was talking about this woman who's working,
you quit working in a health human services like office
(19:59):
because they had a quota of getting rid of twenty
percent of their kids a week and if they didn't
do it, they would get digged. Yeah, they had a
quota for we need to get twenty percent of the
kids out of the shelter every week. Wow. In the
last two years they have lost track of a third
of the kids they send out, which is again, in
the last two years alone, at least eighty five thousand
(20:20):
children they've just lost. I don't fucking know where they are.
Here's some New York Times Again, it's getting to be
a business for some of these sponsors. And yet Pasilaqua,
who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida
last year. Miss Pasilochua said she saw so many children
put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling
to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead,
(20:44):
she settled for explaining to the children that they were
entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Wow. Wow, And you know, I.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Want to make really clear what we're talking about here, right,
This is not you know, like I don't think like,
you know, whatever your position is on like whether like
a twelve year old or a fourteen year old should
be working any job at all. We are talking about
twelve year olds working on factories. We were talking about
thirteen year olds cleaning up the floors of slaughter the
(21:16):
kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are talking about like, we
are talking about fourteen year olds who are like literally
making food that like you are eating yeah, and we're
still right. So this is happening in a large part
because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon
(21:37):
on a company miners. Well, it turns out a lot
of those miners are on a company because the Biden
administration wouldn't let their fucking parents into the country. And
this is where this is where we need to get
into the fucking like the whole sort of like sex
trafficking panic, right, because you know, one of the things
that this panic, specifically about sex trafficking has covered up
(21:58):
is that most humans trafficking is not sex trafficking. It's
almost all labor trafficking almost also huo strong a word,
but it's mostly by volume. Most of it is is
labor trafficking, which nobody gives a single shit about because
you know, there's no you can't you can't have a
moral panic around like you can't have a moral panic
(22:18):
around labor trafficking like people who aren't white. And simultaneously,
all the business groups who would normally fund these panics
like love this shit because you know, all of all
of these capital's ghouls drinking a thousand dollars bottles of
wine under thirty million dollar yachts. All of that shit
is paid for about child labor, so of course they
don't give a shit about it. In fact, they love it.
(22:40):
And the you know, the product of this is you
have a bunch of fucking twelve year olds who are
effectively in debt bondage, working twelve hours of fucking day
in a slaughterhouse or a paper bill. I'm gonna I'm
gonna read another thing from the New York Times, which is,
I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing,
but like, I think this is the most depressing thing
(23:03):
I've read in this entire I don't know, like in ages,
I didn't get how expensive everything was, says thirteen year
old Jose Vasquez, who works twelve hour shifts, six days
a week at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and
lives with his teenage sister. I'd like to go to school,
but then how would I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know,
(23:28):
and of course one of you know, like the everything
about this, right is these these are people dealing with
the fucking American housing market, right. The American housing market
is intolerable to adults who work full time, who work
like full time jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right,
this is a thirteen year old. How the fuck is
(23:48):
a thirteen year old? It's supposed to be paying rent? Right?
And you know, and every every sort of additional thing
just makes it worse because the more the more of
these kids. And one of one of the things happening
is these kids are getting funneled into very specific areas, right,
because they're getting You're getting funeled to like specific towns
because those specific towns have a bunch of like, have
(24:09):
a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these
migrant kids. And when they do that, that fucking continually
drives out the price of housing because all of these
people are competing for the same like fucking one Vegoe
apartment for sixteen hundred dollars a month, right, And so
every everything just sort of spirals in on each other
(24:29):
and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year
old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six.
This is the fucking like thing I talked about in
China is at nine am nine pm, six days a
week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know,
in any just world, people would die for this. In
(24:49):
this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this.
It's a bunch of children who are dying on their
fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,
the people who for this are children. And the Biden
administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking
all these kids out to their families, like they're kicking
all these people out to just like fucking anyone as
(25:10):
soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's families
into the country, and then doing literally nothing at all
to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into
this country like have a place to live or like
any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves,
you know, and we could, we could, fucking like, there
are there are individual people in the US who benefit
(25:31):
from this child labor who you could fucking like throw
into a box tomorrow, take all of their money, and
you could fund this entire program. They are individual people, right.
