With immigrant workers being deported or driven into hiding, Florida businesses need more workers. Where to look? How about getting those slothful 13-year-olds wasting time out on playgrounds and doing homework into the workplace, and letting older teens work full time?
A House bill sponsored by Florida Rep. Monique Miller passed its first of three committee stops Tuesday by a 12 to 6 vote along party lines, with only one Republican joining all Democrats to vote against. The bill would allow children as young as fourteen who have graduated high school or are home- or virtual-school students and allow older teens to work 30 hour shifts a week as well as overnight shifts, even on school nights. Currently, a Florida teen must be 14 years old to be employed, but the legislation would lower that cutoff to 13-year-olds who would become eligible for employment as soon as the summer of the year in which they turn 14.
Just to make sure they’re hungry for work, the legislation would also eliminate 30-minute meal breaks for any shift of four hours or more. Current Florida law caps night-time work for minors at 11pm on school nights. The Senate version was passed by the Commerce and Tourism Committee earlier.
God, Families and DeSantis
Florida Senator Ron DeSantis, who pushed the bill to legislators, endorsed the legislation asking
“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” DeSantis said during the panel. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff.”
To this argument, I can only continue to quote Wisconsin Assemblywoman Deb Andraca, who responded to a similar effort, stating ‘The solution to Wisconsin’s worker shortages is not shorter workers.”
‘The solution to Wisconsin’s worker shortages is not shorter workers.” — Wisconsin Assemblywoman Deb Andraca
How do we protect these children from injuries and abuse? Well, luckily God has thought about that problem, according to bill sponsor Monique Miller.
“I think every family needs to make that decision for what’s best for them, instead of having the government tell them what’s best,” said Miller, a self-described “parental rights” activist. She further responded to voiced concerns from Democratic colleagues about children being exploited on the job. “God gave us a great barrier for that, and that is parents,” she attempted to reassure, conveniently ignoring parents who abuse or otherwise exploit their own children. “Parents can definitely oversee what children are allowed to do.”
The legislation in Florida and other states was inspired by , specifically, at the behest of a right-wing think tank Foundation for Government Accountability which is funded in large part by billionaire Richard “Dick” Uihlein.
“God gave us a great barrier for that, and that is parents,” — Florida Rep Monique Miller on how child laborers will be protected.
West Virginia Follows
Meanwhile, further north, the West Virginia House has passed a bill that would remove permit requirements for 14 and 15 year-old workers as long as they get a permit from their school superintendent that includes “age certification, a commitment by the employer to employ the child legally, a description of the work the child is applying to do, a signature by the child’s principal saying that they’re attending school and parental consent.”
Under the new bill, 14- and 15-year-olds seeking employment would no longer be required to have a work permit as long as the real experts on workplace safety — their parents — sign off.
International Race to the Bottom
And, of course, all of this is consistent with the Trump administration’s policy of reducing America’s labor force to third-world conditions. Previous Democratic and Republican administrations have provided grants to non-profits in other countries to fight child labor. Aside from the obvious humanitarian benefits of these efforts, reducing child labor abroad also addresses unfair trade practices by reducing low-paid, exploited labor that allows lower-priced foreign goods.
Trump has turned that theory upside down: Instead of fighting child labor abroad, we simply just allow it here.
But Trump has turned that theory upside down: Instead of fighting child labor abroad, we simply put “America First” by allowing it here. While states make it easier for children to work in the US, DOGE has eliminated of grants by the Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) “to non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations working in other countries to promote better working conditions for the most vulnerable people and to ensure companies complied with international labor standards.”
Makes sense.
The discontinued projects reached across continents and industries, according to the Labor Department website. One grant went toward helping end a practice in Uzbekistan that put farmers and children to work picking cotton against their will. Another grantee trained agriculture workers in Mexico on labor rights, aiming to end child labor in the tobacco industry. A project in West Africa helped curb the practice of 10-year-old children being sent to harvest cacao beans with machetes, according to Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, a group of organizations fighting child labor domestically and internationally.
Meanwhile, this week’s Weekly Toll reports the deaths of a 16 year old and a 19 year old.
Maybe God wasn’t paying attention?
Thank you Jordan for this sad profile of child labor in the U.S, particularly Florida. We are going back so far in history to allow for this as a matter of acceptance. We have always had child labor but now it is being sanctioned, and meanwhile we can just send adults to prison in El Salvador. it is very disturbing, of course, that kids can’t vote to express their displeasure with their rights being taken away. And in all my years focusing on protecting young workers, sometimes it was parents who are the worst at protecting kids at work, partly because they are not health and safety professionals, do not know what is going on in workplaces, and ultimately have no power to protect their kids from abuse in the workplace. So-called parents’ rights advocates, have no say over working conditions. In parent-owned businesses, parents often put their kids in serious harm’s way. Child Protective Services should have been involved in some cases. The U.S. that doesn’t value education for children and youth will see us fall even further behind in our ability to compete in the world, on top of all the other regressive policies of this administration.
I love this quote: ‘The solution to Wisconsin’s worker shortages is not shorter workers.” — Wisconsin Assemblywoman Deb Andraca. Also, I love the photo, but didn’t see the credit, who took it? Sorry if I missed it mentioned in your article. Thank you again! Mary, former Child Labor Specialist, Washington State
Children in their teens are absolutely clueless to the dangers in the workplace. Teens also tend to carry an attitude that it’s going to be old age that will be the demise of them. A workplace “injury or death” is the LAST thing on their minds. Then there’s the fact that too many employers don’t properly train or train these young kids at all, as was in the case of my 19 year olds workplace fatality. He was simply told by his employer, “Stay far enough away from the auger or it will pull you in.” REALLY?! Yes, that’s the actual scenarios young kids are faced with, and it royally ticks me off that anyone out there wants to put a kid in place of doing what’s already downright dangerous for any adult who does know the dangers, etc. I’m just appalled at the type of individuals we have in government supporting these bills.
Wonderful story, Jordan. DOL updated child safety rules for manufacturing during the Obama administration, as I am sure you know, but canceled the effort to update them for children working in agriculture because the Farm Bureau had a fit. And now there won’t be anyone to enforce manufacturing standards and kids are still left picking tobacco, carrying bushel baskets of tomatoes when they are very young, climbing unsafe ladders, driving heaving farm equipment. It is a terrible shame. In 2010, a wonderful documentary came out about it all that is still available on Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iILwsZtAYAw
Rena