Closer to home. (On the nightshift.)

When I think about child labor in the US, my mind goes to olden days when poor (often immigrant) children routinely toiled under harrowing conditions in factories, or to more recent days when poor (always immigrant) children toil under harrowing conditions in factories. The ones I've read the most about are Midwest packing factories, where workplace safety and child labor violations are rampant. And which I've blogged about as recently as last November. 

But these terrible working conditions, this god-awful treatment of kids - to my parochial, smug little mind - always happen somewhere else. 

Sure, it happened in Massachusetts, but that was in days of yore. 

Oh, I knew a bit about it. After his father died - my father was 11 years old - he got a part time job, through pull (his uncle was a factory foreman), in a knitting mill in Cherry Valley, Massachusetts. He wasn't actually a factory worker. He was a "candy butcher," selling sandwiches and candy bars to the "girls" who ran the looms. This was in 1924, and a knitting mill was nowhere near as perilous as, say, a steel mill or a coal mine, but there was plenty of danger: exposure to chemicals, crowded conditions, machines that weren't designed for safety. And this was only a bit more than a decade away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in NYC, which killed well over 100 workers. 

Still, my father wasn't working overnight shifts. He wasn't manning (boying?) a machine. From the stories he told, he rather enjoyed himself. He worked for a couple of hours after school, a couple of days a week and on Saturdays. It didn't get in the way of his schoolwork, his participation in sports, or his overall boyhood (which, in his telling, was an unfettered adventure). 

Nonetheless, it probably wasn't the best idea on the face of the earth to let an 11 year old kid work in a factory. 

Anyway, the knitting mill chapter of my father's adventurous boyhood took place nearly 100 years ago. That was then, this is now. And kids are working hard shifts in factories and other workplaces in Massachusetts.

One kid - a Guatemalan refugee named Walter - worked in a plastics factory in Central Massachusetts. 

From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., Walter trimmed plastic with sharp knives and retrieved hot molds stuck inside machines, then went straight to Framingham High School, bleary eyed, often falling asleep in class. He later got a job at a massive commercial greenhouse, cleaning machines that planted and harvested produce, sometimes working until 5 a.m. In warm weather, he worked 50 hours a week — using his earnings to pay rent and help his family back home, as well as a 16-year-old sister who recently arrived here. (Source: Boston Globe)

Interestingly, I had a number of high school and college friends who, back in the late 1960's/early 1970's worked in plastics and other ghastly factories in places like Central Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire. (I spent a summer in a boot factory.)

There were a lot of factories in New England back then, and it didn't kill any of us to work in them. But we were all doing it as a summer job, working day shifts, and knowing we were going back to school in September. 

I would have thought that low-skill factories in Massachusetts would have gone extinct by now. After all, we're high tech, biotech, financial machers, big brain consultants. And this is true. 

Massachusetts has fewer large factories and meat-packing plants than other states, and advocates say egregious labor trafficking is less common here.

But still, migrant children are processing fish in New Bedford, roofing houses in the Boston suburbs, toiling deep into the night in greenhouses in Central Massachusetts, and working in restaurant kitchens everywhere.

Many of these kids are "unaccompanied minors," sent by their families to get away from violence and support the family back home. A good portion (over 25 percent) of the 2.700 "unaccompanied minors" (many ending up working in factories) who showed up in Massachusetts in 2022 are under the age of 15. Many of these kids owe money to the "coyotes" who smuggled them in. Being undocumented and away from home alone, let alone under the age of 15, makes the child worker issue more complicated. (Undocumented workers are less likely to report terrible, unlawful working conditions for fear of being deported. Plus they and their family need the money. Hovering over the already terrible conditions: cartel involvement.)

In many cases, teen employment violates laws regulating hours and exposure to risky jobs in risky workplaces. But these regulations aren't all that well-enforced. 

Even if the existing regulations are threadbare in terms of enforcement, there are a number of states trying to undo the guardrails that are nominally in place. 

In Arkansas, the state’s labor department is no longer required to certify workers under 16. A bill introduced in Iowa would allow children as young as 14 to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries, while a Minnesota measure would allow 16-year-olds to work on construction sites.

Then there's the shame of Massachusetts:

In the seafood-processing plants that line the New Bedford waterfront, largely immigrant workforces use sharp knives to filet fish and operate powerful machines to extract shellfish, often in freezing temperatures. At one plant, two workers were killed within five years after getting caught up in the machines.

Manuela was 15 when she began working in a fish processing factory, Finicky Pet Food. The pet food might have been finicky, but the working conditions suggest that the factory owners weren't. Manuela worked: 

...feeding fish into a machine 12 hours a day, five days a week, for the next five years. The floor was slippery with water and blood, the fish bones cut into her hands, and the cold made her fingers and toes go numb. Her male co-workers leered at her.

Welcome to America, kiddo.

My father's stint in the knitting mill was always presented to us as a fun gig. My father would entertain us by acting out his sales technique. "Sang-wiches. Get your sang-wiches." And bragging about his promotion to bobbin boy, bringing giant bobbins of yarn to the women working the looms. The women who tipped him better got bobbins that didn't have any knots in the yarn that could slow down the weaving and hinder a weaver's ability to achieve her piecework rate. 

But that was then - and a not so terrible then at that, at least for my father at work in Duffy's Mill. This is the terrible now.

Shame on these companies that allow anyone to work under such terrible conditions, let alone kids. 

I'm all for kids having low-key part time and summer jobs. And I'm not all that bothered if those jobs are ill-paid. But kids working a full, grueling nightshift in a dangerous workplace? Shame on the companies who are exploiting children in this way.

I'm embarrassed for my home state letting companies get away with this, and for not doing enough of anything to help these poor kids out.

What's wrong with us?