The Economy

It's window dressing.

As long as you have thousands of migrant children coming into the U.S. looking to earn money to send back to where they are coming from, they will continue to come up with fake documentation to get work. The staffing companies that take a see no evil, hear no evil approach will continue to do as little as necessary to try to credibly cover their asses. And the owners of those businesses will continue to feel the pressure of being unable to fill those jobs and the blowback they are getting from consumers because prices have gone up so much -- an intractable combo, even though the labor shortage is not nearly as bad as it was 2 years ago.

The best hope is that the labor market is already slowing enough to reverse all of the incentives driving this, and perhaps at some point some adults who have been laid off or can't find better work are desperate enough to take the jobs they can still hold their noses to up to at the wages those jobs pay. Unfortunately, the labor market might cooperate sooner than the welfare programs that make it so that tens of million people in this country can meet their basic needs without having to clean the blood and guts from the machines in a slaughterhouse, because that doesn't help.

But as long as things remain the way they are, people from Central America are going to continue to send their kids here hoping they can send money back home, where people can't find any work. And people who want their chicken parts and beef cuts (but they want them as cheaply as possible) will create enough demand for those slaughterhouses (or whatever other businesses this is happening in) for their businesses to be torn between very completing incentives.

It's easy for McDs or Ford to put on an act. They are saying, "Hey, it's not us. ... but we will do some window dressing so it looks like it is a priority." They may as well fund the outside inspectors from their PR budget.

 

It's not the simplistic narrative of, "Greed!" Lots of people who need labor would pay zero to get low-skilled workers if they could. ... but you'll notice in those child labor stories that became prevalent in 2022 and 2023, it was almost always a slaughterhouse or a chicken processing plant or a sawmill or a cheeto's factory. They were all the places that experienced severe labor shortages, while at the same time demand for what they produced was strong (and prices were rising as their input costs rose and there was pressure on them because of those rising prices).

They are really difficult, shitty jobs that nobody wants if they can do anything else, so it shouldn't be a surprise that in a tight labor market, they were the ones that became impossible to fill.

The "as long as my dividend check comes, fuck them kids" thing (not you) is so trite. The majority of what we are talking about when it comes to child labor in the U.S. right now are migrant children, and what landed them in a Cheeto's factory in the midwest or a chicken processing plant in Arkansas is not some simplistic story of a Montgomery Burns kind of cartoon character. Nobody is saying, "my dividends, fuck those kids," anymore than the people consuming what they produce are consciously saying "Give me my Cheetos, fuck them kids."

The sad thing about reducing it those kinds of narratives is that I doubt the people being glib that way are financially supporting 50 Honduran or Guatamalan families that can't find work and are surrounded by gangs and crime, and sadly see it as preferable to send a 13 or 14-year-old on a trek to the U.S. because they might be able to find work so they can send money back home.

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

When Carolina left Guatemala, she had no real understanding of what she was heading toward, just a sense that she could not stay in her village any longer. There was not much electricity or water, and after the pandemic began, not much food.

The only people who seemed to be getting by were the families living off remittances from relatives in the United States. Carolina lived alone with her grandmother, whose health began failing. When neighbors started talking about heading north, she decided to join. She was 14.

“I just kept walking,” she said.

Carolina reached the U.S. border exhausted, weighing 84 pounds. Agents sent her to an H.H.S. shelter in Arizona, where a caseworker contacted her aunt, Marcelina Ramirez. Ms. Ramirez was at first reluctant: She had already sponsored two other relatives and had three children of her own. They were living on $600 a week, and she didn’t know Carolina.

When Carolina arrived in Grand Rapids last year, Ms. Ramirez told her she would go to school every morning and suggested that she pick up evening shifts at Hearthside. She knew Carolina needed to send money back to her grandmother. She also believed it was good for young people to work. Child labor is the norm in rural Guatemala, and she herself had started working around the second grade.