Civic Center
Child Labor Makes a Hideous Comeback Nationwide
It's 2023 in the United States of America, but American businesses have regressed to the turn of the previous century by exploiting children with impunity, putting them to work in jobs as varied as cleaning slaughter house floors to filling Lucky Charms cereal boxes for your morning treat.
Contributing to recent robust employment figures, children from Guatemala and El Salvador have been smuggled into the U.S. illegally and trafficked out to slaughterhouses across multiple states–which is the focus of this story. So far, no employers in the scheme are being held to account. Read more in NBCnews.
Slipstream
Corporate America has been side-stepping the U.S. child labor laws for decades by sending work out of the country knowing full well that children were being used in the factories. They don't care as long as the price was right.
Well, here they are doing the same thing in the U.S. I read that a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Co in Alabama has 12-year-olds working in their stamping plant.
The U.S. Department of Labor has to come down hard on these corporations. No more minor hand slaps. Bigwigs should get big fines and find themselves in the unemployment line. Better yet, find themselves on the floor of a slaughterhouse or stamping plant and see how they like it.