Sponsored Content
Child Labor
If asked, a reasonable American might reasonably say that we do not have a child labor problem in this country. We’ve had laws against child labor for nearly a hundred years, they might say. Regretfully, child labor is a problem in other countries, and every so often a major fashion or shoe brand has to disavow one of its distributors for child labor violations, but it’s not a problem here. Right?
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
Uhhhhhh, what the fuck? What kind of companies would tolerate children working in their factories on American soil?
In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
What. The. Fuck. You may recall talk of ‘unaccompanied minors’ entering the US, a problem the Obama administration struggled to deal with. Trump’s ‘solution’ was to deport all of them. A parent might find the prospect terrifying - who is sending their child on a cross-country journey to try and gain entry to a country notorious for mistreating its immigrants?
A 2008 law meant to curb child trafficking allowed non-Mexican minors to remain in the US while their immigration applications were processed, a potentially yearslong process due to backlogs. The effects of this policy trickled down the grapevine and by 2014 the number of Central American children showing up at the border increased exponentially. Worried parents, opportunistic coyotes, whatever the source, new waves of kids showed up, alone and desperate.
So, uh, what happens to them?
These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation.
But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors.
Right, yeah. We’ve talked before about the sad state of our country’s immigration system due to lack of resources. Even if the government were to fully fund our borders, could we find the tens of thousands of case and social workers necessary to deal with the flood of desperate migrants in, say, east Texas? What would you need to be paid to go work with sick, hungry, and desperate children in a desert border town?
Anyhow, if we built this perfect, wholly imaginary system to process child immigrants and keep track of them so they don’t end up working in slaughterhouses, a core competency might be not to lose the kids once they set foot in the country:
While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.
One third of the children placed with sponsors immediately go missing. Not good!! Also not good are predatory sponsors, who may be forcing these children into full time employment:
In interviews with more than 60 caseworkers, most independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time.
Granted, in some cases both child and sponsor are in a difficult situation. Child labor may be common in their home country, where many of the poor are subsistence farmers or work for poverty wages. Or, the child’s family may owe money to a coyote, or be victims of extortion back home. Or or, the child may have been instructed to send money home to support parents or grandparents. There are a million reasons for a penniless immigrant child to be expected to earn their keep, but they are both not legal and deeply immoral.
It’s difficult to imagine a world where our government provided these children with some form of a stipend so they could, you know, eat food and whatnot. Foster parents receive (often scant) money for the children under their care - why not sponsors? The answer, of course, is the idea of providing even basic funds and services for Brown Immigrant Kids would spark gale-force outrage among Republicans, and probably quite a few Democrats. So, these children who come here legally and are processed by the government, are instead left to fend for themselves, sometimes given over to total strangers.
So we’ve established that the HHS and DHS and whichever HSes that are in charge of the child migrant system are woefully negligent, let’s talk about another lever we have to keep children out of the workforce. Employers! It’s easy to blame government incompetence for most things, but what about the shift manager, the small business owner, or anyone who gives a grueling third-shift job to an 80-pound middle schooler.
Upstream companies, of course, blame contractors and vendors:
Three people who until last year worked at one of the biggest employment agencies in Grand Rapids, Forge Industrial Staffing, said Hearthside supervisors were sometimes made aware that they were getting young-looking workers whose identities had been flagged as false.
Sure, of course. It’s always someone else’s fault. But what does happen to the companies that knowingly employed kids to do dangerous, illegal jobs? Fines, of course:
A sweeping investigation of Packers found 102 teens, ages 13 to 17, scouring slaughterhouses in eight states, part of a growing wave of child workers illegally hired to fill jobs in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries.
[…]
Packers has faced no criminal charges, despite evidence that it failed to take basic steps to verify the age of its young employees. Last month, it quickly resolved the case by paying a $1.5 million civil fine.
What about the sponsors, and family members of the teens? Criminal charges and threats of deportation, of course!
The families of the teen workers, by contrast, have been exposed to child-abuse charges and potential deportation.
The parents of one 13-year-old girl exposed to dangerous chemicals during her overnight shift cleaning slaughterhouses were arrested and her father was sent to jail. Both may be deported back to Guatemala. What happens to the kids in the wake of these government raids on their lawbreaking employers?
