Speaker 1: It's happening here. The thing that's happening here is fucking
Speaker 1: child labor. I am. I am deeply angry this episode,
Speaker 1: this is it could happen here. I'm your host, Mio
Speaker 1: Wong and with me Sharen Hi Mia.
Speaker 2: I'm so glad to join you on this really uplifting episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's gonna be great. So yes, all right, As
Speaker 1: anyone who studied, like even a little bit of labor
Speaker 1: history dos, the fight over child labor is very, very old.
Speaker 1: It is. It's one of the first causes that sort
Speaker 1: of liberal reformers to capitalism took up nearly eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Like it's like in the Communist Manifesto is one of
Speaker 1: the things. It's actually it's one of the things people
Speaker 1: point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things
Speaker 1: that was in the original comedist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's
Speaker 1: also one of the things that like you get these
Speaker 1: sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we
Speaker 1: eliminated child labor. This is like this has proof the
Speaker 1: system works. No, this, the battle over child labor or
Speaker 1: is a battle that we are in the middle of losing.
Speaker 1: We are losing it in worse and worse ways every day.
Speaker 1: So okay, so why why why are we why are
Speaker 1: we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in
Speaker 1: this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One of
Speaker 1: the big problems is that vast swaths of the US
Speaker 1: sees child labor is morally good. You know, they see
Speaker 1: something like, oh, this is like you teach your kids.
Speaker 2: It's like how you like, how they grow up and
Speaker 2: get responsible, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then this and this is true in a
Speaker 1: lot of parts of the world. It's also completely and
Speaker 1: absolutely bonkers. It is just it's just nuts, Like people
Speaker 1: shouldn't think like this. It's incredibly weird. And the other
Speaker 1: thing that you get a lot is like there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's sort of like different versions of like more or
Speaker 1: less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think
Speaker 1: most people agree if you're not running the business that
Speaker 1: like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's like lots of things that people
Speaker 1: are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like
Speaker 1: that's completely fine, Like oh, it's like a like a
Speaker 1: fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm,
Speaker 1: Like that's fine, but.
Speaker 2: It's a slippery slope, right because it's starting to farm
Speaker 2: work and then.
Speaker 1: Down. Also, like I would argue that that's also not fine,
Speaker 1: because what's what's essentially happening here is that there's this
Speaker 1: basically like this sort of family loophole to people's understanding
Speaker 1: if child labor were like, as long as child labor
Speaker 1: is being done by like the family as an economic
Speaker 1: unit instead of like capitalists directly, yeah, it's fine. It's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's actually not fine to be working people
Speaker 1: like be a child and then working for a living
Speaker 1: for your family, Like that's not kay.
Speaker 2: I think there's a difference between. I think there's a
Speaker 2: difference between like child labor and like working in a
Speaker 2: field for your family versus like a chore, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, Like, yeah, yeah, it's I think I
Speaker 2: think that line gets blurred and people see their kids
Speaker 2: as much more mature than they are and like able
Speaker 2: to like no, I I I understand what you're saying,
Speaker 2: and I think I agree.
Speaker 1: I think I agree, yeah, and it's I don't know it.
Speaker 1: It sucks. This has a lot of sort of knock
Speaker 1: on effects. One of the big knock on effects his
Speaker 1: Haus and this is this has been a thing for
Speaker 1: like the entire history of child labor, right, is that
Speaker 1: like capitalists use children as a way to write down
Speaker 1: wages for everyone else. And this is you know, if
Speaker 1: you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right,
Speaker 1: one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is
Speaker 1: that like, oh well, it's like it's like kids get
Speaker 1: the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one,
Speaker 1: it's not like children are not morally worth less and
Speaker 1: their labor is also not worth less than an adult.
Speaker 1: Like like if you if you're gonna explain them like this, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, things all are the same price for everybody. It's
Speaker 2: not like less for a child.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not. It's not like it like a kid
Speaker 1: is like somehow less of a human being than an adult. Right,
Speaker 1: Like this is this is this sucks, but you know
Speaker 1: it's used to sort of hold down wages directly through
Speaker 1: things like like opposing mineral wage increases, used to hold
Speaker 1: you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because and
Speaker 1: this is another reason like capitalists love child labor is
Speaker 1: that children are, you know, like they're physically smaller than adults,
Speaker 1: they're easier to control, they have less social power, and
Speaker 1: because you know, because of that, you can pay them less.
