Exploiting Children for Profit

[F]law School Episode 11: The Midnight Shift

Today’s Child Labor Crisis

Luke Hinrichs

February 16, 2025

Summary:

In this episode of [F]law School, guest Luke Hinrichs joins hosts Nolan Mascarenhas and Troy Brown to discuss his [F]law article, Economy of Exploitation, which sheds light on the issue of child labor. Hinrichs describes how child labor — an issue labeled a problem of the past — is highly relevant today, with legislation failing to protect exploited youth workers. As the episode notes, the issue goes beyond the continued exploitation of children; it’s a window into the fallacies of identification and regulation of child labor. By debunking previous gaps in the legal structures and today’s lack of corporate accountability, this episode explores and highlights the existence of modern-day child labor. 

Editors:

Special thanks to Giovana de Oliveira for production and editing and to Gauri Sood and Reya Singh for their assistance with this episode.

Guest Bio:

Luke Hinrichs is a third-year law student at Harvard Law School specializing in employment and antitrust law. He has worked in public antitrust enforcement and private antitrust litigation. As a student attorney with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, Luke represents indigent plaintiffs in employment and wage law litigation. 

Music:

Our theme music is “I Been Waiting” by Crystal Squad, and you’ll also hear segments of “Palms Down” by Blue Dot Sessions.

[F]law Resources: 

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Additional Resources (regarding topics mentioned in podcast): 

Press Releases:

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Transcript 

 (This transcript was created by an automated process and contains errors.)

Flaw School – Episode 11; Season 1 – The Midnight Shift

Jon Hanson Introduction:Hi everyone! This is Jon Hanson from the Systemic Justice Project and The Flaw Magazine at Harvard Law School. In this episode of [F]law School, hosts Troy Brown and Nolan Mascarenhas sit down with third-year law student Luke Hinrichs to uncover the shocking resurgence of child labor in the U.S. Luke takes us inside the factories, slaughterhouses, and supply chains where corporate giants quietly rely on underage workers—some as young as 13—operating dangerous machinery and working overnight shifts. He unpacks how corporate loopholes, weak enforcement, and a race to the bottom have allowed child labor to flourish in the shadows.From meatpacking plants to shareholder boardrooms, this episode exposes how the law isn’t stopping the exploitation—it’s enabling it. Welcome to Flaw School: the podcast about the flaws in the law.

Troy Brown Hey, welcome to Flaw School, a podcast that explores the flaws in our legal system. We’re today’s hosts. I’m Troy Brown, a 3L at Harvard Law School.

Nolan Mascarenhas And I’m Nolan Mascarenhas, a senior at Branham High School.

Troy Brown And we’re so excited to be hosting Flaw School’s eleventh episode.

Nolan Mascarenhas Every two weeks, we interview law students to uncover the role of corporate actors in producing many of our most urgent social problems, and the troubling tale of corporate actors shaping, bending, capturing, and breaking the law in their favor. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the surge of child labor violations in the U .S.

Troy Brown A hundred years ago last summer, both houses of Congress passed the Child Labor Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. The proposed amendment was a response to a pair of Supreme Court decisions in the nineteen teens striking down federal laws restricting child labor. As written, the proposed amendment would have given Congress the power to limit, regulate, and ban child labor all across the country. But the amendment was never ratified. And for a lot of reasons, that makes sense. For one, Congress’s power to regulate economic activity, including child labor, has expanded dramatically in the past century. And for another, child labor is a problem from a different era. Or at least that’s how we tend to think of it. But far from being a problem of the past, child labor is an urgent problem of the present, and it’s a problem that’s only getting worse. Joining us today to talk about it is Luke Hinrichs. Luke is a 3L at Harvard Law School and is a repeat contributor to the flaw where he’s written about corporate exploitation of workers. Welcome to flaw school, Luke. Class is in session.

Luke Hinrichs Lovely to be here.

