Child labor in the midst of plenty: Shameful!

A while back, I had a long conversation with a guest at St. Francis House, the Boston shelter I've been involved with for years. (Last fall, after over two decades, I left the board. I remain an active volunteer.)

The fellow was in his late thirties, an African-American who had grown up, poor, in South Carolina. He told me that he could barely read or write; that he, his siblings, and cousins were regularly taken out of school to work in the fields. He was obviously very bright. But mortified that he was illiterate.

How could this be, I asked myself.

Something like this might still have been happening during the Depression, even during the Jim Crow 1950's and 1960's. But this would have been the 1980's. 

A crew of little children, needed by their families to help scratch out a living, so able to have only sporadic schooling.

In the midst of plenty. 

How could this be?

Well, things like this are still going on. Las week, I read about a Hyundai Motor subsidiary, a parts maker, that has been using underage workers - as young as 12 years old - in its Alabama metal-stamping plant. 

Hyundai put out a statement that it "does not tolerate illegal employment practices at any Hyundai entity."

Yah, well, except when they do by going the "see no evil" route.

SMART, the subsidiary, claims to be equally committed and compliant. It "denies any allegation that it knowingly employed anyone who is ineligible for employment." 

The company said it relies on temporary work agencies to fill jobs and expects "these agencies to follow the law in recruiting, hiring, and placing workers on its premises." (Source: Reuters)

The specific children that were focused on in the Reuters story - a girl who's just turning 14 this month, and her brothers, who are 12 and 15 - are from a Guatemalan migrant family and, early this year, were working in the factory and not going to school. 

Pedro Tzi's children, who have now enrolled for the upcoming school term, were among a larger cohort of underage workers who found jobs at the Hyundai-owned supplier over the past few years, according to interviews with a dozen former and current plant employees and labor recruiters.

Several of these minors, they said, have foregone schooling in order to work long shifts at the plant, a sprawling facility with a documented history of health and safety violations, including amputation hazards.

We've become inured to hearing about child labor overseas: young children laboring in clothing factories, gleaning metals from discarded electronics, searching for anything salvageable in slag heaps all over the world, mining diamonds in South Africa. 

One thing for kids to help around the house. To have kiddo jobs like raking leaves, shoveling walks, babysitting. Even working a bit in a family business. 

But children shouldn't be working in factories when they should be in school. 

At the age of 12, my father had an after school job in a knitting mill. He worked as a "candy butcher," selling candy bars and sandwiches to the "girls" (largely Irish immigrants) working at their looms. The girls didn't want to lose any time, so they grabbed a ham sandwich or Hershey bar from my father. He got the job through "pull" - his Uncle Joe was a foreman - and my father was happy for the work. His father had died that year, and what he made after school helped his family out and gave him a bit of spending money.

He would entertain us with his spiel - "Sangwiches! Get your sangwiches!" - and he wasn't any worse for the experience. He still went to school. He still played sports. He still enjoyed his childhood. 

And he was good at his work, earning a promotion to "bobbin boy," bringing spools of thread to the girls at their looms. He learned to figure out what the best bobbins were - the ones with the fewest knots; the knots slowed down the weaving work - and bring them to the girls who tipped. 

I have no idea how many days a week he worked. Maybe it was a day or two. Saturday mornings. Summers. But work he did.

I don't know what my mother was doing at the age of 12, but it was likely some combo of doing a bit of work at my grandfather's grocery store, and keeping an eye on her younger sibs while my grandmother worked at the store.

My parents' experiences were ages ago. 

As were my early jobs - babysitting, and opening the envelopes and counting the collection money at church each Sunday - but, while I don't think kids should overdo it, or be forced into it,  I think it's still okay for kids (even as young as junior high) to have a tiny bit of work. But it should NEVER be at the cost of schooling, or of having time for rest and play. 

Naturally, the children of migrants are at particular risk of having their childhoods stolen, and for danger to life and limb while they're at it. Yet still it happens, especially when labor shortages are putting nodes all along the supply change under pressure. 

Alabama and federal laws limit minors under age 18 from working in metal stamping and pressing operations such as SMART, where proximity to dangerous machinery can put them at risk. Alabama law also requires children 17 and under to be enrolled in school.

Hyundai and SMART, of course, are smart enough to use outsource staffing agencies, giving them plausible deniability when it comes to awareness that laws are being violated and kids illegally made to work. 

One former worker at SMART, an adult migrant who left for another auto industry job last year, said there were around 50 underage workers between the different plant shifts, adding that he knew some of them personally. 

The spotlight was trained on SMART when the little girl disappeared. (She was found, safe and sound. She'd taken off with another young worker, looking for a "better" job in Georgia.) 

The Tzi kids are now in school. I'm hoping the other kiddos who've been laboring in the SMART plant are, as well.

Next time you hear calls for rolling back all sorts of regulations, and start to think that it's not a bad idea, think about the 12-year-olds working at a metal-stamping plant in Alabama. Capitalism unfettered = capitalism at its worst.