No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids,
They will let every single one of these kids die
before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single
cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child
(25:55):
laws that exists in this uh uh, you know that
that exists in the rutcher are completely useless because regulatory
agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing,
or they spend some time investigating so they can get
a cut of the child labor money by issuing a
fine to the company.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Oh are you fucking kidding me? It gets worse than worse.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Now and this is the fun part. Merely taking a
cut of the child labor money or doing nothing, those
are those might arguably be the best case scenarios. Because
the other thing that happens, and the Washington Post has
been talking you did a very good report about this,
is the other thing they do is, you know, either
they effectively enter the revshare agreement with the contractors who
(26:38):
are hiring these fucking human traffickers, or they do raids.
And the product of these raids is you put, is
they put the families of the kids who are doing
the child labor in prison or deport them, and then
they do nothing about the actual you know, so a
lot of what's happening is this is happening through contractors, right,
so they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will
(26:58):
fucking happen and the parents of these kids, who also
like cannot fucking survive, and in a lot of cases
are doing this because literally they do not have enough
money to pay rent or buy food for their kids.
Those people are getting fucking set to prison. Are the
only people, by the way, again, the only even even
though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they
(27:19):
are getting children killed. The only people going to prison
are the families of the fucking kids.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I not None of it makes sense, and it makes me.
I mean, I can't really recover from any of this episode,
and I and I shouldn'to that is the reality, but
I just I don't know. It's it doesn't feel like
billionaires uh will ever lose it. I guess capitalism.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
My analysis of this is that any world that allows
us to happen is intolerable and should be burned to
the ground.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I agree, Oh, I agree. I think we're ready for
the rapture. But by that I just mean like the
sun exploding into us and everyone dying.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, I'm gonna read a bit more, because you know,
the horrors never end. Here was in the Washington Post.
The Grand Island teens had been hired to scour blood
and fat from slippery quote kill floors, using high pressure hoses,
scalding water, and industrial foams and assets. According to the
Labor Department in federal court records, they sanitize electric knives,
(28:38):
fat skimmers, and one hundred and ninety pounds saws used
to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students,
and again when they say students, they're not talking about
college students, they're talking about middle and high school students
suffered chemical burns and we're so sleep deprived after working
their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to
a local prosecutor in court records. When about the children,
(29:01):
like the actual kids who were supposed to be, you know,
the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department
of Labor raids, the Department of Labor pulled a it's
not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we
don't know what happened to these kids. Hope they're okay,
have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington
Post article that I want to read just to sort
(29:23):
of like, I don't know. I think the big problem
with all of this coverage is that it's treating this
problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of
like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight
labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not.
Here's from the Washington Post. We have never in my
memory found the types of violations that are being found
(29:44):
and hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social
policy and management at Brandy's University who was a top
labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this
is bullshit, Dream Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a
shit ton of migrant workers and by specifically migrant children
workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and has in
(30:07):
his work. It's just that they were mostly in agriculture.
I mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like,
some of the ship was already happening and nobody paid
attention to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they
were also just a shit ton of kids fucking like
picking tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California.
That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama
specifically made it worse because one of again, one of
(30:30):
the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like,
if you commit a labor violation against one of these
against against, against, against someone someone who is undocumented in
a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right?
They can't go to the government. If they go to
the government, they get deported.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, and Obama, Yeah, the employers know that, I mean
employers yeah. Yeah, but like they know that they're control
of the situation.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, And Obama fucking helped them do it because he
deported so many people like Obama and this fucking guy
probably also too directly, was helping literally the worst abuses
of this system happen over and over and over again.
They were they were using you know, immigration. One of
the onli other things you can notice about these stories
is that if you if you look at the locations right,
most of the places with these not all, but a
(31:16):
lot of the place where these are happening are very
very anti immigrants. Southern border states, in southern states of
border states. And the reason or or places or some
places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a
lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right
is you know, if you're if you're like, uh, if
you're a politician, right, and you know, and your your
(31:37):
allies are local business owners. You get, you get you
get to play this sort of like you get you
get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.