Troy Brown So we’re so thrilled to have you here. And I know you’ve been a regular contributor to the flaw, but for our listeners less familiar with you, could you tell us a bit about who you are?

Luke Hinrichs Yeah, incredibly excited to be here with you guys, having this really critical conversation. As you mentioned, I’m a 3L at Harvard Law School. Came to law school hoping to operate within this space of economic justice, focusing on employment law and antitrust and labor law. And for me, the flaw has been a home for a lot of that exploration, fleshing out certain ideas about antitrust and labor struggles. And just very excited to be digging into this with you. A little bit about me just as a background is that I came to law school hoping to really engage with these types of topics. My childhood and upbringing was scarred by a lot of financial insecurity and housing insecurity, which led me down a road of inquiry and exploration to try to really understand my personal experiences and the systems that I was operating within. And that brought me to these issues that we’re here to discuss about today.

Nolan Mascarenhas You wrote a really powerful piece on the devastating impacts that corporations employing children have had. What inspired you to investigate and learn more about this topic?

Luke Hinrichs So I was digging into the topic of labor, antitrust and power within labor markets and the harms that can arise when there’s this concentration of power specifically between employers and employees, bosses and workers. And what I kept finding were these Department of Labor, DOL press releases that were tracking a lot of their enforcement efforts for policing child labor. And for me, what I found was that there wasn’t too much mainstream discourse about this rise in enforcement efforts and a crackdown in a rise of child labor in the U .S. For me, whenever I envisioned child labor issues, it always seemed historical. It always seemed like an issue of decades past. But a lot of these press releases kind of showed how salient and current these social woes are. And I started digging into these court documents and finding these really heart wrenching stories and images of 14- and 13-year olds in full protective gear, full hazmat suits. They were hard hats and they’re on their hands and knees scrubbing slaughterhouse floors with hazardous chemicals, suffering chemical burns. These truly heart wrenching working conditions of these truly just kids, these middle schoolers. And seeing that and reading through these court documents, there was this one instance where there was a 14 year old in Nebraska working in a city that prides itself in this Midwestern hospitality. And this 14 year old was just trying to go to school every day. They’re trying to live their usual teenage life, but they’re actually working from 11 p .m. to 5 a .m. at a slaughterhouse in this community. They’re coming home toiling overnight. They have experienced truly harmful chemical burns and all the while they’re working on skull splitters and they’re working on this dangerous machinery used to cut through flesh and bone of different types of animals, brisket saws. We’re talking 14 year olds working overnight and reading through these documents really solidified that this needs to be out open and discussed and fully understood and in the mainstream discourse so that we can address it.

Troy Brown I think like you, a lot of people understand child labor through imagery, including the really evocative imagery you just mentioned there. But I think for most people, certainly for me, the image that comes to mind is like children working in mines during the Great Depression. But to better ground this conversation, could you give us a picture of just what child labor looks like today?

Luke Hinrichs So, yeah, there’s that classic image of a soot-covered kid coming out of a mine from the early 1900s. And that’s often what we think of when we’re thinking of child labor. But today, when you’re eating your Cheetos, you start your day with your Cheerios, there was actually likely a 14 year old, a 15 year old working overnight packaging your food. There was likely a 13 year old driving a forklift in a distribution center so that you can get your Amazon package. When you’re eating your turkey dinner, your chicken dinner, there could have been a child using hazardous chemicals cleaning the killing floor of that meat processing plant. There are minors employed in industries across the economy today in the U .S., from automobile part factories to sawmills, food manufacturing facilities to roofing companies, fast food establishments to slaughterhouses. It is incredibly widespread and it’s widespread because we have allowed for certain corporate law systems and systems of employment to take shape that dissipate how we impose liability and burdens that then incentivize a race to the bottom. This race to the bottom captures and brings in miners into these dangerous employment scenarios. And truly, the laws that are currently enacted to enforce and prevent this just are not ready to meet this moment and aren’t enforced to the greatest possible extent. The Department of Labor, that’s the primary agency tasked with enforcing this, has been decimated across the decades since the 80s. It has been undermined. And what we have is a clear rise in child labor enforcement by an agency clearly starved of resources. So the real number of child labor incidents across the U .S. is far greater than what we know it to be. We only know what has been successfully policed. We don’t know the true extent of how often children are brought into the workplace, brought into dangerous scenarios. And the ideal is that we have a broader enforcement mechanism and to address these systems.