Speaker 1: And because of you know, because because people just in
Speaker 1: our society don't fucking like kids, and because of that,
Speaker 1: it's so it's it's just socially accessible to just pay
Speaker 1: them less.
Speaker 2: All those reasons you listed are absolutely terrifying, though, like,
Speaker 2: oh they will listen. Oh they're smaller, Oh they're like
Speaker 2: cheaper or whatever it is that they're all like terrible
Speaker 2: reasons to justify child labor.
Speaker 1: No, they're not good. They're not good. And yet, however, Comma,
Speaker 1: it still persists. It has persisted. It's very old. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read something from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about
Speaker 1: this fucking kid who was working in a mine. What okay?
Speaker 1: This is from the early nineteen hundreds. One boy touchingly
Speaker 1: recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mine
Speaker 1: this way, I'll always think of my poor blind father
Speaker 1: and my mother at home, but I won't never play
Speaker 1: with the boys at all, And then the cracker boss
Speaker 1: won't have to beat me like he does the others
Speaker 1: this boy was nine years old. While stories like these
Speaker 1: produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions,
Speaker 1: there is no such concern the view that quote the
Speaker 1: little devils like it, as one cold boss put it,
Speaker 1: seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed
Speaker 1: these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So
Speaker 1: this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early
Speaker 1: nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people, my people,
Speaker 1: I mean capitalists and also people who are incredibly desperate
Speaker 1: and don't have enough money to give by like love
Speaker 1: child labor. There's you know, it takes a long time
Speaker 1: for like an actual series anti child labor campaign to
Speaker 1: get started in the US. And of course the exact
Speaker 1: people who you would expect to oppose banning child labor
Speaker 1: oppose banning child labor. I'm going to read this from
Speaker 1: the also from the barrel laborististics. The chairman of the
Speaker 1: National Association of Manufacturers said about a law to abolish
Speaker 1: child labor. Quote this union, this labor union plot against
Speaker 1: the advancements and happiness of the American boy is a ploy.
Speaker 1: Is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion. And prosperity
Speaker 1: in this country. So this is what their thing is.
Speaker 1: Their argument is that is that children don't oppose child labor.
Speaker 1: This is this is being foisted upon them by outside
Speaker 1: agitated labor unions. And also, if we're not allowed to
Speaker 1: use child labor, if we're not allowed to have a
Speaker 1: nine year old be put in a mine, the entire
Speaker 1: American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke.
Speaker 2: It's like making you like being like child labor because patriotism,
Speaker 2: Like that's basically what that means.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's s genu widely terrible, like I
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's so goulish. Like companies today have
Speaker 1: figured out how to do this pr thing of like, oh,
Speaker 1: we don't condone child labor. We crack down on it
Speaker 1: very seriously. We also hire children literally all the time.
Speaker 1: But it's fine, We're just we're gonna like you know,
Speaker 1: but back in like nine hundreds, they hadn't really figured
Speaker 1: that out yet, and so you know, there's there's a
Speaker 1: sort of reform movement that happens. And one of the
Speaker 1: sort of key moments of this reform thing is Laurence
Speaker 1: Textile Strike and This strike is probably most famous today
Speaker 1: for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, like wrung down the halls of
Speaker 1: labor and socialist histories, like the names of newspapers, songs, poems,
Speaker 1: and also like being the namesake of a truly dogshit
Speaker 1: DSA caucus. We're not going to talk about this strike enormously.
Speaker 1: Here the short, the very very short version of this strike,
Speaker 1: and this this is a nineteen twelve strike. The short
Speaker 1: version of it is that there's a law pass in
Speaker 1: Massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours
Speaker 1: that you could have women and children work from a
Speaker 1: blistering fifty six hours to a leisurely fifty four hours
Speaker 1: a week.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: This prompted the local capitalist to get so mad that
Speaker 1: they did this like massive like industrial speed up, so
Speaker 1: they forced everyone to work faster and then also doctor
Speaker 1: everyone's paid for it. And this this set off a strike,
Speaker 1: which what's relevant for like our stories that the workers
Speaker 1: at this plan. You know, there's lots of coverage of
Speaker 1: the fact that like most of these workers are immigrant
Speaker 1: women of like from a bunch of different places. The
Speaker 1: part of it that's not talked about as much is
Speaker 1: that another huge person of the workers were just fucking children.
Speaker 2: And it seems to get glossed over.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And it's like, I, I, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe maybe we should go back and talking
Speaker 1: about that part because it's really important for like the
Speaker 1: stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode.
