Child labor, (over and over) again
I just found out that Florida state law allows 16- and 17-year-olds to work 30 hours per week when school is in session. My 17-year-old grandson, Jovani, just got a job in a bakery (where his brother, my 22-year-old grandson, Anthony, works). But 30 hours a week on top of 30 hours a week in school? And then you have to add in time for homework, band, flirting, detention, and hanging out. Doesn’t leave much time for washing dishes or cleaning up your room. But a recent series of articles has exposed how serious the problem of child labor is in this country, beyond the regulation of work hours for 17-year-olds.
The Guardian reported that “As child labor law violations have been on the rise in the US, some state legislators are pushing for changes at state and federal levels to roll back protections in what some see as a threat to return child labor to the country… The laws aim to expand permissible work hours, broaden the types of jobs young workers are permitted to do, and shield employers from liability for injuries, illnesses or workplace fatalities involving very young workers.” Among the companies that the U.S. Department of Labor has cited for violations are Hyundai, Kia, JBS meatpacking plants, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, and Chipotle.
According to Vox, “Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders approved a bill on Tuesday [March 7, 2023] eliminating a requirement for children under 16 to obtain state documentation in order to work… The new law, called the Youth Hiring Act, will eliminate the requirement that children aged 14 and 15 seeking a job acquire a document issued by the director of the Division of Labor, which includes the child’s work schedule and a description of their work duties, as well as proof of age and parent or guardian consent.” In other words, removing government oversight of the types of jobs those children can do safely.
The Guardian article points out that “[a]An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 minors work in the U.S. agriculture industry annually, with 48% of all young worker fatalities between 2001 to 2015 occurring in the agriculture industry.”
CBS News reported “a 70% increase in the number of children illegally employed by companies over the past five years… The increase in unlawful child labor cases has come as the number of migrant minors entering U.S. border custody without their parents has reached record levels.” The New York Times published a comprehensive overview of the exploitation of unaccompanied migrant child workers, including “Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota,” and working for companies that manufacture products for brand names such as Ben & Jerry’s, Walmart, Target, Fruit of the Loom, Ford, General Motors, J. Crew, Lucky Charms, Chewy, Nature Valley, Cheetos, and Cheerios.
Even migrant children who come to this country with their parents are not safe from workplace dangers. ProPublica investigated the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a Wisconsin dairy farm where his father worked.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was the first federal regulation of child labor, but as we’ve seen recently with voting rights and women’s rights, hard-won rights, like the right of children to be children, have to be fought for over and over again.
“iPhones are made in hell”
Rest of World published in January a disturbing 3-month investigation of working conditions in the Foxconn plant — “China’s iPhone city” — in Zhengzhou in central China. The Taiwanese-owned plant “covers an area of 5.6 square kilometers [just over 2 square miles] — about one-tenth the size of Manhattan — and at full capacity employs some 200,000 workers.” (In 2018, Business Insider reported that the workforce, around 350,000, produced half of all iPhones in the world, at a rate of 350 per minute in the busy holiday season.) In 2017 Foxconn employed 1.3 million workers in China.
The frenetic pace of production and the intrusive surveillance by the supervisors and their vocal humiliation of the workers, became even more unbearable during the Covid-19 pandemic when Foxconn gave workers a choice — either be confined to the factory dormitory during the government-ordered lockdown, or quit. Many quit. Others eventually escaped the factory and walked home. Fed up with broken promises regarding benefits and unsanitary conditions in the factory dormitory,
thousands of recruits broke out of their quarantine to vent their anger… [On November 23, 2022], footage of riot police beating up protesters and protesters smashing Foxconn offices circulated in workers’ group chats. The conflict intensified at night, as workers, some carrying Chinese national flags in an apparent attempt to tie their cause to the Communist state, threw objects at the police. “Hit back at them!” the crowd chanted…
At the Foxconn plant in Longhua, China in 2010, according to The Guardian,
assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation — and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials… Suicide notes and survivors told of immense stress, long workdays and harsh managers who were prone to humiliate workers for mistakes, of unfair fines and unkept promises of benefits… Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves.
The Guardian wrote that “[then-CEO of Apple, Inc.] Steve Jobs, for his part, declared: ‘We’re all over that’ when asked about the spate of deaths and he pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average.”