Nolan Mascarenhas That description of child labor today is probably pretty shocking to our listeners, particularly because I think the assumption most people have is that, like you mentioned, child labor is against the law and so it doesn’t really exist. But as you talk about, of course, we know that there are a lot of legal behavior that happens all the time. So what exactly does the landscape of child labor laws look like today?

Luke Hinrichs Right. So since 1938, federal law has established that children under the age of 18 are prohibited from working in hazardous occupations and oppressive child labor. That’s under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And that was passed over 85 years ago, regulating child labor by limiting the types of jobs minors can perform and the number of hours they can work and the timing of these hours. It’s really arising out of this social reckoning with industry. Industry was advancing so quickly and the harms were so great and widespread. And this profit maximization that was so early on a driving factor within these industries was wreaking havoc in our communities, in society. And there’s a true recognition that children and vulnerable workers were being harmed. And the desire was that they truly did not belong in these occupations, that they belonged in school, that they had a right to human flourishing and that working these hazardous occupations was interfering with that human flourishing and potential. Under the law, there’s a full system of regulation, which allows for different ages to work different types of jobs. And there’s a lot of regulations there. And that’s all within the federal landscape. There’s also the state level landscape. Where states can pass more stringent laws, really the Fair Labor Standards Act is just the floor, but you have this enforcement system that’s primarily through the Fair Labor Standards Act. So when FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law, he referred at that point to child labor as an ancient atrocity. We know today that it’s ongoing. And a lot of those regulations that were initially passed and a lot of the enforcement mechanisms that were passed within the Fair Labor Standards Act have not changed very much since its initial passage. To give an example of how the Fair Labor Standards Act regulates child labor, the statute has age specific and occupation specific provisions. There’s 17 non -agricultural occupations that are deemed too dangerous to work for anyone younger than 18 years and nine agricultural occupations considered too dangerous for anyone younger than 16 years old. And there’s a lot of just time regulation. So for example, 14 and 15 year olds can be employed in restaurants and fast food establishments, but they just can’t work during school hours with the obvious incentive there and a real interest for kids to be learning and in school rather than working. And they can’t work more than three hours on a school day or more than eight hours on a non -school day. Those are general limitations on the amount worked for children with the idea that the government has a role in preventing children from being overworked. Ultimately, though, you have a baseline of federal law with state law being able to build upon it or deregulate as well. And the result of that is that then child labor laws vary from state to state. You can have some states with far more protective laws, whereas others allow for a good amount of children to enter the workforce.

Troy Brown So digging into the Fair Labor Standards Act a little bit more, clearly the legal structure that’s in place isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of child labor. But as you also write, labor protections are full of all sorts of holes that stem from frankly, deeply racist origins. Do today’s child labor problems then have their roots in those same origins?

