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They're Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?
- vfclists 3y agoIsn't cheaper labor the main reason for migrant workers? Are you also sure that some of those child laborers are not eager to work? For some of the older ones going through the hassle of migration only to depend on state handouts may not be good enough and the probably need to send some earnings to their families.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago> Are you also sure that some of those child laborers are not eager to work? The children yearn for the mines
- gnicholas 3y agoAre you comparing a skittles factory to an underground mine?
- ben0x539 3y agoNo, they're mocking the notion that children actually want to be economically exploited. The specific phrase has some history in related online discourse.
- kdr77 3y agoWorking in a factory is incredibly dangerous work and many children get permanently disabled or are killed. Here are more articles in this series: 1) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/magazine/child-labor-dangerous-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/magazine/child-labor-dang... 2) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/14/us/roofing-children-immigrants.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/14/us/roofing-ch...
- gnicholas 3y agoNo doubt it can be dangerous. But invoking “mines” is unnecessarily inflammatory.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThis is an incredibly common phrase and you can view this as a learning opportunity. If its use is causing emotions in you, then what a good starting point in a journey of self discovery? Why do you think it makes you feel so inflamed?
- gnicholas 3y agoDid you see emotion in my question, or in my use of the word "inflammatory"? If so, perhaps you should determine what is causing you to project emotion in this way.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoInflammatory means it stirs emotions up in people. I'm glad you're aware of your emotions, but I'm curious, why did it do that for you?
- gnicholas 3y agoWhat dictionary are you citing? My dictionary says: arousing or intended to arouse angry or violent feelings. But you didn't answer my question, so I'll pass on answering yours (especially because it misstates what I said). Good day, strange stranger!
- kelseyfrog 3y agoSo either it stirred within you emotions, or you're discrediting it because you're assuming that it does in others. I'm curious which of those it is. Is it the latter? Why would you care so much what others feel? What sort of violence would it imply? So many unanswered questions. You have a fascinating mind gnicholas.
- atoav 3y agoThe phrase is a satirical meme used to sarcastically comment on the ongoing tendencies to ease child labour restrictions and crontrols in certain parts of the US. Edit: those downvoting me, please consider that this is not necessarily the opinion I hold, I am not from the US and I might not have enough background information to even judge this. What I wrore above is what a 5 minutes on research on that phrase brought up.
- araes 3y agoI really need upvotes with themes sometimes. /s
- Manuel_D 3y agoIf the alternative is poverty, this is likely correct. It's a difficult problem to solve, because people aren't very motivated to improve the economic situation in foreign countries.
- User23 3y ago> Isn't cheaper labor the main reason for migrant workers? I’m pretty sure the perception of a better quality of life is the main reason for migrant workers. I’ve never heard an H-1B say the reason they migrated is to drive down wages. That’s not to say that employers don’t enjoy depressing the workers’ share of profits, but since migration to the USA is currently voluntary the desires of employers cannot be the main reason.
- RandallBrown 3y agoI think they meant "Isn't cheaper labor the main reason to hire migrant workers?"
- nothercastle 3y agoThey also work harder and put up with shit labor practices but in a nutshell yes
- User23 3y agoOn the flip side I personally know a small business owner who got fined thousands by the feds for slightly overpaying his legal migrant workers. So failing to be properly exploitative is also illegal.
- Amezarak 3y agoWell, the main answers in the article seem to be: - migrant children show up and work and just lie about their age or supply forged documentation, which is impossible to verify for the company or any US agency. - not enough government inspectors, and not enough latitude during inspections for private inspectors; e.g., having to request permission to show up on second shift. (2) is easy to solve with money, but I have no idea what anyone could be expected to do about (1), unless you decide to aggressively prosecute companies relying on migrant workers, which is politically untenable for both parties.
