It Could Happen Here - American Child Labor, An Unceasing Horror

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Mia and Shereen talk about the history of attempts to end child labor in the US and how their failure produced the unfathomable atrocities children suffer todaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. It's happening here. The thing that's happening here is fucking child labor. I am deeply angry this episode. This is It Could Happen Here here i'm your host mia wong and with me is shireen hi mia i'm so glad to join you on this really uplifting episode yeah it's gonna be great so yes all right as anyone who studied like even a little bit of labor history knows the the fight over child labor is very very old it is it's one of the

first causes the sort of liberal reformers to capitalism took up in the early 1800s like it's like in the communist manifesto was one of the things it's actually it's one of the things people point out is like oh we've done all the things that was in the original communist manifesto and it's like no no we never got rid of this uh you know it's it's also one of the things that like you get these sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we eliminated child labor. This is like this is proof the system works. No, it is the battle over child labor is a battle that we are in the middle of losing.

We are losing it in in worse and worse ways every day. So, OK, so why why are we why are we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in this country um there's there's a lot of reasons one of the big problems is that vast swaths of the u.s sees child labor as morally good um you know they see it as something like oh this is like you teach your kids this is like how you yeah this is like how they grow up and get responsible and yeah and this is true in a lot of parts of the world. It's also completely and absolutely bonkers. It's just nuts.

People shouldn't think like this. It's incredibly weird. And the other thing you get a lot is there's sort of different versions of more or less socially acceptable child labor rights like i think most people agree if you're not running the business that like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever yes you know there's like lots of things that people are like oh no kid working in a restaurant like that's completely fine like oh it's like a like a 14 year old is like doing farm work on a farm like that's fine

but it's a slippery slope right because it starts with farm work and then trickle trickle down also like i i i would argue that that's also not fine because what's what's essentially happening here is that there's this basically like this sort of family loophole to people's understanding of child labor. We're like, as long as child labor is being done by like the family as an economic unit instead of like capitalists directly. Yeah, it's fine. It's like, no, no, it's not. It's actually not fine to be working. People be like be a child and I'm working for a living for your family.

Like that's not OK. Yeah, I think there's a difference between. be a child and working for a living for your family. Like that's not okay. Yeah. I think there's a difference between, I think there's a difference between like child labor and like working in a field for your family versus like a chore. You know what I mean? Like, yeah,

yeah. It's, I think, I think that line gets blurred and, uh, people see their kids as much more mature than they are and like able to like, no,

I, I, I understand what you're saying. And I think I agree. I think I agree. Yeah. And it's, I don't know.

It, it sucks. This has a lot of sort of knock on effects. One of the big knock on effects is has, and this is, this has been a thing for like the entire history of child labor, right? Is that like capitalists use children as a way to drive down wages for

everyone else. And this is, you know, if you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage right one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is that like oh well it's like it's like kids get the minimum wage so like it's fine it's like one it's not like children are not morally worth less and their labor is also not worth less than an adult like like if you're gonna exploit them like this like yeah like things are the same price for everybody it's not like less for a child yeah it's not it's not like it like a kid is like somehow less of a

human being than an adult right like this is this is this sucks but you know it's used to sort of hold down wages directly through things like like opposing minimum wage increases used to hold you know hold down wages sort of indirectly because and this is another the reason like capitalists love child labor is that uh children are you know like they're physically smaller than adults they're easier to control they have less social power and because you know because of that you can pay them less and because of you know and because because people just in our society don't fucking like kids and because of that it's so it's just socially acceptable to just pay them less all all those reasons you listed are absolutely terrifying though like oh they will listen oh they're smaller oh they're like cheaper or whatever it is they're all like terrible reasons to justify child labor it's absurd no they're not good

they're not good and yet however comma it still persists it has persisted it's very old um i'm gonna read something from the bureau of labor statistics about this fucking kid who was working in a mine what okay this is this, this is from the early 1900s. One boy touchingly recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mine this way. I'll always think of my poor blind father and my mother at home, but I won't never play with the boys at all. And then the cracker boss won't have to beat me like he does the others. This boy was nine years old. While stories like

these produced outrage in many quarters in the co-producing regions there is no such concern the view that quote the little devils like it as one coal boss put it seemed to be the prevailing sentiment child labor wasn't discussed these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue so this is like 1900s american view like early 1900s american view on this is like 1900s American view, like early 1900s American view on this, right? Like people, by people I mean capitalists and also people who are incredibly desperate and don't have enough money to get by, like love child labor. There's, you know, it takes a long time for like an actual serious anti-child labor campaign to like get started in the US.