The view from the Global South
The Ukraine-Russia conflict looks different from the Global South, most of whose countries have been or are on the receiving end of the “rules-based international order” so lovingly espoused, but so seldom practiced, by Democrats and Republicans. “The United States sets the rules, and everyone else has to follow them” is the general sentiment. So when Washington and the European Union decided to use Ukrainian lives to beat Russia into submission and imposed sanctions on Russia without consulting the nations that are most affected by such sanctions, using smoke-and-mirror platitudes about “opposing aggression” and “territorial integrity,” you can understand why the general reaction from Africa, Asia, and Latin America is, “We’ve seen the movie. The sequel sucks.”
These three articles lay out an anti-imperialist analysis of the war from that point of view. The first is from William Shoki, deputy editor, and Sean Jacobs, founder-editor, or Africa is a Country and was written one week into the Russian invasion.
The anti-imperialist stance is not on the side of the West, nor with Russia (and by extension, China). It is refusing to pick a side in an elite-serving great power conflict using Ukraine as its proxy. The anti-imperialist position is non-alignment from below and encourages our states to follow such a foreign policy. The African proverb that history’s great purveyor of non-alignment, Kwame Nkrumah, was often wont to recite goes: “When the bull and elephant fight, the grass is trampled down.” Non-alignment, then, does not mean indifference — it means solidarity with those who stand to suffer from war most, and against war because it causes suffering for most. Therefore, we must be unequivocally anti-war, and unconditionally in solidarity (not unlike that which was afforded to the plight of Black Americans last summer) with ordinary Ukrainians, and ordinary Russians, who did not sanction this war and will endure greater repression as they take to the streets to oppose it.
The second was written by William Shoki on the first anniversary of the war:
The civilizational terms on which this war is framed, will only continue to alienate countries in the Global South. The simple reason for that remains that the West cannot simultaneously mobilize concepts like justice and freedom in the defense of Ukrainians, while it presides over an unjust and unequal international order. We need alternative ways to respond to such international crises.
Writing in Asia Times, Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, wrote about how these contradictions played out at the G20 meeting in Bangalore, India in February:
What is the evidence for this loss of [Western] credibility [in the Global South]? Few of the states in the Global South have been willing to participate in the isolation of Russia, including voting on Western resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly.
Not all of the states that have refused to join the West are “anti-Western” in a political sense. Many of them, including the government in India, are driven by practical considerations, such as Russia’s discounted energy prices and the assets being sold at a lowered price by Western companies that are departing from Russia’s lucrative energy sector.
Whether they are fed up with being pushed around by the West or they see economic opportunities in their relationship with Russia, increasingly countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have avoided the pressure coming from Washington to break ties with Russia. It is this refusal and avoidance that drove [French President Emmanuel] Macron to make his strong statement about being “shocked” by the loss of Western credibility.
Burn Pits #2
The November 6, 2022 Thoughts-letter (“Burn Pits and the Iraqis”) explained that the U.S. military turned much of Vietnam into a chemical waste dump and many years later compensated U.S. veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and other chemicals; that no corporations, executives, or politicians were held responsible for that exposure; and that the Vietnamese received no compensation, not even official acknowledgement, for the human and ecological disaster resulting from that chemical warfare.
The U.S. military’s use of burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan also resulted in chemical exposure and health consequences for U.S. veterans and subcontractors and for Iraqis and Afghans living near those pits. As with Vietnam, U.S. veterans succeeded after a long struggle to get compensation for their exposures; no corporations, executives, or politicians were held accountable; and Iraqis and Afghans received nothing.
Yesterday’s Washington Post’s article (“U.S. veterans won justice for burn pit exposure. Iraqis were forgotten.”) detailed some of the health problems among Iraqis living near Joint Base Balad (Camp Anaconda), 40 miles north of Baghdad — many of the same debilitating and deadly diseases reported by U.S. veterans. The reporters confirmed that the U.S. military knew in 2006 about the dangers, even when the U.S. government was telling veterans that there was no known link between their exposures and their health problems.
Aeromedical Services Chief Lt. Col. James Elliot added his own warning [to a 2006 report]: “The known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and a chronic health hazard to our troops and the local population.”
