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.

Astroturf in action

For the last several years, people here have been trying to fight off some major assaults on programs that benefit low income people, such as SNAP (formerly food stamps) and Medicaid.  These initiatives didn't bubble off from below. Rather, they've been driven by dark money, and specifically the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA).

This article from the Center for Public Integrity shines some light on dark money, including their efforts to slam poor people in West Virginia. Wherever you are in the US, there are probably similar things going on.

Picking on the poor

This op-ed of mine came out in today's Gazette-Mail. It has a math error I correct at the end. My bad. Forgot to move a decimal point.

In the 1870s, the nation was slammed by one of those periodic depressions that punctuate our economic history. Although largely forgotten today, it was known as “the Long Depression” for its lingering effects. It lasted for 65 consecutive months — longer than the 43-month contraction of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Around 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875. Unemployment rose above 8 percent. Millions of Americans were jobless, hungry and homeless. In those days, there was no such thing as unemployment insurance, food assistance programs like SNAP or supports for the elderly like Social Security.

Some might call it a free-market paradise, although those hit by it probably didn’t.

In New York City, thousands of jobless workers, nearly half of them women, turned to one of the only forms of public assistance. They got to sleep in their clothes on hard benches in police station houses. And they had to be out at dawn in search of their next meal.


That’s a big credit to the humanity shown by the NYPD, but there was a catch. The homeless were only allowed to sleep for two nights a month in any one station house. For this reason, they were called “revolvers.”

That sounds like a grim existence, but there were those at the time — who had full bellies, money in their wallets and a roof over their heads — who condemned “the over-generous charity of the city” on the grounds that it “might sap the foundation of that independence of character, and that reliance on one’s own resources.”

It reminds me of the saying of Anatole France that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

One might hope that over nearly 150 years of bitter experience that that kind of thinking would have been excreted from the body politic. Instead, it’s alive and well and is being promoted in West Virginia by out-of-state groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability, which aims to tighten the screws on poor people, many of whom are presumed to be “fraudsters” living too high on the hog.

Two groups targeted are people receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is often referred to as “welfare,” and those receiving SNAP (formerly food stamp) benefits. There are all kinds of wild misconceptions about both.

People tend to vastly overestimate the number of people receiving welfare cash assistance and the level of benefits. But according to the DHHR, in September 2016, there were only 7,678 cases statewide. Of these, most were child-only cases with no adults in the benefit group, most of whom were kids living with a grandparent or other relative and who received no other support.

The number of adult cases (i.e. parents with kids) receiving cash assistance was only 2,698. That’s down from around 35,000 when “welfare reform” went into effect in the 1990s.

I did the math, dividing 2,698 adults getting TANF by the 2015 West Virginia population estimate of 1,844,128. That amounts to way less than 1 percent of the population. To be exact, it’s 0.001463022089573 percent. Not that anybody seems to be counting.

Damn, now that’s a problem.

As for the high-on-the-hog part, the TANF maximum benefit for a family of three is $340 per month. Or $11 and change per day per family. Or less than $4 per person per day. If that’s high, we’re talking about an extremely short hog. If people think it’s fun to live on that, I’d suggest they try it.

Benefits were actually slashed by $100 per month back in 2004, and the cuts have never been restored.

The typical adult receiving TANF is a single female, with two kids and some or all of a high school education, who might be a survivor of domestic violence and who has to comply with some stringent rules to receive temporary benefits and is subject to serious sanctions for failing to meet requirements.


Sounds like a dangerous fraudster to me.

Maybe we should call in an airstrike ...

Then there’s the SNAP population. According to the USDA, “SNAP continues to have one of the lowest fraud rates for federal programs.”

It’s true that the West Virginia caseload is bigger than TANF, more than 350,000 in 2013. But around two-fifths of these were children and one-fifth were elderly or disabled. Around one-fourth are adults living with children.

Many of the adults who receive SNAP benefits work at jobs that pay so little that people have to depend on this kind of help go get by.

Back to the hog. The average household benefit is $255 per month, which comes down to $126 per person or around $1.40 per meal. Try that for a while.

One might think that the best way to address that problem is to improve job quality, but some find it more fun to mess with poor people by making benefits like this harder to get, even though this would take federal money out of the economy that supports agriculture and retail jobs in grocery stores.


One thing that particularly seems to set some people off is the shocking discovery that some benefits might be spent in multiple states, although you might have that in a state where around half of the counties border other states or where, God forbid, people visit family members who live elsewhere or who are serving in the military.

I guess that could be remedied by putting collars on poor people that give shocks when the borders are crossed, kind of like the invisible fences some people use with dogs. Or by bringing back patrols like those used in the South before and after the Civil War to keep certain populations in line.

Or we could decide that we have better, less petty and more honorable things to do than stomp on people who are already down.

I think I’ve made up my mind.

Warming up a (metaphorical) pen in hell

The late great American writer known as Mark Twain was said to have warmed up his pen in hell when he felt indignation about this or that social injustice.

Here's  free sneak preview: I'm no Mark Twain, and the extent of my pen or computer doesn't reach to hell (yet), but I'm getting ready to open a can on a right wing foundation that to me is about as morally disgusting and contemptible as can be, which is quite an accomplishment. The group is the Foundation for Government Accountability, a euphemistic name for a billionaire funded and ALEC supported group dedicated to taking  away food and health care from poor people.

WV's Republican-led legislature has brought someone (apparently well fed, by the way) from this group on more than one occasion and I'm sure they'll be back soon. Depending on how things go in a few days, they may even write legislation for the coming session.

Here's a little background on these charm school dropouts and here's a great editorial from the Gazette about them. You'll hear more from me soon, inshallah.