Speaker 1: That made me so angry. I was like physically punching
Speaker 1: my pillow. What happens next is that the police cracked
Speaker 1: down on the strike. It's more and more violence. And
Speaker 1: as this goes on, the workers at like the adult
Speaker 1: workers at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send
Speaker 1: the children, who are both like both the child workers
Speaker 1: and also like just people's kids to New York to
Speaker 1: keep them safe and also to make a political point.
Speaker 1: But like, hey, look they're running our children out of town,
Speaker 1: and this goes great. The first way is this go
Speaker 1: great for the children. Like a bunch of people in
Speaker 1: New York show up but are like, yay, hey, we'll
Speaker 1: take care of these kids. Like and this makes like
Speaker 1: the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this.
Speaker 1: It looks really bad for us. And so they they
Speaker 1: like assembled outside of the next train that was trying
Speaker 1: to leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: so she shouldn't be really mististics again. When the next
Speaker 1: group of children prepared to depart the train station, they
Speaker 1: were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to
Speaker 1: let them board the trains and launch an attack on
Speaker 1: the group. A seven year old was given a black
Speaker 1: eye when she was picked up and thrown into a
Speaker 1: patty wagon by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to
Speaker 1: children being thrown around like rags. Oh my wait god,
Speaker 1: like yeah, thin blue live baby, let's fucking go. This
Speaker 1: is this is the thing the cops or the thin
Speaker 1: blue line ordering chaos. That seventy year old girls. Yeah's
Speaker 1: not gonna throw herself around, right, Like someone has to
Speaker 1: beat up this children. And for that there is the few,
Speaker 1: the proud, the American police.
Speaker 2: But they were scared for their lives, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, Like there are seven year.
Speaker 1: Olds that that seven year old girl looked at me
Speaker 1: really aggressively.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was scared for my life, That's what they said.
Speaker 1: It's it's you know, it's this is bad. And like
Speaker 1: you know, the the nineteen hundreds police can get away
Speaker 1: with like nineteen hundred. Plice've talked about another episodes, like
Speaker 1: they could get away with just like shooting people right,
Speaker 1: like the like they could show up to like a
Speaker 1: strike and just open fire into the crowd and it
Speaker 1: doesn't do anything throwing around a bunch of children like rags. Finally,
Speaker 1: it turned out was the thing that was bad enough
Speaker 1: that it like started a congressional investigation.
Speaker 2: Wow, I guess that's good and bad.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so's a college launched this investigation. And there's
Speaker 1: like this fourteen year old immigrant girl named Kamela Tielli
Speaker 1: testifies about how she was working at the mill when
Speaker 1: a machine caught her hair and tore her scalp off
Speaker 1: the police promptly and this is going and okay that
Speaker 1: the police promptly arrested her dad, didn't do anything to
Speaker 1: the company, arrested her dad for lying about her age.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what now this hold that wood in
Speaker 1: your fucking mind, because we're gonna come back to that shit,
Speaker 1: do I have to?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, because it's gonna get so much worse when Tyler's
Speaker 1: episode is over. So the product of this is that
Speaker 1: there starts to be like a really mainstream push against
Speaker 1: child labor, which is, you know, a thing you would
Speaker 1: have thought would have started earlier, because again we're on
Speaker 1: like century two of child labor in the US by
Speaker 1: this point, right, like in the in an entity called
Speaker 1: the United States. But you know, apparently it takes this
Speaker 1: to actually make people go, wait, maybe this is bad.
Speaker 1: And the product of this is you get this thing
Speaker 1: called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now,
Speaker 1: as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness
Speaker 1: of this law is that it, you know, it allows
Speaker 1: kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the
Speaker 1: family unit. So like if you're on a family you know,
Speaker 1: and this is a very very broad category, right, so
Speaker 1: it's you know, you can you can force your child
Speaker 1: to work as long as like you're their parents, right
Speaker 1: and you're the one making the money off of them
Speaker 1: and not like a capitalist. But even this, even this
Speaker 1: is considered too strong of a law, and in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court rules that it's unconstitutional to ban child labor.
Speaker 1: Wait what they do with the uiple times? Multiple times,
Speaker 1: And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show.