And of course, the exact people who you would expect to oppose banning child labor oppose banning child labor i'm gonna read this from the also from the bureau labor statistics the chairman of the national association of manufacturers said about a law to abolish child labor quote this union this labor union plot against the advancements and happiness of the american boy is a ploy is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion and prosperity in this country. So this is their argument is that is that children don't oppose child labor. This is this is being foisted upon them by outside agitated labor unions.

And also, if we're not allowed to use child labor, if we're not allowed to have a nine-year-old be put in a mine, the entire American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke. It's like making you like being like child labor because patriotism. Like, that's basically what that means. Yeah, it's it's it's genuinely terrible. Like, I I don't know. It's so ghoulish. Like America, like companies today have figured out how to do this PR thing of like, oh, we don't condone child labor.

We crack down on it very seriously. We also hire children literally all the time, but it's fine. We're just, we're going to like, you know, but back in like the 800s, they hadn't really figured that out yet. And so, you know, there's a sort of reform movement that happens. And one of the sort of key moments of this reform thing is the Lawrence textile strike. And this strike

is probably most famous today for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too which is you know like rung down the halls of labor in socialist history is like the names of newspapers songs poems and also like being the namesake of a truly dog shit dsa caucus um we're not going to talk about this strike enormously here the short the very very short version of this strike this is a 1912 strike um the short version of it is that there's a law passed in massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours that you could have women and children work from a blistering 56 hours to a leisurely 54 hours a week oh my god um this prompted uh the local capitalists to get so mad that they did this like massive like industrial speed up so they forced everyone to work faster

and then also doctor everyone's paid for it and this this set off a strike um which was relevant for like our story is that the workers at this plant you know know, there's lots of coverage of the fact that, like, most of these workers are immigrant women of, like, from a bunch of different places. The part of it that's not talked about as much is that another huge portion of the workers were just fucking children. Yeah.

That definitely seems to get glossed over. Yeah, yeah, and it's like, I, I, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe we should go back to talking about that part, because it's it's like, I, you know, I don't know. Maybe we should go back to talking about that part because it's really important for like the stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode that made me so angry. I was like physically punching my pillow. What happens next is that the police crackdown on the strike gets more and more violence. And as this goes on, the workers at like the adult workers at this plant decide, OK, we're going to like send the children who are like both the child workers and also like just people's kids to New York to keep them safe and also to make a political point. But like, hey, look, they're running our children out of town.

And this goes great. The first ways this go great for the children, like a bunch of people in New York show up or like, yeah, hey, we'll take care of these kids like. And this makes like the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this it looks really bad for us and so they they like assembled outside of the next train that was trying to leave and tried to stop them oh my god so here's the labor statistics again when the next group of children prepared to depart the train station, they were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to let them board the trains and launched an attack on the group. A seven-year-old

was given a black eye when she was picked up and thrown into a paddy wagon by police. What? Another witness testified to children being thrown around like rags. Oh my god. Like, yeah, thin blue line, baby. Let's fucking go. The god like yeah thin blue line baby let's fucking go this is this is the thing the cops are the thin blue line between order and chaos that seven-year-old girl yeah

seven-year-old girl's not gonna throw herself around right like someone has to beat up this children and for that there is the few the proud the american police but they were scared for their lives you know what i mean like they were seven-year-olds. That seven-year-old girl looked at me really aggressively. Yeah, I was scared for my life. That's what they said. It's, it's, you know, this is bad. And, like, you know, the 1900s police can get away with, like,

the 1900s police, we've talked about this in other episodes, like, they can get away with just, like, shooting right like they like they can they can show up to like a strike and just open fire into the crowd and it doesn't do anything all right throwing around a bunch of children like rags finally it turned out was the thing that was bad enough that it like started a congressional investigation wow i guess that's good and bad but yeah so so collins launches this investigation and there's like four this 14 year old immigrant girl named camilla tieli testifies about how she was working at the mill when a machine caught her hair and tore her scalp off the police promptly and this is going and okay the police promptly arrested her. Didn't do anything to the company and arrested her dad for lying about her age.