Luke Hinrichs From the very beginning, our most progressive employment and labor laws often exempted agriculture and domestic workers. That goes for the National Labor Relations Act as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act. A lot of the exemptions were part of this trade -off, this deal -making between Dixie Democrats who had interest in maintaining Jim Crow structures and maintaining economic, social, and racial hierarchies that would prevent Black workers specifically from rising, organizing, and building power. That was clear within the National Labor Relations Act, where those agriculture exemptions and domestic work exemptions removed from the Black workers. And that’s also then true where you have agricultural workers often exempted from the Fair Labor Standards Act, where then you can still have employers within that industry bringing children in, bringing exploitable labor and vulnerable workers in, to then further diminish their power, their ability to bring legal claims, legal protections and also keep wages down, keep a clear source of cheap and exploitable labor there for their taking. And those exemptions exist today. There have been the occasional congressional effort to remove the exemptions, but they’ve often been meant by strong business interest disapproval, and they have yet to be successful. And those exemptions are just baked in. They exist still today. And we see by design that the Fair Labor Standards Act does very little to protect children working in the agriculture industry. And that really brings in a clear, vulnerable community of migrant workers. Migrant workers are strongly disproportionately taking those agricultural jobs and migrant children are then funneled into the system as well as a vulnerable community to be exploited by certain bosses and employers.

Nolan Mascarenhas So given that we have this failure of law, I think it’s important to understand just how big this failure is. So to start with, what is the scope of the current state of child labor in the United States right now?

Luke Hinrichs So given the extremely limited resources available to the Department of Labor after decades of under resourcing, of undermining, what we know based on the Department of Labor’s efforts is that child labor violations have increased 283 % from 2015 to 2022, and then 2023 and 2024 were marked by continued increase in child labor violations. And I want to just emphasize that that increase only represents what we’ve found to be policing incidents where they’ve actually investigated how the resources and ability to investigate have found it and we’re able to enforce the law. What’s going under that is all the instances that they don’t have the resources to catch, that they don’t have the necessary personnel to enforce. And so the issue is far greater than that 283% increase.

Troy Brown So I think numbers are useful here for understanding just the sheer size of the problem, but what does this actually look like in practice?

Luke Hinrichs Right. So in 2023, the DOL, the Department of Labor, found 5 ,792 children employed in violation of the law. That’s just in violation of the law and what they found. But in that year also in February, 2023, there was a major, major federal investigation into this one cleaning service, this staffing agency service called the Packer Sanitation Services, Inc., PSSI, which was found to have been employed over a hundred children, aged 13 to 17, working overnight shifts in hazardous occupations at meat processing facilities across eight states. This isn’t just a singular incident. This is a widespread issue where you had this one staffing agency company bringing in minors to clean dangerous machinery. Children were suffering severe chemical burns from the cleaning products that the company was providing. And you had 13 year olds consistently working overnight shifts. Now the Department of Labor did discover it, investigated and was able to enforce it. PSSI, however, was only fined the maximum of $15 ,138 for each minor aged employee that they could find. Now $15 ,000, that’s, that’s the statutory limit that this company could feel the wrongs of their harms. And the Department of Labor’s investigation into PSSI really revealed this broader issue where you had major meat processing companies within a consolidated industry. You really only have four big competitors within this space. And each of the dominant firms within the meat processing industry we’re all using the same company, PSSI, to provide staff and employees, workers to clean their facilities. And we’re not talking small businesses operating under small profit margins. These are massive dominant corporations like JBS, Cargill, and Tyson Foods. Three of the four most dominant firms within the meat processing industry using through this company, child labor to keep their facilities clean and operating. The revelations of that investigation, however, show this broader systemic rot that indicts really the status quo of corporate governments, how we have allowed shareholder primacy to govern our system and this common outsourcing of risk and responsibility through this business arrangement or fissured workplace where company can outsource to a staffing agency their employment relationships, fully disentangling their duties and responsibilities under the law and creating this race to the bottom that we’re seeing where children are being brought in harmed within the workplace.

Nolan Mascarenhas So you talk about how hard it is to identify child labor violations. What are some of the barriers, including structural corporate issues to accountability to hold these corporations accountable for their actions?