A 2019 article in Military Times quotes a Pentagon report that explained why the department continues to use burn pits:
“Open burning remains a field expedient alternative to reduce waste volume and protect troops from disease… Despite significant [research, design, test and evaluation] investment, no vendor or academic has been able to meet the basic DoD deployable incinerator requirements of scalability, transportability, reliability and fuel economy,”
In other words, burn pits are cost-effective. But the government’s cost calculation doesn’t account for the cost to veterans and to the local people of early death, long-term health care, and lost employment opportunities and income, and the cost of environmental remediation of the soil and groundwater. (My guess is the U.S. military fills in and covers over the burn pits it no longer needs. That is also cost-effective.)
I have a solution that will bring the cost down to zero: Stop invading other countries.
Notable Dates
March 1, 1886 — 200,000 railroad workers, led by the Knights of Labor, stopped work in what came to be known as the Great Southwest Railroad Strike. Robber baron Jay Gould, who owned Southwest Railroad, used scabs, a private militia, and federal troops to break the strike.
March 1, 1954 — Four Puerto Rican nationalists, led by Lolita Lebron, unfurled the Puerto Rican flag, shouted “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” and fired guns during a session of the House of Representatives, injuring five representatives.
March 2, 2016 — Indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home. In 2018 a Honduran court found that the murderers “had been hired by executives within Desa, a company constructing a dam in indigenous Lenca territory.”
March 7, 1965 — State and local police attacked civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
March 8, 1957 — Women garment workers in New York City went on strike for better pay and working conditions, a 10-hour day, and equal rights. New York City police attacked the demonstrators. At the 1910 International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, Denmark, Clara Zetkin, a German socialist, proposed celebrating March 8 as International Working Women’s Day in honor of the New York City garment workers.
March 14, 2018 — Brazilian ex-military police assassinated Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian queer woman who was a community leader, socialist, and city councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro. Some evidence points to the involvement of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s sons, Flavio and Carlos. In a stunning political statement, President Lula da Silva appointed Anielle Franco, Marielle’s sister, as Brazil’s Minister of Racial Justice on January 11, 2023.
March 18, 1971 — Workers in Paris seized power in the city and established the Paris Commune. Two months later it was crushed by Prussian troops, to whom the French ruling class appealed for salvation. Karl Marx praised the Commune as an example in practice of what working class state power looks like. In his address in May 1971 to the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx reflected on one of the lessons of the Commune: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
March 19-20, 2003 — The United States invaded Iraq, with catastrophic consequences.
March 21, 1965 — South African police attacked Black anti-apartheid demonstrators in Sharpeville, killing 200.
March 25, 1911 — The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan caught fire. “Trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors, workers jumped to their deaths. In a half an hour, the fire was over, and 146 of the 500 workers – mostly young women – were dead.”
March 30, 1976 — Israeli police killed six and injured hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel protesting Israeli land theft in the Galilee. Palestinians commemorate the event as Land Day.
Apropos of nothing
My daily Semafor Flagship (#108) newsletter contained the following headline: “Bank rescues calm investors.” The lede explained: “Rescues of troubled banks on both sides of the Atlantic appeared to calm investor jitters. The biggest U.S. lenders jointly deposited $30 billion into First Republic Bank, while the European Central Bank’s as-expected 0.5-percentage-point interest-rate hike signaled a vote of confidence in Swiss support plans for Credit Suisse.” I get all warm and fuzzy knowing that banks are helping each other out, but the headline made me chuckle. If you read the headline as adjective (bank) noun (rescues) verb (calm) noun (investors), then it accurately summarizes the story. If you read the headline as noun (bank) verb (rescues) adjective (calm) noun (investors), then the headline is way funnier than the story — why would calm investors need to be rescued by a bank?
The I-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Department
So here’s Minnesota Republican state Senator Steve Drazkowski arguing against a bill that would address the problem of food insecurity in the state: “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. Yet today, I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat… Now, I should say that hunger is a relative term. I had a cereal bar for breakfast. I guess I’m ‘hungry’ now.” And further, “This [bill] is about the government dictating to kids what they’re going to eat and how much they’re going to eat.”
Yep. He said that. He really said that. He also made a video explaining socialism. I can’t make this stuff up.
Dad Joke
Why did the airline not allow Jeffrey Dahmer to board the plane?
Answer: He had too many carrion bags.