On April 1, 2024 Washington Post reporter Lauren Gurley wrote yet another story of politicians promoting child labor: “America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor laws.” The Post has previously published stories on child labor such as February 11, March 8, April 23, and April 30, 2023.
Corporate America’s relentless effort to exploit children goes back many decades. Congress passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act back in 1916, an age when the courts would not do anything to impede corporate America in their eternal quest for cheap labor. Child welfare reformers tried to use the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the transportation of products through interstate commerce for products produced with child labor.
Use of the commerce clause was a legal strategy intended to satisfy the judicial review they were certain would come. In previous cases the Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that the commerce clause of the constitution provided Congress with the necessary power to regulate interstate commerce. Even though the court previously upheld a ban on the interstate transportation of adulterated drugs, and another banning the interstate sale of lottery tickets, and still another banning the interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes, the justices searched for previously unheard of excuses to undo child labor legislation.
In the Supreme Court case known as Hammer v. Dagenhart the
court wrote that the interstate transportation of adulterated drugs, lottery
tickets, and prostitutes created “harmful results” but the new law that
restricted children under 14 from working more than 8 hours a day, or more than
6 days a week, or before 6 a.m. or after 7 p.m. in textile mills did not create
“harmful results” and was therefore beyond the power of Congress to regulate.
In the wrap up to their long and convoluted written opinion of June 3, 1918 the
justices declared
the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act
“repugnant” to the constitution.
The Post’s April 1 review reported a long list of child
labor law violations with under age teens working long hours doing hazardous
work that state and federal labor law prohibits for minors. Not to worry, just
change the law as did Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. She signed a new law that
allows minors in that state to work in industrial laundries, light
manufacturing, demolition, roofing and excavation. Ms. Gurley also mentions the
Florida-based lobbying group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, that
fights to restrict access to anti-poverty programs as well as drafting
legislation to end child labor protections. This groups fits perfectly into
Florida where Governor DeSantis signed a new law that allows 16 and 17 year olds
to work seven days in a row and removes all hours restrictions for teens in
online school or home school, effectively permitting them to work overnight
shifts.
Current Population Survey data proves a plentiful
supply of labor. The Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics report
the civilian population since 1990 was up every year with an annual growth rate
of 1.05 percent. A growing population allows an increase in the supply of
labor, but the actual increase depends on the numbers who enter the labor
force. In 2023, an adult civilian population of 266.9 million people supplied
167.1 million adults to the labor force, leaving 99.8 million adults not in the
labor force (NLF); adults not children. Those not in the labor force can change
their mind and enter the labor force to look for work and become part of the
labor supply.
In the ten years from 2013 leading through 2023 the adult civilian population increased at .83 percent a year while the labor force increased at a rate of only .73 percent.
In the same period the labor force increased at .73 percent the adults not in
the labor increased at 1.01 percent.
In a labor
shortage we would expect the opposite. In a shortage, the labor force grows
faster than population as employers lure some of those 99.8 million adults back
into the labor force by offering higher wages and maybe a few benefits as well.
We can all conclude that wages and working conditions are substandard and do
not generate enough people able or willing to return to the labor force. The
United States does not have a shortage of labor; shortages are a myth offered
by the cheapskates of corporate America, always trolling for people they can
coerce to work for lower wages, including undocumented immigrants and underage
children.