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court is and has always been just one
Speaker 1: of history's greatest monsters.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, there, wait, I was right, then child labor
Speaker 2: does equal patriotism. That's basically what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So eventually FDR gets into this giant fight with Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and the first child labor law we get in federal
Speaker 1: child labor law that gets that sticks, I like doesn't
Speaker 1: happen till nineteen thirty eight when FDR threatens to pack
Speaker 1: the court if the Court refuses to fucking stop stop
Speaker 1: saying that that that the state that the state doesn't
Speaker 1: have the government doesn't have the power to regulate child labor.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's like literally less than a century ago. That
Speaker 2: is like yesterday, you know.
Speaker 1: But but but you know, and this actually works, right,
Speaker 1: but but and this is a real problem. And this
Speaker 1: is a problem that we're gonna we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: later in this fucking episode. In the modern day, those
Speaker 1: child labor laws don't get enforced. It doesn't act that
Speaker 1: actual The nineteen thirty eight Fair Labor Act like basically
Speaker 1: doesn't actually do shit to like reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: child labor in the country. And here's the thing, Like,
Speaker 1: even now, even before all the horror show stuff that
Speaker 1: we're about to get to that's happening right now, like
Speaker 1: not kids, Like we never actually dealt with child labor
Speaker 1: through like the law, Like we just basically outsourced, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: we we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper
Speaker 1: than like an American child, and we did. It's either
Speaker 1: like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have legal citizenship status,
Speaker 1: or just outsourcing. And then you know, our kids still
Speaker 1: fucking do work, you know, like are like they're like
Speaker 1: it's very common for ten and twelve year olds to work.
Speaker 1: It's just that it's usually like babysitting or like bowing lawns.
Speaker 1: And we've we've decided that like, no, this is actually fine,
Speaker 1: Like it is actually fine to fucking put twelve year
Speaker 1: olds in a labor market.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean I think most people today anyway, I
Speaker 2: think the common person thinks that child labor happens like
Speaker 2: in other countries over there, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I don't think they think America is still that archaic
Speaker 2: and stupid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and oh my god, yeah, so we need to
Speaker 1: take an ad break. And then I'm not even gonna
Speaker 1: make a joke about our sponsors and child labor because
Speaker 1: like Jesus fucking Christ. This is good about to be
Speaker 1: it's so bad. But yeah, here's some ads. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you know, we never really got rid of child labor, right,
Speaker 1: what we did basically was, to some extent we've been
Speaker 1: able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know,
Speaker 1: in the last twenty years there'd been a decline in
Speaker 1: what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough, this is
Speaker 1: the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the
Speaker 1: labor markets. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, vanilla of a way to say that.
Speaker 1: So return to present day, present day. The thing that's
Speaker 1: been happening in the last few months is that in
Speaker 1: a five week span in this country, three children died
Speaker 1: or I you know, I would actually argue we're killed
Speaker 1: by their employers on the job. Well, five children in
Speaker 1: three children in five weeks. So sixteen these there, these
Speaker 1: kids were all sixteen. Sixteen year old Duvn Thomas Perez
Speaker 1: got killed by machiinery get a conveyor belt. Sixteen year
Speaker 1: old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen
Speaker 1: year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company.
Speaker 1: There have been other child labor deaths recently, those are
Speaker 1: just sort of the most recent ones. And I want
Speaker 1: to get in to the shit that's been happening because
Speaker 1: in the last really in the last been under like
Speaker 1: eight years, things have gotten you know, like the Charlie
Speaker 1: situation in the US was never good, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that later, but like things have gotten so much worse.
Speaker 1: There's been almost a factor of four increase since twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs. It's actually
Speaker 1: probably well, it's unclear to me whether the numbers are
Speaker 1: actually worse than that. I don't know, because I think
Speaker 1: almost all of this these districts are being undercounted, like
Speaker 1: dramatically because those numbers are just violations that are caught.
Speaker 1: And go into that a bit later. But meanwhile, like
Speaker 1: right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont
Speaker 1: have already passed laws in the last two years that
Speaker 1: weaken restrictions on child labor, and bills are appearing like
Speaker 1: across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff,
Speaker 1: like they want to allow fourteen year olds to serve
Speaker 1: alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is, it is
Speaker 1: truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant business associations
Speaker 1: across the country who want to, you know, use child labor,
Speaker 1: and that's bad. The fact there's more stuff that you
Speaker 1: know is on the horizon is not good. But for
Speaker 1: an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says,
Speaker 1: the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times.