- rndmwlk 3y ago>migrant children show up and work and just lie about their age or supply forged documentation, which is impossible to verify for the company or any US agency. Except it is possible, obviously, as the Department of Labor ultimately discovered the child labor. Auditing isn't simply looking over some spreadsheets, I've had to audit inventory before back in the day and we had to go to the warehouse and verify actual inventory. These auditors aren't doing their due diligence because these auditors aren't hired to find any issues, they're hired to provide a passed audit. The solution is that these audits shouldn't be privatized, or significantly heftier fines need to be levied to align incentives.
- Amezarak 3y agoI agree that the audits should not be privatized and we should probably increase the number of Department of Labor employees by an order of magnitude or two, but how do you propose a DoL employee verify the age of a Guatemalan national who says he's 18 but is really 15 and has paperwork to "prove" it? This is actually a very hard problem to solve. Even some American citizens don't have any government paperwork documenting their age, but fortunately the number is very low and they typically belong to groups that would not be applying to work in factories anyway. > Except it is possible, obviously, as the Department of Labor ultimately discovered the child labor. The article sadly did not go into detail about how they did it - presumably they discovered some blatant or documented discrepancies. It says only that they were "severe."
- gnicholas 3y agoWhen I searched the article for “billion”, I saw only two occurrences in the article (plus one in the headline). The impression I got is that there is a multi-billion dollar worldwide compliance industry, which does multiple things, including check for child labor. But I wasn’t remotely convinced that this industry is paid billions to root out child labor in the US. Was there evidence provided that indicates this?
- geodel 3y agoBut that would also root out their own labor which they might not be inclined to do.
- gnicholas 3y agoYou’re suggesting that the auditing firms themselves use child labor?
- somedude895 3y agoProbably meaning that they'd lose their jobs if they solved the problem.
- bashinator 3y agoEveryone knows that once you've addressed a problem it goes away forever and no further attention ever has to be paid to it. That's how we fixed racism in the United States back in the 1960s!
- klyrs 3y agoI have a friend in this industry and I think your response excessively misses the point GP made. Auditors who actually succeed in flagging child labor find themselves without work -- either because of actions of their employer, or because their employer gets a reputation and businesses who employ child labor don't want the spotlight. It isn't that Nike (or whoever) wants to employ children, what they really want is to not get caught employing children. And they also don't want to pay higher wages, and they don't want to pay supply chain auditors. So if they can get away with paying a rubber-stamp auditor, they can claim they did their due diligence and wash their hands of it.
- wredue 3y agoYes. This is an actual systematic issue in private sector services. Rather than regulatory body “random” selection for audit, private sector actually gets say in who is picked for their own audit, and if those auditors “find things” those auditors are no longer picked, and thus lose their jobs. I don’t know if child labour auditing is specifically impacted by this issue, but most definitely other forms of audit and bargaining are.
- kelseyfrog 3y agohttps://archive.ph/8kzV6 https://archive.ph/8kzV6
- Animats 3y agoWell, that totally trashes UL's reputation. They used to be Underwriters Laboratories, a nonprofit owned by insurance companies, and had a good reputation. Their only product was neutral safety evaluations. Then, in 2012, they "reorganized" and became a for-profit organization. In 2022, they reorganized again. Their century-old reputation is now toast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization)
- mistrial9 3y agoone toast, three hundred fifty million muffins
- kristjank 3y agoI opened the article wondering why, then the first line said "Private auditors", and then it was pretty clear to me. Why would you ever rely on auditors paid with private sector profit to care for basic human rights? Especially when paid for by a huge corporation? The answer must lie in strengthening the Labor department, but that's a whole another problem I imagine.
- thedigitalone 3y agohttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/cK5GE https://ghostarchive.org/archive/cK5GE
- ram4jesus 3y agoChild Labor, like illegal immigration, like having a narco state on its borders, like endless wars, like keeping opium production at record levels during its unjust, cruel, and senseless occupation of Afghanistan, benefits the US elites. It does not benefit you or I, plebes, but the holy few that are chasing profits at all costs while crushing everyone else. The US has a history of doing highly illegal stuff for profits and the unwashed masses be damned. This is just a lame attempt at saying that there's a problem and it's being addressed. It's like if you know your neighbor is very hungry and instead of inviting them for diner or giving them a nice meal, you give them a crinkled dollar.
- FireBeyond 3y agoI always go back to the Tyson Chicken raids a few years ago to show just how broken this is. ICE officials raided a few facilities a few years ago, and actually found about 900 undocumented workers. Many of them gave evidence to officials, including written instructions from the company that advised them how to fill out employment, banking, taxation paperwork if they "didn't have documentation", i.e. Tyson didn't just know this was the case, they were actively enabling it. And in press conferences, when journalists asked about any plans to investigate/punish Tyson, ICE "had no plans to do so". What it actually ended up looking like, with some other safety issues raised around that time is that Tyson perhaps decided their undocumented workers were getting a little too angry about poor safety standards, and making waves. It would be entirely unsurprising if Tyson made a sweetheart deal with ICE that said "Hey, if you come to these plants, you'll get to make this big stink about undocumented workers" (and remember, this was during the Trump administration), "but in return, can you leave us out of it?". "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
- Animats 3y agoWhen the government did crack down on a big employer of illegal immigrants, in 2008, there were screams. A prominent Jew did go to jail for years, until pardoned by Trump. That was the last time enforcement got serious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid
- citizenpaul 3y agoSame as always - They tell them weeks in advance they will be making an inspection - The inspectors only work banker hours. - Inspectors are low paid government workers making them susceptible to bribes and various other pay to play manipulation. - No one really cares about the violations, its just about checking off lists to say it was done. - Status quo is what matters. - Even when inspectors find something they often ignore it unless its truly egregious because it will cause more work for the inspector then ignoring it. - Inspectors,even true believers in the cause are eventually worn down by the bureaucracy and push back from powerful people to keep status quo.
- tprynn 3y agoYou tell a fun anecdotal narrative but in other cases those workers show up unannounced and threaten to separate families if they don't allow entrance even though of course that's unconstitutional. You can't reduce it to a single story here. - https://www.propublica.org/article/child-welfare-search-seizure-without-warrants https://www.propublica.org/article/child-welfare-search-seiz... - https://www.propublica.org/article/dcfs-illinois-investigations-child-welfare https://www.propublica.org/article/dcfs-illinois-investigati... - https://www.propublica.org/article/some-constitutional-rights-dont-apply-in-child-welfare https://www.propublica.org/article/some-constitutional-right...
- u32480932048 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747w&ab_channel=talkRAYdio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747w&ab_channel=talkR...
- smogcutter 3y agoTFA is not about family child welfare services. Thats it’s own mess, not relevant to parents point or anything having to do with corrupt private “auditors” turning a blind eye to migrant child labor.
- citizenpaul 3y agoWhen the FBI took down the FLDS church with hundreds of child brides that also had kids of their own. The FBI/Social services essentially threw up their hands and said this is too big a problem then handed the child brides and products of child r@pe back to the abusers to continue on. Watch the doc on netfix. Child protective services (CPS) is mostly a joke all over the world. It all stems from the same problem. You have to spent 24x7 for 18 years raising the child if you take it from the parents. There simply are far more abuse cases happening then there are people willing to raise other peoples children. Making a child takes moments. The resources of raising for 18 years is an imbalance that cannot be reconciled.
- kthejoker2 3y agoIt's laid out pretty clearly in the article why: > the suppliers ... arrange and pay for the audits. > After Mr. Callington failed three Walgreens suppliers ... the chain complained > the supplier objected to his finding 21 violations when the previous audit had found none. Who's paying for what. Big vendor wants a shiny "responsibly sourced" badge. Supplier wants a rubber stamp. The real question is why bother with the actual audits?
- neonate 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231229014350/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/us/migrant-child-labor-audits.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231229014350/https://www.nytim...
- nonrandomstring 3y agoBut we still keep buying the products of misery and exploitation. I guess the smartphone users who saw Foxconn put up "anti-suicide" nets and carried on shopping as usual don't really care that much?