Luke Hinrichs For really understanding this new status quo of outsourcing risk and responsibility, I think a great starting point is 1970. You have economist Milton Friedman penning an essay articulating really the underpinnings of a dogma that would profoundly influence private businesses and shape the development of law for Friedman. The sole purpose of business is to serve shareholders and that’s really the sole social responsibility of business was simply to increase profits. According to Friedman, this free society that we all come to enjoy requires that there really be one and only one social responsibility of business and that’s to use its resources to engage in activities designed to increase short term profits so long really as it stays within the rules of the game. The hidden bag behind that though, is that the rules of the game can change to further this shareholder premises, to further this short term profit maximization. And this worldview manifested an emergent and now dominant legal and economic framework for corporate governance that we now know as shareholder premises where shareholders are held supreme. This dogma then instructs executives and boards of directors to prioritize increasing short term profits and share prices over all else, over improving alternative metrics like operational performance, the benefit of workers, and to serve this profit maximization goal, companies from the 80s on deprioritize labor retention, worker retention, reinvestment in their facilities and supplies and really their growth of sales over the long term, instead focusing on short term, cost cutting efficiencies, maximizing payments for shareholders. This shift in priorities resulted in deep downsizing practices, widespread across industries. And that’s where we really get this employment result, where we get workers losing their jobs while shareholders rake in profits. Now for the worker, for the employee, companies are outsourcing their services and want to seek to avoid the burdens of direct employment. What those burdens really just mean is following employment law, providing benefits to workers, providing a minimum wage, and a company is able to avoid all of those costly benefits to workers by contracting with intermediary companies that provide labor through subcontractors and subcontractors of subcontractors. For this one economist and labor scholar that was in Obama’s Department of Labor, David Weil, he describes this trend as the emergence of the fissured workplace. A fissured workplace is where this major company can deploy very legalese detailed contracting agreements and rely on an intermediary like a staffing agency, a PSSI, a cleaning staffing agency, to provide the necessary services that ensure the company can still operate and move forward. For meat processing sector, this is very useful. It’s a common dynamic now where meat processing companies can downsize, completely eliminate in -house cleaning services, and instead contract with PSSI, quote, premier provider of food safety solutions. Also happens to be owned by a private equity company in the name of Blackstone. Then they can come in, provide staffing, provide workers, and a company like Tyson Foods or the overall meat processing industry can say, we aren’t employing these workers. We don’t owe these workers anything. It’s actually the staffing agency. The staffing agency is the primary responsible party who controlled who they’re employing and who they’re bringing into the workplace. Down the road, we then have these staffing agencies in a bidding war, in a race to the bottom. How can they provide these big companies the most amount of labor at the least cost? And really that then creates that race to the bottom of, all right, as little pay as possible, terrible working conditions, terrible working hours. And who can we actually bring in that would accept this hours? And often that’s vulnerable communities. And who’s more vulnerable than a minor desperate for work, desperate provides some type of money for their family. And then you have bringing in even more vulnerable to exploitation workers like migrant children who are repeatedly found to be employed within these meat processing facilities. And what we overall have is within this fissured workplace is this disentangled structure that allows big companies to escape burdens, to escape costs, to escape liabilities, to point the finger at another company, a staffing agency of sorts, who can then in turn using the rhetoric of individuality, of free choice, to then again point the finger at a minor, that it was this minor’s fault that they out of desperation lied, cheated to get their way into work. And it’s just this low down of responsibility where in the end, maybe no company responsible, maybe it’s this individual to who’s the most blame worthy and that’s their ideal cost effective. They can limit their legal liabilities and they can point the finger easily and escape any consequence.

Troy Brown I want to stick on this point of the corporate structures here and the ideas of shareholder supremacy, because I think a counter argument from the right would be that actually corporate actors are the best positioned to address these issues, right? As we’ve seen the government regulation and oversight just frankly isn’t working in part because there aren’t the resources. So why is it not the case that corporate boards and corporate governors who, as you note, have immense power, can’t be the ones to affect this change?

