No rollbacks on child labor

  

(This column by Lida Shepherd was published today in the Charleston Gazette-Mail)

Welch, WV, September 1908 

A quick peak into the National Archives you can find photographs by Lewis Hine when he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in the early 1900s to take photos of children working.  Hine’s photos were a part of a national campaign at the time to advance laws regulating child labor, which eventually paved the way for labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act.  

Prior to FLSA, injuries and deaths of children were common.  Many of the children photographed by Hine were working to help support their families living in extreme poverty.  Some of these young kids in the photos worked in places like coal mines in Welch and the glass factory in Grafton.

A 1920 NCLC poster features Hine’s photos and reads: “Work that Deadens: These Children Are Working so that Their Employer May Make Money.” 

The famed labor rights attorney Clarence Darrow said, “History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.”  To his point, the West Virginia legislature has been advancing House Bill 4005 which would weaken child labor laws that many fought so hard over a century ago to enact.   

HB 4005 would eliminate state rules that enumerate which jobs are too dangerous for minors.  Under current state law industries cannot employ children under 18 in jobs like ore reduction works, logging and saw milling occupations, occupations involving exposure to radioactive substances, power-driven hoisting apparatus occupations, and mining, to name a few.   The bill would also remove requirements for direct supervision when children work with hazardous machinery.

Proponents for legislation to roll back longstanding state-level child labor protections say that this is to better align with federal standards.   As the word “standards” implies, federal law under the Fair Labor Standards Act is the floor not the ceiling.  For example, federal child labor standards do not include time and hour restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds, establish rest or meal break requirements, or require work permits for youth to be employed.

Proponents also try to paint this bill as expanding apprenticeship programs, however our state’s Youth Apprenticeship Programs already allow 16 and 17-year-olds to safely obtain on-the-job experience.  And while we are on the subject of apprenticeship programs, I have to say that using the apprenticeship program argument for HB 4005 is pretty rich.  

Many of those supporting this bill also pushed to repeal our state’s prevailing wage law in 2016.  Since then, according to a report by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute, the number of active registered apprentices has fallen by 28 percent in West Virginia, relative to neighboring states with prevailing wage laws. 

So who are the proponents of HB 4005?  I’m really glad you asked.  HB 4005 and other bills like it are a part of a coordinated national effort led by billionaire-backed groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability, to undermine worker rights and weaken government's role of protecting public safety and the most vulnerable. 

Bills like HB 4005 are straight from the authoritarian playbook of Project 2025 where one of their policy objectives is to “amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.”  In simple terms, changing “hazard-order regulations” means letting kids as young as 16 to work in hazardous jobs.  

Project 2025 cynically suggests, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The narrative suggesting that young people everywhere will now have the “opportunity” to gain important job experience could not be farther from the truth when you consider who is impacted by the deregulation of child labor.   Since rollbacks around the country, more and more kids are being mangled or killed.  A 16-year-old boy in Wisconsin died working in a sawmill after he became entangled in a machine, a teenage boy in Pennsylvania died after getting pulled into a woodchipper, and another teenage boy was maimed at a Perdue slaughterhouse in rural Virginia.   

These are a few tragic examples among many, and each one of them underscores the fact that the children most subject to dangerous conditions are not looking for “opportunity” but they are looking to merely survive.  Deregulating child labor laws allows industries unfettered access to a more exploitable workforce. 

According to the Economic Policy Institute, at least sixteen states have now introduced cookie cutter legislation nearly identical to HB 4005.  But take heart.  West Virginia lawmakers have the power to stand up to these efforts to allow corporations to profit on the backs of our kids, even in the most dangerous jobs.   They don’t have to put West Virginia on the race to the bottom where the laws privilege profit over protections for our kids and their families.   

They can be clear-eyed enough to see that HB 4005 is as the Economic Policy Institute says is part of “a massive and generational project to remake the economy into one that gives corporations license to extract exorbitant profits from increasingly unregulated and dangerous child labor.”

Lewis Hine wrote in 1908 about his experience taking photos of children working, "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers.”

If our legislators truly prioritize the safety and well-being of our kids, they’ll find the political will to leave our child labor laws alone, and prevent history from repeating itself.