The unemployment rate remains high in the United States, and many corporations are turning to prey on the children of the poor and migrant youth while our government stands by and watches. Federal and state politicians have mistakenly trusted corporations to regulate themselves when, time after time, they’ve proven to cross that line whenever adult labor dries up.
On July 14, 2023, 16-year-old Duvan Tomas Pérez was killed in a Mar-Jac Poultry Plant. I say killed because his death comes as a result of corporate negligence and malpractice. Pérez lost his life because his employer, Mar-Jac, never properly followed or instated mandated lockout and tagout procedures to ensure machinery was fully disabled to make the cleaning process safe. To make matters worse, Perez shouldn’t have even been working there, as federal law prohibits anyone under 18 from working in slaughterhouses. Mar-Jac not only violated Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) safety standards but had also violated child labor laws. What was the federal response to Mar-Jac’s blatant corporate disregard for the laws of our nation? A slap on the wrist in the form of a $213,000 fine — spitting in the face of the Perez family as Mar-Jac gets off scot-free and continues to dub their manslaughter of Perez a simple mistake.
Again, on June 29, 2023, two weeks after his birthday, 16-year-old Michael Schuls was killed due to managerial incompetence by his employers regarding safety and supervision at Florence Hardwood, a direct result of corporate negligence and governmental mismanagement. Despite the traumatizing death of Schuls, the Wisconsin Republican Party has a goal to relax child labor laws in the state by introducing “bills that would eliminate work permits for 14- and 15-year-olds and allow children as young as 14 to serve alcohol in restaurants.” Schuls should not have been allowed to operate dangerous machinery. Florence Hardwoods got hit with the heftiest fine of the bunch, $1.4 million, an amount still minuscule to the pain they’ve unleashed onto the Schuls family after taking their son.
Again, on July 1, 2019, a Guatemalan teenager was killed in a very similar case of corporate malpractice in Cullman, Ala. The boy’s employer, Apex Rising, got off with a small $117,175 fine despite breaking child labor laws while yet another family lost their child.
Three lives were taken due to the greed that has claimed hundreds before them and will continue to claim hundreds after them. Thousands of children in America continue to work in fields like agriculture, slaughterhouses and construction sites, with many of these children working in conditions like Schuls’s. In agriculture alone, numbers tend to go unreported, as there is a gray area between an official job and mere farmwork. Statistics from the National Center for Farmworker Health reported in 2018 that “approximately 115 children die a year in agricultural-related incidents,” with an additional 12,000 experiencing an injury of some sort. The government’s response to this has ranged from a bipartisan defense of it as a way of life to more democratic proposals such as the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety Act, which proposes merely raising the age for farm work from 12 to 14. We should not be looking to simply minimize child labor — we should be moving to eliminate it.
We like to think of child labor as a thing of an “uncivilized past” instead of a current reality where migrant children are funneled into the hands of sponsors eager to churn them out into the workforce, with Republicans eager to make this process easier by dismantling child labor laws. Businesses continue to demonstrate that, if given the choice between morality and economics, they will always side with economics to keep business afloat. It is time to abandon passivity and partisanship — the safety of our children depends on it.
Jaylin Seldon, FCRH ‘27, is a philosophy major from Harlem, N.Y.