Speaker 1: In many parts of the country, middle and high school
Speaker 1: teachers in English language larner programs say it is now
Speaker 1: common for nearly all of their students to rush off
Speaker 1: to long shift after their classes end. They should not
Speaker 1: be working twelve hour days, but it's happening here, said
Speaker 1: Valeria Lindsay, an Arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle
Speaker 1: School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every
Speaker 1: eighth grader in her English learner program, about one hundred students,
Speaker 1: was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a
Speaker 1: massive surge since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering
Speaker 1: the US. And this has been driven by a law
Speaker 1: of sort of you know, it's been driven by sort
Speaker 1: of pandemic driven poverty, a massive obsertion of violence in
Speaker 1: a bunch of countries in Central America, a lot of
Speaker 1: which has to do with like, you know, the the
Speaker 1: US back to Cunel Salvador about a decade ago. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff going on. It's all very
Speaker 1: bad and it's been pushing people here. But you know,
Speaker 1: like the the situation for immigrants getting into the US
Speaker 1: is never good, but Biden specifically has managed to make
Speaker 1: it worse because Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy
Speaker 1: has been has been resting on getting kids out of
Speaker 1: shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing
Speaker 1: them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor, right,
Speaker 1: And you know, this has gone about as well as
Speaker 1: you would expect it would when someone like starts to
Speaker 1: you know, one of the I think it was The
Speaker 1: New York Times was talking about this woman who's working,
Speaker 1: you quit working in a health human services like office
Speaker 1: because they had a quota of getting rid of twenty
Speaker 1: percent of their kids a week and if they didn't
Speaker 1: do it, they would get digged. Yeah, they had a
Speaker 1: quota for we need to get twenty percent of the
Speaker 1: kids out of the shelter every week. Wow. In the
Speaker 1: last two years they have lost track of a third
Speaker 1: of the kids they send out, which is again, in
Speaker 1: the last two years alone, at least eighty five thousand
Speaker 1: children they've just lost. I don't fucking know where they are.
Speaker 1: Here's some New York Times Again, it's getting to be
Speaker 1: a business for some of these sponsors. And yet Pasilaqua,
Speaker 1: who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida
Speaker 1: last year. Miss Pasilochua said she saw so many children
Speaker 1: put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling
Speaker 1: to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead,
Speaker 1: she settled for explaining to the children that they were
Speaker 1: entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.
Speaker 2: Wow. Wow, And you know, I.
Speaker 1: Want to make really clear what we're talking about here, right,
Speaker 1: This is not you know, like I don't think like,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever your position is on like whether like
Speaker 1: a twelve year old or a fourteen year old should
Speaker 1: be working any job at all. We are talking about
Speaker 1: twelve year olds working on factories. We were talking about
Speaker 1: thirteen year olds cleaning up the floors of slaughter the
Speaker 1: kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are talking about like, we
Speaker 1: are talking about fourteen year olds who are like literally
Speaker 1: making food that like you are eating yeah, and we're
Speaker 1: still right. So this is happening in a large part
Speaker 1: because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon
Speaker 1: on a company miners. Well, it turns out a lot
Speaker 1: of those miners are on a company because the Biden
Speaker 1: administration wouldn't let their fucking parents into the country. And
Speaker 1: this is where this is where we need to get
Speaker 1: into the fucking like the whole sort of like sex
Speaker 1: trafficking panic, right, because you know, one of the things
Speaker 1: that this panic, specifically about sex trafficking has covered up
Speaker 1: is that most humans trafficking is not sex trafficking. It's
Speaker 1: almost all labor trafficking almost also huo strong a word,
Speaker 1: but it's mostly by volume. Most of it is is
Speaker 1: labor trafficking, which nobody gives a single shit about because
Speaker 1: you know, there's no you can't you can't have a
Speaker 1: moral panic around like you can't have a moral panic
Speaker 1: around labor trafficking like people who aren't white. And simultaneously,
Speaker 1: all the business groups who would normally fund these panics
Speaker 1: like love this shit because you know, all of all
Speaker 1: of these capital's ghouls drinking a thousand dollars bottles of
Speaker 1: wine under thirty million dollar yachts. All of that shit
Speaker 1: is paid for about child labor, so of course they
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about it. In fact, they love it.