Luke Hinrichs So I would definitely even agree that corporations are the best positioned to address that. But that actually means that corporations being the best positioned actor to address these child labor harms should be the ones held accountable. And they should be the ones bearing the burden and costs of preventing child labor violations in their workplace. So what we need to do is break down that fissured workplace, maybe through a joint employer status solution. And for those listening, the current status quo is that this company can hire a staffing agency who then hire workers and really then it’s only the staffing agency that has that employment relationship as it’s only that staffing agency beholden to the worker rather than the company, even though the company is getting all the benefits of the work and joint employer status instead says that company, given its relationship, given its decision to hire a staffing agency and control of the workplace that the worker’s ultimately in, given these variables, both the company and the staffing agency function as employers. And because of that, they also have to be beholden to the law, but hold into the responsibilities of being an employer. If you want to be an employer, you have to bear the burdens that come with that. And we’ve accepted legal structures that attach to employment status. And what some though argue is that because corporations are the best positioned and because we believe in shareholders, that shareholders are informed that they can see these news articles come out, see that the department of labor is investigating the company that they’re a shareholder of and force the company to change through a shareholder vote of some sort or what have you. And it’s the shareholders and shareholder primacy, the system that is the status quo here that can come to a solution that can come to change, that can move the company. And this has been attempted. We saw from the PSSI investigation that I spoke about earlier that Tyson Foods was involved in where there were children working within Tyson Foods facilities and shareholders saw this and proposed solutions. They proposed a shareholder solution of a third party audit of labor practices within the company’s supply chain and asked the company to disclose more information, making good on their stated no tolerance policy for illegal child labor. The proposal highlighted the fact that the company does not disclose information as it stands on their unfortunate use of illegal child labor. And sought really just that the company could strengthen its policies and practices, including a robust system of checks and audits, a simple proposal, but as headlines announced shareholders ultimately rejected that proposal and that’s not to discredit the values of an everyday shareholder within Tyson Foods. The reality is that it wasn’t a truly democratic outcome. When we think of shareholder votes and shareholder primacy, it’s really not the everyday stockholder that has an equal vote for these proposals. In fact, Tyson has a dual stock structure where insiders have an outsized vote power and these insiders have over 70 % control of the company’s stock where publicly traded stockholders have only 30%. And despite the clear harms of child labor and despite what we would consider a rational moral disgust with child labor, that shareholder proposal was rejected even though the majority of normal everyday public traders voted in favor of these simple audits and checks. Despite this majority, it fails given this very common dual class stock structure of these big companies. When we think of these values of shareholder primacy, that it’s empowered by principles of democratic outcome of private enforcement and control and free market values, no matter what the vote shows again that the weakness of shareholders as a check on the most powerful entities for society’s worst instincts is disrupted by a concentration of power within a select few’s hands. It’s not democratic, these outcomes. And there’s further issues also in just thinking that private markets can self -regulate here. The proposal was for third party auditors, which again is a booming industry for these companies to sign off and say that they’ve hired an independent auditor, they got the all clear and they can’t be liable. They’ve done all that they can. And that’s the status quo today.

Troy Brown Can you walk us through this third party auditing structure and explain some of the ways where it works or more likely doesn’t work?