Oh, my God. What? Now this hold that one in your fucking mind, because we're going to come back to that shit. Do I have to? OK, unfortunately, because it's going to get so much worse. This episode is over. So the product of this is that there starts to be like a really mainstream push against child labor which is you know a thing you would have thought would have started earlier because

again we're on like century two of child labor in the u.s by this point right like in the in an entity called the united states but you know apparently it takes this to actually make people go wait maybe this is bad and the product of this is you get this thing called the kenning owen child labor act 1916 now as we sort of talked about earlier right the weakness of this law is that it you know it allows kids to be used as laborers like inside of the family unit so like if you're on a family you know and then this is a very very broad category right so it's you know you can you can force your child to work as long as like you're their parents right you're the one making the money off of them and not like a capitalist but even this even this is considered too strong

of a law and in 1918 the supreme court rules that it's unconstitutional to ban child labor wait what yeah they do these multiple times multiple times and i i we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show the supreme court is and has always been just one of history's greatest monsters like yeah wait i was right then child labor does equal patriotism that's basically what they're saying so eventually fdr gets into this giant fight with the supreme court and the first child labor law we get federal child labor law that gets that sticks i like doesn't happen till 1938 when fdr threatens to pack the court if the court refuses to fucking stop i stop saying that that that the saying that the state doesn't have the power to regulate child labor. Wow, it's like literally less than a century ago.

That is like yesterday. You know, but, you know, and this actually works, right? But, but, and this is a real problem. And this is a problem that we're going to talk about later in this fucking episode in the modern day. Those child labor laws don't get enforced it doesn't that act that actual the 19 the 1938 fair labor act like basically doesn't actually do shit to like reduce the amount of child labor in the country and here's the thing like even now even before all the horror show stuff that we're about to get to that's happening right now like

even before all the horror show stuff that we're about to get to that's happening right now like not kids like we never actually dealt with child labor through like the law like we just basically outsourced you know okay we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper than like an american child and we did it's either like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have legal citizenship status or just outsourcing and then you know we our kids still fucking do work you know like our like they're like it's very common for 10 and 12 year olds to work it's just that it's usually like babysitting or like mowing lawns and we've just we've decided that like no this is actually fine like it is actually fine to fucking put 12 year olds in the labor market yeah i mean i think most people today anyway i think the common

person thinks that child labor happens like in other countries over there you know what i mean i don't think they think america is still that archaic and stupid um yeah and and oh my god yeah so uh we need to take an ad break and then i i I'm not even going to make a joke about our sponsors and child labor because, like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is about to get so bad. But, yeah, here's some ads. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. How should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is

actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. okay so you know we never really got rid of child labor right what we did basically was to to some extent we'd we've been able to successfully decrease the severity of it um and you know in the last 20 years there'd been a decline in what economists and i really cannot emphasize enough this is the actual phrase they use is child participation in the labor market wow that's so vanilla of a way to say that so return to present day uh present day the thing that's been happening in the last few months is that in a five-week span in this country three children died or i you know i would actually argue were killed by their employers on the job.

Wow. Five children in three children in five weeks. So 16, these kids were all 16. 16-year-old Duven Thomas Perez got killed by a machine. He had a conveyor belt. 16-year-old Will Hampton died working in a landfill. And 16-year-old Michael Schz died working for a logging company um there have been other child labor deaths recently those are just sort of the most recent ones and i want to get in to the shit that's been happening

because in the last really in the last last bit under like eight years things have gotten you know like the child labor situation in the u.s was never good and we'll talk about that later but like things have gotten so much worse there's been an almost a factor of four increase since 2015 in kids working illegally in hazardous jobs it's actually probably well it's unclear to me whether the numbers are actually worse than that i don't know because i i i think almost all of this these statistics are being undercounted like dramatically because the those numbers are just violate like violations that are caught i'm gonna go into that a bit later but meanwhile like right now arkansas iowa new hampshire new jersey and vermont have already passed laws

in the last two years that weaken restrictions on child labor and bills are appearing like across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff like they want to allow 14 year olds to serve alcohol in bars um it's you know it is it is truly horrific and it's being driven by restaurant business associations across the country who want to use child labor. And that's bad. The fact that there's more stuff that is on the horizon is not good. But for an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says, the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times.