Speaker 1: And the you know, the product of this is you
Speaker 1: have a bunch of fucking twelve year olds who are
Speaker 1: effectively in debt bondage, working twelve hours of fucking day
Speaker 1: in a slaughterhouse or a paper bill. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read another thing from the New York Times, which is,
Speaker 1: I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing,
Speaker 1: but like, I think this is the most depressing thing
Speaker 1: I've read in this entire I don't know, like in ages,
Speaker 1: I didn't get how expensive everything was, says thirteen year
Speaker 1: old Jose Vasquez, who works twelve hour shifts, six days
Speaker 1: a week at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and
Speaker 1: lives with his teenage sister. I'd like to go to school,
Speaker 1: but then how would I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know,
Speaker 1: and of course one of you know, like the everything
Speaker 1: about this, right is these these are people dealing with
Speaker 1: the fucking American housing market, right. The American housing market
Speaker 1: is intolerable to adults who work full time, who work
Speaker 1: like full time jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right,
Speaker 1: this is a thirteen year old. How the fuck is
Speaker 1: a thirteen year old? It's supposed to be paying rent? Right?
Speaker 1: And you know, and every every sort of additional thing
Speaker 1: just makes it worse because the more the more of
Speaker 1: these kids. And one of one of the things happening
Speaker 1: is these kids are getting funneled into very specific areas, right,
Speaker 1: because they're getting You're getting funeled to like specific towns
Speaker 1: because those specific towns have a bunch of like, have
Speaker 1: a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these
Speaker 1: migrant kids. And when they do that, that fucking continually
Speaker 1: drives out the price of housing because all of these
Speaker 1: people are competing for the same like fucking one Vegoe
Speaker 1: apartment for sixteen hundred dollars a month, right, And so
Speaker 1: every everything just sort of spirals in on each other
Speaker 1: and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year
Speaker 1: old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six.
Speaker 1: This is the fucking like thing I talked about in
Speaker 1: China is at nine am nine pm, six days a
Speaker 1: week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know,
Speaker 1: in any just world, people would die for this. In
Speaker 1: this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this.
Speaker 1: It's a bunch of children who are dying on their
Speaker 1: fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,
Speaker 1: the people who for this are children. And the Biden
Speaker 1: administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking
Speaker 1: all these kids out to their families, like they're kicking
Speaker 1: all these people out to just like fucking anyone as
Speaker 1: soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's families
Speaker 1: into the country, and then doing literally nothing at all
Speaker 1: to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into
Speaker 1: this country like have a place to live or like
Speaker 1: any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves,
Speaker 1: you know, and we could, we could, fucking like, there
Speaker 1: are there are individual people in the US who benefit
Speaker 1: from this child labor who you could fucking like throw
Speaker 1: into a box tomorrow, take all of their money, and
Speaker 1: you could fund this entire program. They are individual people, right.
Speaker 1: No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids,
Speaker 1: They will let every single one of these kids die
Speaker 1: before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single
Speaker 1: cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child
Speaker 1: laws that exists in this uh uh, you know that
Speaker 1: that exists in the rutcher are completely useless because regulatory
Speaker 1: agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing,
Speaker 1: or they spend some time investigating so they can get
Speaker 1: a cut of the child labor money by issuing a
Speaker 1: fine to the company.
Speaker 2: Oh are you fucking kidding me? It gets worse than worse.
Speaker 1: Now and this is the fun part. Merely taking a
Speaker 1: cut of the child labor money or doing nothing, those
Speaker 1: are those might arguably be the best case scenarios. Because
Speaker 1: the other thing that happens, and the Washington Post has
Speaker 1: been talking you did a very good report about this,
Speaker 1: is the other thing they do is, you know, either
Speaker 1: they effectively enter the revshare agreement with the contractors who
Speaker 1: are hiring these fucking human traffickers, or they do raids.
Speaker 1: And the product of these raids is you put, is
Speaker 1: they put the families of the kids who are doing
Speaker 1: the child labor in prison or deport them, and then
Speaker 1: they do nothing about the actual you know, so a
Speaker 1: lot of what's happening is this is happening through contractors, right,
Speaker 1: so they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will
Speaker 1: fucking happen and the parents of these kids, who also
Speaker 1: like cannot fucking survive, and in a lot of cases
Speaker 1: are doing this because literally they do not have enough
Speaker 1: money to pay rent or buy food for their kids.
Speaker 1: Those people are getting fucking set to prison. Are the
Speaker 1: only people, by the way, again, the only even even
Speaker 1: though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they
Speaker 1: are getting children killed. The only people going to prison
Speaker 1: are the families of the fucking kids.