Luke Hinrichs So third party audits are now 80 billion global industry. In which firms perform hundreds of thousands of inspections every year. However, we’re seeing reporting of confidential audits conducted by several large firms in the audit industry that revealed that they are largely captured as a private enforcement market and consistently missed child labor incidents. They’re increasingly deployed and relied upon by corporations as this privatized solution for policing. But really it’s to shift away from public enforcement. It’s to show that these companies can do it on their own, but in reality, it’s a flawed mechanism. Companies themselves can dictate the scope of the audit, determining when and where auditors can even conduct inspections, as well as what documents the auditors can even review. So facility inspections typically scheduled weeks in advance with auditors reporting that they will avoid arriving earlier than scheduled as to not risk upsetting the relationship that they want to have with a company. These auditors want to be hired again. They want good relationships with the very same companies that they are auditing. They know that auditors won’t come back to see if the lights are on at 3 a .m. They won’t come back to see the children that are being bused in and brought in to work that 5 a .m. to 11 a .m. shift. They’re not going to go out of their way to disrupt their economic incentives. They want to be hired. And under these conditions, auditors naturally can miss the shifts that minors are typically employed in and either consciously or unconsciously turn a blind eye. They often don’t have the opportunity to speak to the right employees. They might not even ever directly speak to workers generally. Fear of retaliation, lack of translation services. All of these factors come together to prevent truthful disclosure of worker experiences and disclosure of actual realities within these facilities. Subcontractors especially are even rarely placed within the scope of these compliance audits. So again, the general norm is that these big companies are using subcontractors and those subcontractors won’t be in that determined scope of an audit. So they can point to a private auditor, point to this burgeoning industry of private audits as a legitimation machine, as a kind of washing of their reputation while controlling what auditors can see and the outcomes of the audits, essentially. Research has also found that third party audits often rely on forged and false documents. There’s no policing the private policers in this scenario. They can just rein free and again, are just driven by the same profit maximization that the companies are.

Nolan Mascarenhas Is it then safe to say that third party auditors, in a sense, are essentially useless?

Luke Hinrichs I mean, for companies, the real beauty of these third party audits is that it reduces then the apparent need for real oversight by scrutinizing third parties and public enforcers. What we have now is this expansion of private compliance audits in conjunction with a diminished enforcement capacity of public agencies. This privatization of enforcement through captured auditors provides companies further insulation from the meaningful public accountability that is required to prevent shot labor. As captured third party audits fail to even catch the most blatant violations of child labor laws, the very structure of companies further provide the insulation from accountability. And ultimately, what we have are business interests then engaging in coordinated legislative efforts to further roll back the existing child labor restrictions, limited as they even are today, as part of this broader movement to privatize public institutions and deregulate employment.

Troy Brown So let’s stick on this point about what’s happening legislatively, because we know that in the coming years, there’s no help coming from the federal government. So the onus really is on states to do something. But what exactly are states doing right now?

Luke Hinrichs Yeah, the Economic Policy Institute has been really great about tracking state level efforts to deregulate child labor laws. I would point to a lot of the work of Nina Mast, who’s a researcher over at EPI Economic Policy Institute, who has been doing a lot of great work within this space. What we’ve found is that state legislatures across the country are trying to introduce and have enacted legislation to either extend the permitted length of work hours for minors, also limit the additional oversight and enforcement capacity of the agencies tasked with forcing child labor laws and are loosening certain restrictions and liabilities if a child is harmed in the workplace. What’s consistently seen is also that the same states where these legislative efforts are coming forward are often the states where the Department of Labor are finding egregious federal child labor violations. You have in Minnesota, a national food manufacturer was illegally employing 11 children, nine of whom operating hazardous machinery and meatpacking and food crossing facilities. And Minnesota in 2023 tried to enact legislation to undermine their child labor laws. It goes hand in hand. The companies in these states are often already engaging in unlawful behavior and are also benefiting from this coordinated effort to make that unlawful behavior actually legal. Why it’s considered coordinated is that the primary proponents mobilizing around this legislation are the same business interest groups. It’s the National Federation of Independent Businesses. It’s the Chamber of Commerce. It’s the National Restaurant Association. These industry associations are coming in and truly just handing over legislation to legislators to just pass. What organizers have found on the ground is that after legislation has been introduced, when they confront a legislator, they often don’t even know what they’ve tried to enact. They don’t even know what’s in this law to allow a 13 year old to work longer shifts to completely eliminate liability for certain companies who employ children and that child that children get injured on the job. These legislators are given legislation by interested parties to just pass forward. And I will say that although this pro -business agenda is seeking to limit guardrails to ensure that the health and safety of workers is protected, there are coordinated efforts to fight back and there’s some real solace in seeing that there has been progress on that front. That some of these statutes haven’t been enacted because of organizing and that some states are actually strengthening their child labor laws because of organizing around this issue and a recognition that it is a widespread issue. We can’t hide our heads in the sand anymore and think of child labor as an ancient atrocity, as it was in 1930. That ancient atrocity is here today.