Since the October raid, some of the children are nowhere to be found — dismissed from their jobs and no longer in school, according to two school employees. Migrant advocates said Labor Department officials raided the Grand Island plant with no plan for making sure all the children were safe and then declined to provide the children’s names to organizations that could have helped them.
Gone! Cool.
Some of the people interviewed on the subject blame a tight labor market for the precipitous rise in kids working dangerous, illegal jobs. Multiple states are trying to loosen child labor laws at the behest of the business lobby. The truth is, we have access to an adult workforce willing to mop floors or stitch tags and, contrary to racist rhetoric, less likely to commit crimes. They’d actually strengthen the economy if granted legal status. Rather than letting them come do those jobs, we leave them only with the choice to send their children here to be forced to do them.
Laws
America fancies itself a nation of laws, and for whatever reason tasks its presidents and legislators to nominate the judges tasked with interpreting and enforcing those laws to lifetime appointments.
The Supreme Court is generally regarded as the final say in all matters United States. Its history is so unremarkable, in fact, that I had to Google ‘famous Supreme Court cases’ and the resulting list is…more embarrassing than impressive. One early 19th century decision is especially pertinent to the Court’s dominance over modern American life. Marbury v. Madison saw the court vote itself judicial review powers over Congress, which seems like a conflict of interest, but I am most definitely not a lawyer.
These days, extreme conservative legal lobbyists have leaned on Marbury to legislate from the bench, establishing rules that wouldn’t stand a chance passing in Congress. The conservative supermajority on the Court means it can dispense with any illusion of non-partisanship and openly advance the hard right views of its patrons.
Enter the ‘major questions doctrine’, created out of whole cloth by the anti-government movement to be, well, whatever they need it to be:
“In 2016 — long before it was anointed a ‘doctrine’ by the Supreme Court — the ‘major questions doctrine’ was featured by name in the annual Federalist Society conference,” she wrote, referring to the conservative legal group.
The turning point came in 2017, when Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, used the term in a dissent. “That moment,” Professor Larsen wrote, “seems to have changed the game.”
What is the major questions doctrine? In its current application, it can prevent federal agencies from exercising discretion in regulation enforcement. It is a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument, because the Court can agree to hear cases dealing with issues its conservative members care about - stocks, environment, guns, abortion, etc - and use this newly fabricated ‘doctrine’ to limit or block agencies from doing what they have been given Congressional authority to do:
The theory’s requirement that Congress speak clearly when the issue is of major political significance, they added, allows after-the-fact gamesmanship. “In politically polarized times,” [the paper’s authors] wrote, “this aspect of the major questions doctrine allows political parties and movements to make an issue ‘major’ through generating controversy.”
The latest example is the case of Biden’s student loan forgiveness order, which the Court will likely decide is not within the Department of Education’s authority, unlike Trump’s pausing of the same loans during the early days of the pandemic. It’s also blocking Biden’s attempted reversal of cruel Trump-era immigration practices, because a Democratic president attempting to utilize the same authority the Court granted a Republican president is simply not allowed. Doctrine!
Even the branding was cooked up by the Federalist Society’s warlock coven:
Elevating an idea into a doctrine is particularly attractive to conservative judges, Professor Larsen said in an interview, as they “don’t want to be accused of activism or of making it up.”
[…]
But, she added, the mechanical application of a “doctrine” can be a substitute for reasoned judgment. “The nature of the shorthand,” she said, “eliminates nuance.”
They’ve given the hundreds of unabashedly right wing judges Trump appointed across the federal judiciary - up to and including the Supreme Court - rhetorical cover to strike down any law they don’t personally care for. Barring a Democratic administration that simply ignores the Court, the government could soon be run by a group of unelected lawyers who pick and choose what the government is allowed to regulate, who it’s allowed to protect and provide services for, and how it’s allowed to spend its money.
Last year, I was a bit…downcast about the country’s future under judicial tyranny:
What is clear is that without a major change - revolution, a civil war, or a political purge - the US will cease to be a democracy. If the outcome of this year’s federal elections goes the way it’s currently predicted, that future will be sealed. While lawyers debate jurisprudence and politicians fiddle with the knobs of bureaucracy, remember that at the end of the day laws are societal rules we all agree to, and the house of cards is a lot more fragile than those in power want to believe it is.
My election prediction was wrong (thank god), but in lieu of a major Republican electoral victory - still possible thanks to the active undermining of voting rights - it seems clear the Court plans to expand its erosion of rights while limiting the power of government to do much of anything. If they can’t wipe the administrative state out at the ballot box, the FedSoc goons will hobble it any way they can.