On the one hand, you get to you get to
keep hiring a bunch of undocumented immigrants, and on the
other hand, you whip up this like enormous social hystoria
about them so that all these people, you know, can
can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And everyone
(32:00):
fucking knows how this game works, right, Like all the
all the people with any real power like actually understand this.
It's it's why. It's why like the Justice Department or
like you know, all all the immigration agencies never go
after the companies you hire people. They only ever go
after the actual workers themselves.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Just so upsetting because like the most in their mind,
like the most helpful like useful person is the person
that has like the most to lose, and they know
that and use it against them for that reason.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, it's just so it's just.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Fucked up in every possible way.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yeah, it's also just a little silly, like you said
to just like think this just happened, Like this is
something that has clearly been building to this, you know
what I mean, I think anyone with a brain can
figure that out, because this kind of intricate system doesn't
just like pop up in a year or two out
of nowhere. It's been building it on itself.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I don't know. Yeah, it's yes, like yeah, like you're
you're definitely right. It's not just like yeah, it's been
building for ages like it was just it was deliberately
designed by those white people who like make a bunch
of fucking money from it. Right, they make slightly more
money if they fucking force a twelve year old to
(33:15):
clean the floor of a slaughterhouse than they do if
they force like a twenty two year old to do it.
And so they do. And the last mad yeah, and
the last thing that I want to sort of mention
about this, right is that a lot of these a
lot of the states where this stuff is happening, a
lot of the states that are passing these laws are
(33:35):
asso states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous rass
of anti trans legislation, like as part of their sow
called like protect the kids thing and you know, you
can talk about their hypocrisy of it, right, but I
think the important thing to understand here is that protect
the kids was always racialized, Like they don't give a
shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because they
aren't white, right, their immigrant kids who these Freese want
(33:57):
to fucking kill anyways, and if those kids die in
the job, nobody gives shit, right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
So it makes it's it's upsetting also because the majority
of these kids, I don't want to say majority, I
don't want to speak for anybody, but I feel like
these kids also they need to work in their minds,
you know what I mean, Like they're like, I have
no other choice, no one's helping me. This is the
only option I have. And it just becomes this like
(34:26):
snaky in its own tail bullshit where it's just I
don't know, it's there's no there's no good out for
them because no one's fucking helping them and their family's
not there, and they need to fucking survive. So it's
this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in
a in a sick way, like not because they not
because they're consenting to it because they want to because
they need to to survive, and the people that are
(34:50):
in power know that and take advantage of it. And
I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board
is just inhumane and disgusting and I hate that.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
I don't know. That's that's all I have, other than
a general exportation that like every single part of the
system that produces this, the entire border regime, the US
labor regime, the regime, the sort of family regimes that
this stuff relies on, like, all of it needs to
fucking go, and we need to do it before another
kid gets fucking killed on a factory floor.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah. I have a hard time not feeling like it's
too big and it's I'm too helpless and there's nothing
to do. But I think stuff just raising awareness and
not pretending this doesn't happen here or just started happening,
I think that's a good step in the right direction.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I think one way to look at it is that
like there there there have been regimes that are a
lot more powerful and a lot sort of a lot
more willing to kill that have been brought down and
have COLLA don't exist anymore. So, you know, as as
(36:03):
as bad as everything looks on any given day, right,
Like people people have done this before, they'll do it again,
and you know it's at some at some point they're like,
we will hit a point where it's fucking too much,
it seased to be, You're right, and our responsibility is
to get everyone to that point.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah. I think it takes longer when the like insidiousness
or the evilness is more subtle quote unquote you know
what I mean, Like when it's not so outright in
your face. It's almost like it really takes longer to
burn out. And yeah, we're just in that burning out phase. Yeah,
(36:45):
well glad I enjoyed.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Yeah, yeah, this is going to make it happen here,
wage war against the capitalist system and the people who
kill children for money. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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