Speaker 2: I not None of it makes sense, and it makes me.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't really recover from any of this episode,
Speaker 2: and I and I shouldn'to that is the reality, but
Speaker 2: I just I don't know. It's it doesn't feel like
Speaker 2: billionaires uh will ever lose it. I guess capitalism.
Speaker 1: My analysis of this is that any world that allows
Speaker 1: us to happen is intolerable and should be burned to
Speaker 1: the ground.
Speaker 2: I agree, Oh, I agree. I think we're ready for
Speaker 2: the rapture. But by that I just mean like the
Speaker 2: sun exploding into us and everyone dying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna read a bit more, because you know,
Speaker 1: the horrors never end. Here was in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: The Grand Island teens had been hired to scour blood
Speaker 1: and fat from slippery quote kill floors, using high pressure hoses,
Speaker 1: scalding water, and industrial foams and assets. According to the
Speaker 1: Labor Department in federal court records, they sanitize electric knives,
Speaker 1: fat skimmers, and one hundred and ninety pounds saws used
Speaker 1: to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students,
Speaker 1: and again when they say students, they're not talking about
Speaker 1: college students, they're talking about middle and high school students
Speaker 1: suffered chemical burns and we're so sleep deprived after working
Speaker 1: their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to
Speaker 1: a local prosecutor in court records. When about the children,
Speaker 1: like the actual kids who were supposed to be, you know,
Speaker 1: the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department
Speaker 1: of Labor raids, the Department of Labor pulled a it's
Speaker 1: not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we
Speaker 1: don't know what happened to these kids. Hope they're okay,
Speaker 1: have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington
Speaker 1: Post article that I want to read just to sort
Speaker 1: of like, I don't know. I think the big problem
Speaker 1: with all of this coverage is that it's treating this
Speaker 1: problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of
Speaker 1: like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight
Speaker 1: labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not.
Speaker 1: Here's from the Washington Post. We have never in my
Speaker 1: memory found the types of violations that are being found
Speaker 1: and hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social
Speaker 1: policy and management at Brandy's University who was a top
Speaker 1: labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this
Speaker 1: is bullshit, Dream Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a
Speaker 1: shit ton of migrant workers and by specifically migrant children
Speaker 1: workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and has in
Speaker 1: his work. It's just that they were mostly in agriculture.
Speaker 1: I mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like,
Speaker 1: some of the ship was already happening and nobody paid
Speaker 1: attention to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they
Speaker 1: were also just a shit ton of kids fucking like
Speaker 1: picking tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California.
Speaker 1: That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama
Speaker 1: specifically made it worse because one of again, one of
Speaker 1: the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like,
Speaker 1: if you commit a labor violation against one of these
Speaker 1: against against, against, against someone someone who is undocumented in
Speaker 1: a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right?
Speaker 1: They can't go to the government. If they go to
Speaker 1: the government, they get deported.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Obama, Yeah, the employers know that, I mean
Speaker 2: employers yeah. Yeah, but like they know that they're control
Speaker 2: of the situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Obama fucking helped them do it because he
Speaker 1: deported so many people like Obama and this fucking guy
Speaker 1: probably also too directly, was helping literally the worst abuses
Speaker 1: of this system happen over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: They were they were using you know, immigration. One of
Speaker 1: the onli other things you can notice about these stories
Speaker 1: is that if you if you look at the locations right,
Speaker 1: most of the places with these not all, but a
Speaker 1: lot of the place where these are happening are very
Speaker 1: very anti immigrants. Southern border states, in southern states of
Speaker 1: border states. And the reason or or places or some
Speaker 1: places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right
Speaker 1: is you know, if you're if you're like, uh, if
Speaker 1: you're a politician, right, and you know, and your your
Speaker 1: allies are local business owners. You get, you get you
Speaker 1: get to play this sort of like you get you
Speaker 1: get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, you get to you get to
Speaker 1: keep hiring a bunch of undocumented immigrants, and on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you whip up this like enormous social hystoria
Speaker 1: about them so that all these people, you know, can
Speaker 1: can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And everyone
Speaker 1: fucking knows how this game works, right, Like all the
Speaker 1: all the people with any real power like actually understand this.
Speaker 1: It's it's why. It's why like the Justice Department or
Speaker 1: like you know, all all the immigration agencies never go
Speaker 1: after the companies you hire people. They only ever go
Speaker 1: after the actual workers themselves.
