EP 680 America Revisits Child Labor Law: Really?

There are things that still seem unimaginable even in the political chaos of our times as women’s rights are being stripped away and historical content taught in schools is being tightened so as not to ‘offend’ students.  One of those to my mind is the push in a number of states to ease restrictions on child labor.  It’s hard to imagine that we want to revisit the images seared in our minds by Upton Sinclair in his novel “The Jungle”  which exposed the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry at the turn of the 20th century and place young people in that circumstance again.  Mind you there are stories of the two 10-year old children found to have worked unpaid shifts at a Kentucky McDonald’s and unaccompanied migrant children cleaning up remains at a meat packing plant in the US, as well as an increase in federal child law violations, but what we discuss more directly in this podcast is the growing movement in state legislatures to ease restrictions on child labor because of worker shortages. Backed by business groups, this push is to lift limits on hours worked, types of work performed and the ages of those involved in states like Arkansas, Tennessee and Minnesota, among others.  It’s a trend that must be monitored to ensure that we do not backslide to a place we have not been in this country for more than a century. Elisabeth Jacobs, a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of “Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor”, joins us to discuss.

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