Here's from the New York Times. In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English language learner programs say it is now common for nearly all of their students to rush off to long shift after their classes end. They should not be working 12 hour days, but it's happening here, said Valeria Lindsay, a language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a massive surge since 2021 in unaccompanied minors entering the u.s and this has been driven by a lot of sort of you know it's been driven by sort of pandemic pandemic driven poverty a massive upsurge of violence in a bunch of countries in central america a lot of which has to do with like you know the the u.s backed kun el salvador about a decade ago uh you know there's a lot of stuff going on it's all very bad and it's been pushing people here but you know like the the the situation

for immigrants getting into the u.s is never good but biden specifically has managed to make it worse because biden's sort of like biden's immigration policy has been has been resting on getting kids out of shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor right and you know this has gone about as well as you would expect it would when someone like starts it you know one of the I think it was the New York Times was talking about this woman who's working you quit working in a health and human services like office because they had a quota of getting rid of 20 of their kids a week and if they didn't do it they would get a quota yeah they had a quota for we need to get 20 of the kids out of the shelter every week

wow in in the last two years they have lost track of a third of the kids they send out, which is, again, in the last two years alone, at least 85,000 children they've just lost. I don't fucking know where they are. Here's some New York Times again. It's getting to be a business for some of these sponsors, and yet Pasolacqua, who left her job as a caseworker in central Florida last year. job as a caseworker in central florida last year miss pasalacqua said she saw so many children put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them instead she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks and overtime wow wow and you know i want to make really clear what we're talking about here right this is not you know like i i i don't think like you know whatever your position is on like whether like a 12 year

old or a 14 year old should be working any job at all we are talking about 12 year olds working on factories we are talking about 13 year olds cleaning up the floors of slot the kill floors of slaughterhouses um we are talking about like we are we are talking about 14 year olds who are like literally making food that like you are eating yeah yeah and we're still right so this is this is happening in a large part because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon on a company of minors. Well, it turns out a lot of those minors are on a company because the Biden administration wouldn't let their fucking parents into the country. like the whole sort of like sex trafficking panic right because you know one of the things that this panic specifically about sex trafficking has covered up is that most human trafficking is not sex trafficking it's almost all labor trafficking almost also maybe too strong a word but it's mostly by volume most of it is is is labor trafficking which nobody gives a single

shit about because you know there's no you can, you can't have a moral panic around like, you can't have a moral panic around labor trafficking, like people who aren't white. And simultaneously all the business groups who would normally fund these panics, like love this shit because you know, all of, all of these capitalist ghouls drinking a thousand dollar bottles of wine

on their $30 million yachts. All of that shit is paid for by child labor so of course they don't give a shit about it in fact they love it and the you know the product of this is you have a bunch of fucking 12 year olds who are effectively in debt bondage working 12 hours a fucking day in a slaughterhouse or a paper mill i'm gonna i'm gonna read another thing for the new y Times, which is, I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing, but I think this is the most depressing thing I've read

in this entire, I don't know, like in ages. I didn't get how expensive everything was, says 13-year-old Jose Vasquez, who works 12 hour shifts six days a week at a commercial egg farm in michigan and lives with his teenage sister i'd like to go to school but then how would i pay rent 13 13 you know and of course one of you know like the other thing about this right is these these are people dealing with the fucking american housing market right the

american housing market is intolerable to adults who work full-time who work like full-time jobs or multiple part-time jobs right this is a 13 year old how the fuck is a 13 year old supposed to be paying rent right and you know and every every sort of additional thing just makes it worse because the more the more of these kids and one of one of the things that's happening is these kids are getting funneled into very specific areas right because they're getting they're getting funneled to like specific towns because those specific towns have a bunch of like have a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these migrant kids and when they do that that fucking continually drives out the price of housing because all these people are competing for the same like fucking one-bedroom apartment

for 1600 a month right yeah and so every everything just sort of spirals in on each other and and until you get you get a fucking 13 year old working working fucking this is this is 996 this is the fucking like thing I talk about in China is 9am 9pm 6 days a week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan in you know in any just world people would die for this in this world and you know

people have fucking died for this it's a bunch of children who are dying on their fucking jobs in this world though the people you know the people who died for this. It's a bunch of children who are dying on their fucking jobs. In this world, though, the people, you know, the people who died for this are children. And the Biden administration, again, is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking all these kids out to their families, like kicking all these people out to just like fucking anyone as soon as humanly possible and not allowing these people's families into the country and then doing literally nothing at all to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into this country like have a place to live or like any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves you know and we could we could fucking like there were there are individual people in the u.s who

benefit from this child labor who you could fucking like throw into a box tomorrow take all of their money and you could fund this entire program there are individual people right no one will fucking do it they will let these kids they will let every single one of these kids die before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single cent taking care of these kids meanwhile the actual child laws that that exist in this uh uh you know that that exists in the u.s are completely useless because regulatory agencies are taking one of two approaches either they do nothing or they spend some time investigating so they can get a cut of the child labor money by issuing a fine to the company how are you fucking kidding me it gets worse and worse now now and and this is the fun part

merely taking a cut of the child labor money or doing nothing those are those might arguably be the best case scenarios because the other thing that happens and the washington post has been talking you know did a very good report about this is the other thing they do is you know either either they effectively enter the rev share agreement with the contractors who are hiring these fucking human traffickers or they do raids and the product of these raids is you put is they put the families of the kids who are doing the child labor in prison or deport them and then they do nothing about the actual you know so a lot of what's happening is happening

to contractors, right? So they'll find the contractor, the parent company, nothing will fucking happen. And the parents of these kids who also like cannot fucking survive. And in a lot of cases are doing this because literally they do not have enough money to pay rent or buy food for their kids. Those people are getting fucking sent to prison are the only people,

by the way, again, the only, even, even though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they are getting children killed. The only people going to prison are the families of the fucking kids. I know none of it makes sense and it makes me I mean, I can't really recover from any of this episode and I, and I shouldn't, that is reality. Um, but I just,

I don't know. It's, it doesn't feel like billionaires, uh, will ever lose, I guess, capitalism. My analysis of this is that any world that allows this to happen is intolerable and should be burned to the ground.

I agree. Oh, I agree. I think we're ready for the rapture. By that, I just mean, like, the sun exploding into us and everyone dying. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you

love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,

the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah, I'm going to read a bit more because you know the horror the horrors never end here's in the washington post the grand island teens had been hired to scour blood and fat from slippery quote kill floors using high pressure hoses scalding water and industrial foams and acids according to the labor department and federal court records they sanitize electric knives fat skimmers and 190 pounds saws used to split cow carcasses according to court records some students and again when they say students they're not talking about college students they're talking about middle and high school students suffered chemical burns and were socially deprived after working their night shift they dozed off in classes according to a local prosecutor on court records

when asked about the children like the actual kids who were supposed to be you know the ones being saved by these by the fucking department of labor raids the department of labor pulled a it's not my department and we're like yeah fuck it we don't know what happened to these kids hope they're okay have fun

there's one more part of this washington post article that i want to read just to sort of like i don't know i think i think the big problem with all of this coverage is that it's treating this problem as if it's new yeah this is sort of like a unique product of like oh it's a tight labor market in the pandemic it's like no no it's not here's from the washington post we have never in my memory found the types of violations that are being found in hazardous occupations that david wheel a professor of social policy and management at brandeis university who was a top labor official in the obama administration it's outrageous now this is bullshit dream wheels obama administration there was absolutely a shit ton of migrant workers and specifically migrant children

workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and hazardous work it's just that they were mostly in agriculture i mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses right like some of the shit was already happening and just nobody paid attention to it and it's gotten worse. But again, they were also just a shit ton of kids fucking, like, picking tomatoes in like 110 degrees in California. That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama specifically made it worse

because, again, one of the things about using immigrant child labor is that if you commit a labor violation against someone who is undocumented and a child, what the fuck are they going to do about it, right? They can't go to the guard. if you commit a labor violation against someone who is undocumented and a child, what the fuck are they going to do about it? They can't go to the government. If they go to the government, they get

deported. And Obama... Employers know that. I mean, employers. They know that they're 100% controlled situation. Yeah, and Obama fucking helped them do it because he deported so many people.

Like, Obama and this fucking guy probably also, too, directly, was helping literally the worst abuses of this system happen over and over and over again. They were using, you know, immigration... One of the only other things

you can notice about these stories is that if you look at the locations, right, most of the places where these... Not all, but a lot of the places where these are happening are very, very anti-immigrant southern border states. These are southern states or border states. And the reason, or places,

or some places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska. And a lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right, is, you know, if you're like, if you're a politician, right, and your allies are local business owners you get you get you get to play this sort of like you get you get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum right on the one hand you get to you get to keep hiring a bunch of undocumented immigrants and on the other hand you you whip up this like enormous social hysteria

about them so that all these people you know can can be more effectively disciplined and crushed right and everyone fucking knows how this game works right like all the all the people of any real power like actually understand this it's it's why it's why like the justice department or like you know all the immigration agencies never go after the companies who hire people they only ever go after the actual workers themselves it's just so upsetting because like the most in their mind like the most uh helpful like useful person is the person that has like the most to lose and they know that and use it against them for that reason yeah it's just so it's just fucked up in every possible way i don't know yeah It's also just a little silly, like you said, to just like think this just happened. Like this is something that has clearly been building to this.

You know what I mean? I think anyone with a brain can figure that out because this kind of intricate system doesn't just like pop up in a year or two out of nowhere. It's been building it on itself. I don't know. Yeah. It's like, yeah.. I don't know. Yeah. It's like, yeah,

like, like you're, you're definitely right. It's not, it's not just like, yeah, it's been building for ages. Like it was just,

it was deliberately designed by this, by people who like make a bunch of fucking money from it. Right. They make slightly more money if they fucking force a 12 year old to clean the floor of a slaughterhouse than they do if they force like a 22 year old to do it and so they do and the

last yeah and the last thing that I want to sort of mention about this right is that a lot of these a lot of the states where this stuff is happening a lot of the states that are passing these laws are also states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous brass of anti-trans legislation uh like as part of their so-called like protect the kids thing and you know you can talk about the hypocrisy of it right but i i think the important thing to understand here is

that protect the kids was always racialized like they don't give a shit about the kids dying in meatpacking plants because they aren't white right they're immigrant kids who these freaks want to fucking kill anyways and if those kids die in the job nobody gives a shit right so it makes it's it's upsetting also because the majority of these kids i don't want to say majority i don't want to speak for anybody but i feel like these kids also they need to work in their minds you know what i mean like they're like i have no other choice no one's helping me this is the only option i have and it just becomes this like snake eating its own tail bullshit where it's just i don't know if there's no there's no good

out for them because no one's fucking helping them and their family is not there and they need to fucking survive so it's this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in a in a sick way, like not because they not because they're consenting to it because they want to because they need to to survive. And the people that are in power know that and take advantage of it. And I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board is just inhumane and disgusting, and I hate that. I don't know. That's all I have other than a general exhortation that, like, every single part of the system that produces this, the entire border regime, the U.S. labor regime, the regime, the sort of family regimes that this stuff relies on. Like, all of it needs to fucking go, and we need to do it before another kid gets fucking killed on a factory floor yeah i have a hard time not feeling like it's too big and it's i'm too helpless and there's

nothing to do but i think stuff just raising awareness and not pretending this doesn't happen here or just started happening i think that's a good step in the right direction i don't know i think one way to look at it is that like there there there have been regimes that are a lot more powerful and a lot sort of a lot more willing to kill that have been brought down and have collapsed don't exist anymore so yeah you know as as bad as everything looks on any given day right like people people have done this before they'll do it again and you know it's at some at some point they're like we will hit a point where it's fucking too much it will cease to be you're right and our responsibility is to get everyone to that point yeah i think it takes longer when

the like insidiousness or the evilness is more subtle quote unquote you know what i mean like when it's not so outright in your face it's almost like it really takes longer to burn out. And we're just in that burning out phase. Yep. Well, glad I joined you. Yeah. Yeah.

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