Unions
Much like judges feel empowered to shape the application of laws, corporations feel increasingly empowered to oppress, strongarm, and retaliate against captive workforces. In the past, unions provided a bulwark against corporate overreach, but the conservative movement and pro-business interests have eroded their power for decades.
The primary federal agency that ‘goes after’ illegal union busting is the NLRB. I put those words in quotes because the agency has little power to impose any meaningful punishments:
Echoing many union leaders, [Michelle] Eisen says US labor laws are woefully inadequate because they don’t allow regulators to impose any fines on companies that break the law when fighting against unionization.
Facing a wave of unionization across the country, companies have stepped up their efforts to deny workers a seat at the table. Not content to merely intimidate employees and shower them in anti-union propaganda, closing unionized stores is a new hardball tactic:
Shortly after workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, petitioned for a unionization vote in the hope of becoming the first Chipotle in the US to unionize, the company shut down the store.
Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and others have adopted the practice. They aggressively fire anyone involved in the effort:
On 17 February, a day after employees at a Tesla plant in Buffalo announced plans to unionize, Tesla fired dozens of workers there.
[…]
Federal judges have ordered Starbucks to reinstate numerous pro-union baristas who they say were fired illegally.
If a union vote does succeed, companies resort to stall tactics - they refuse to acknowledge the union, or won’t come to the table to negotiate contracts, gradding the process out for months or years. With the high turnover at restaurants, warehouses, and coffee shops, the companies plan to wait their opponents out, and the NLRB can do little to force them to the table.
Stronger labor laws with real penalties would force companies to accept and negotiate with unions. Recently, faced with a unionized uprising at the railroads, the ‘pro-union’ Biden administration caved amidst political concerns. It’s fine, though, because the railroads are up and running safely again, proving the demands for additional staffing and safety measures from rail worker unions were totally superfluous.
Metals
These days, most fraud is electronic - numbers on a spreadsheet, or a fake email, or a wire transfer. We do not commonly associate fraud with giant freight trains or warehouses full of metal:
Trader Trafigura Group is facing more than half a billion dollars in losses after realizing that cargoes it bought didn’t contain the nickel they were supposed to, sending fresh shockwaves through an industry that has been rocked by several high-profile frauds in recent years.
It turns out the metals business is surprisingly low tech, which creates an easy target for fraudsters. Rather than writing complex software to fool your target, you just need to forge a few warehouse receipts or shipping documents. Or you can pledge the same shipment of metal as collateral for multiple loans from different places, none of whom talk to each other:
Last year, the company got loans from a syndicate of more than a dozen mostly state-owned firms, backed by 300,000 tons of Risun’s stockpiled copper concentrate. The lenders learned that Risun was under financial stress, and when they went to check their collateral on site, they found only 100,000 tons — a third of the pledged amount. The rest had already been shipped out, violating the lenders’ claim on the material.
You can also, you know, just ship something else in place of the valuable metal:
Nickel is a popular metal with fraudsters due to its high value, with a single container potentially worth $500,000. Trafigura had been buying the metal that was in containers already on ships, then selling it on when the vessels reached their destination. But when investigators checked the contents of a container at Rotterdam in December, they found it was full of much lower-value materials. The discoveries have left Trafigura facing a $577 million loss from the containers.
It’s not as entertaining as delivering paving stones instead of copper, but holy cow was that a lucrative con. A carefully coordinated, transoceanic nickel fraud caper is more interesting to read about than the 150th crypto rug pull of the month. It just feels more…weighty. Sorry.
Short Cons
Defector - “Instead of hiring an exterminator, Levy has simply asked employees to take care of a “really bad” rodent problem for about six months.”
Insider - “This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will stand trial in Nebraska after being accused of performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by Meta, the parent company of Facebook.”
WIRED - “This risk score is dictated by attributes such as age, gender, and Dutch language ability. And rather than use this data to work out how much welfare aid people should receive, the city used it to work out who should be investigated for fraud.”
TAP Into Newark - ““Based on fraud, the ceremony was baseless and void. Although this was an unfortunate incident, the City of Newark remains committed to partnering with people from different cultures to enrich each other with connection, support and mutual respect,” Garofalo wrote.”
Know someone planning on hiring migrant child laborers? Send them this newsletter!