Newspaper Investigation Reveals Lax Enforcement of Child Labor Laws

by James Parks, Dec 3, 2008

Félie and thousands of children like him work every day and are not in schools.

On a typical day, more than 400 workers younger than 18 are hurt on the job in the United States and one is killed every 10 days. At the same time, the number of federal child labor investigations has declined by half since the Bush administration took office eight years ago.

In a two-part series last week, the Charlotte Observer revealed that employers are ignoring federal child labor laws and getting away with it. As part of its investigation, the Observer interviewed more than 20 current and former House of Raeford Farms workers who said the North Carolina-based poultry company often hired underage workers. Click here and here to read the series.

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) told the Observer:

It’s hard to believe that’s going on in this century and in this state….You’re really talking about a form of child abuse here.

The U.S. Labor Department has 750 investigators who look into both child labor and wage and hour complaints, 20 percent fewer than in 2001, according to Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Education and Labor subcommittee on Workforce Protections. Woolsey, who conducted hearings last September on child labor, has vowed to work with the incoming Obama administration to strengthen child labor laws and increase the number of inspectors.

The current laws have been loosely enforced at best, the Observer found. Under federal law, the maximum penalty for most child labor violations is $11,000, but in 2006 the average penalty was less than $1,000.

In an interview with the Observer, Woolsey said:

Nobody should face dangerous working conditions—particularly our children….We have a great deal of work to do.

Federal and state laws prohibit anyone younger than 18 from working in jobs deemed hazardous, including poultry processing. But three young workers told the Observer they were under 18 when they held jobs at House of Raeford plants requiring them to make thousands of cuts a day with sharp knives.

Fifteen-year-old Lucero Gayton worked 10-hour shifts at the Raeford chicken plant outside Greenville, S.C., wielding a sharp knife, cutting muscles from thousands of freshly killed chickens. She told the reporters:

I was scared that I’d cut my finger off. I did cut myself a few times.

House of Raeford has been cited for at least 130 workplace safety violations since 2000—among the most of any U.S. poultry company. The company is one of the nation’s top chicken and turkey producers, with some 6,000 employees and eight processing plants in the Carolinas and Louisiana.

But child labor is not just a U.S. problem. Every day, more than 250 million children around the world—one in every six between ages 5 and 17—go to work instead of school. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 171 million children are engaged in hazardous work, including 111 million who are younger than 15. Some 8.4 million children are trapped in the worst forms of child labor, including slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, forced military recruitment, prostitution and pornography.

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center is working to keep more children in school while their parents earn decent wages so their children don’t have to work. Over the past year, a unique Solidarity Center partnership with Save the Children UK has enabled more than 700 boys and girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to leave jobs in the mines and attend school full-time so they can have a chance for a better life. When AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, a former mine worker himself, heard about the thousands of children in Congolese mines, he recognized the need to act:

When you look at the eyes of these children, they have all the life plucked out of them—none of the sparkle and excitement that you normally see in children as they play and anticipate all the joys of life. They should be learning to read and think, stretching their minds and not their backs. If we can stop just one child from meeting this fate, it is worth the struggle.

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