Speaker 2: Just so upsetting because like the most in their mind,
Speaker 2: like the most helpful like useful person is the person
Speaker 2: that has like the most to lose, and they know
Speaker 2: that and use it against them for that reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just so it's just.
Speaker 2: Fucked up in every possible way.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also just a little silly, like you said
Speaker 2: to just like think this just happened, Like this is
Speaker 2: something that has clearly been building to this, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, I think anyone with a brain can
Speaker 2: figure that out, because this kind of intricate system doesn't
Speaker 2: just like pop up in a year or two out
Speaker 2: of nowhere. It's been building it on itself.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, it's yes, like yeah, like you're
Speaker 1: you're definitely right. It's not just like yeah, it's been
Speaker 1: building for ages like it was just it was deliberately
Speaker 1: designed by those white people who like make a bunch
Speaker 1: of fucking money from it. Right, they make slightly more
Speaker 1: money if they fucking force a twelve year old to
Speaker 1: clean the floor of a slaughterhouse than they do if
Speaker 1: they force like a twenty two year old to do it.
Speaker 1: And so they do. And the last mad yeah, and
Speaker 1: the last thing that I want to sort of mention
Speaker 1: about this, right is that a lot of these a
Speaker 1: lot of the states where this stuff is happening, a
Speaker 1: lot of the states that are passing these laws are
Speaker 1: asso states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous rass
Speaker 1: of anti trans legislation, like as part of their sow
Speaker 1: called like protect the kids thing and you know, you
Speaker 1: can talk about their hypocrisy of it, right, but I
Speaker 1: think the important thing to understand here is that protect
Speaker 1: the kids was always racialized, Like they don't give a
Speaker 1: shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because they
Speaker 1: aren't white, right, their immigrant kids who these Freese want
Speaker 1: to fucking kill anyways, and if those kids die in
Speaker 1: the job, nobody gives shit, right.
Speaker 2: So it makes it's it's upsetting also because the majority
Speaker 2: of these kids, I don't want to say majority, I
Speaker 2: don't want to speak for anybody, but I feel like
Speaker 2: these kids also they need to work in their minds,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, Like they're like, I have
Speaker 2: no other choice, no one's helping me. This is the
Speaker 2: only option I have. And it just becomes this like
Speaker 2: snaky in its own tail bullshit where it's just I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's there's no there's no good out for
Speaker 2: them because no one's fucking helping them and their family's
Speaker 2: not there, and they need to fucking survive. So it's
Speaker 2: this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in
Speaker 2: a in a sick way, like not because they not
Speaker 2: because they're consenting to it because they want to because
Speaker 2: they need to to survive, and the people that are
Speaker 2: in power know that and take advantage of it. And
Speaker 2: I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board
Speaker 2: is just inhumane and disgusting and I hate that.
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's that's all I have, other than
Speaker 1: a general exportation that like every single part of the
Speaker 1: system that produces this, the entire border regime, the US
Speaker 1: labor regime, the regime, the sort of family regimes that
Speaker 1: this stuff relies on, like, all of it needs to
Speaker 1: fucking go, and we need to do it before another
Speaker 1: kid gets fucking killed on a factory floor.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have a hard time not feeling like it's
Speaker 2: too big and it's I'm too helpless and there's nothing
Speaker 2: to do. But I think stuff just raising awareness and
Speaker 2: not pretending this doesn't happen here or just started happening,
Speaker 2: I think that's a good step in the right direction.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think one way to look at it is that
Speaker 1: like there there there have been regimes that are a
Speaker 1: lot more powerful and a lot sort of a lot
Speaker 1: more willing to kill that have been brought down and
Speaker 1: have COLLA don't exist anymore. So, you know, as as
Speaker 1: as bad as everything looks on any given day, right,
Speaker 1: Like people people have done this before, they'll do it again,
Speaker 1: and you know it's at some at some point they're like,
Speaker 1: we will hit a point where it's fucking too much,
Speaker 1: it seased to be, You're right, and our responsibility is
Speaker 1: to get everyone to that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it takes longer when the like insidiousness
Speaker 2: or the evilness is more subtle quote unquote you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, Like when it's not so outright in
Speaker 2: your face. It's almost like it really takes longer to
Speaker 2: burn out. And yeah, we're just in that burning out phase. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well glad I enjoyed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is going to make it happen here,
Speaker 1: wage war against the capitalist system and the people who
Speaker 1: kill children for money. It could happen here as a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 2: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 2: find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 2: coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening