Amid a child labor crisis, U.S. state governments are loosening regulations

Amid a child labor crisis, U.S. state governments are loosening regulations

Amid a child labor crisis, U.S. state governments are loosening regulations

A series of investigative reports over the last few months has revealed that migrant children, mostly from Central America, are working in some of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.

New York Times investigative journalist Hannah Dreier has interviewed more than 100 migrant children working in violation of child labor laws across 20 states.

“I talked to a 12-year-old girl in Alabama who was working overnight stamping auto parts. I talked to a 12-year-old in Florida who came to this country and the next day was put to work roofing houses,” Dreier says.

Dreier met one 13-year-old boy in Michigan who worked 12-hour shifts at an egg farm, six days a week. “He told me that really he wanted to go to school, but he hadn’t understood how expensive things were in this country,” she says.

Dreier estimates that some 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and that the majority of them wind up working full-time jobs.

“These are jobs working for household brands like Cheerios, Cheetos, Ford,” she says. “These are jobs that used to go to undocumented immigrants. Now they go to undocumented child migrants.”

Meanwhile, Washington Post business reporter Jacob Bogage says a Florida-based conservative think tank called the Foundation for Government Accountability and its lobbying group, the Opportunity Solutions Project, are spearheading an effort to relax child labor laws across the country. Just last month, the Iowa Senate passed a bill allowing minors as young as 14 to work night shifts, and states like Missouri and Ohio are considering bills that would allow teenagers to work longer hours in jobs that were previously deemed too dangerous.

“In Iowa right now, we have this bill advancing that would roll back vast portions of the state’s child labor protections,” Bogage says. “This is part of a movement that we’re seeing across the country. … This is really a nationwide effort going statehouse-by-statehouse that relaxes some of these regulations.”

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