Nolan Mascarenhas So I think it feels safe to say that we are facing a tough regulatory environment because of growing corporate power and captured state legislatures, but you give us some hope in the sense that there is a growing recognition of the problems. So where can we go from here to hold corporations accountable?

Luke Hinrichs I mentioned the joint employer status movement that really took shape under the Biden administration. Unfortunately, from this current climate of the Trump administration, it shouldn’t be expected that the National Labor Relations Board or the Department of Labor will still seek this new movement of joint employer status as a solution. But what really needs to take shape is a reckoning with how we view shareholder primacy, how we view corporate governance and what we accept to be the guiding principles and guiding motives of commerce and corporations. I would like to emphasize that there’s a lot of factors that come into play here, and one significant one is our immigration system. Our immigration system creates vulnerability specifically for migrant children. They are in often this limbo period where there’s simply no protections, no regulations, and out of necessity, out of a need to provide for their family and feeling all those pressures of economic necessity are often pipelined into these exploitative workplaces. And that situation is only expected to get worse under the Trump administration. These vulnerable communities are only expected to expand, especially when you have widespread demonization. The only thing that will happen really is the exploitation will say the same, but the willingness to come forward, the willingness to accept the harms will only be greater because there’s this lack of legal support, legal framework, and a fear of coming forward that the repercussions for voicing their harm will be too great. And what we will likely see is that maybe the incidents of recorded reported child labor will balk, that incidents that we know of child labor violations will decrease, but that will likely only be because the Department of Labor under the Trump administration will stop looking. So if we see a new headline coming out down the road of a decline in child labor violations, I would likely take that as a grain of salt because we know that the issue is far broader than the Department of Labor has been able to discover, given their lack of resources, given the hamstring of different administrations and this view that private enforcement mechanisms are the solution in this broader landscape. We will see a growing movement towards private enforcement, but we already know the holes in that are baked in and they’re baked in to permit these children from slipping through the cracks and the harm will only be greater.

Troy Brown So, Luke, this has been such a useful conversation. And unfortunately, as you note, there are a lot of reasons for pessimism in the coming years, but you also write about some reasons for optimism, and I think it’s worth flagging those. How should we feel about this issue in the coming years and why is it not actually hopeless?

Luke Hinrichs I think it’s really important to note that it’s very possible to cut through the narratives of free choice, of free markets, that when you see a child laboring on a killing floor of a meat processing facility coming out of that facility with severe chemical burns, that we have a reaction to that, that there’s some feeling that there’s something wrong here. And at least where we’ve seen efforts to roll back child labor laws on the state level, there are also efforts to fight back, Indiana specifically, tried proposing giving employers complete immunity. In the case of injury or death of a minor employed, complete immunity. That provision was met by significant opposition once organizers took shape there. They organized families, parents, the communities, and they were able to push back and prevent the passage of that law. That said, again, Indiana was able to pass other rollback bills, which eliminated many protections for 16 and 17 year olds. And that was enacted. But I will say that the organizers are still taking shape. At least seven states just in 2024 strengthened their child labor protections. And that includes Alabama. That includes Nebraska, Utah, Virginia. These aren’t northern sensibilities. These are states with histories of labor exploitation, at least recognizing that a line needs to be drawn, that children should not be in occupations with hazardous materials, that children should not be exploited in the workplace. And at least we should see some glimmer of hope within organizing at the state level, that there can be something done, that these powerful associations, like the chamber of commerce, that the national restaurant association, that these organizations coordinating this effort of deregulation can be challenged and can be defeated. That progress can be made. We know that the federal landscape may look a little more bleak, but there are pockets of progress that can be made, that there are carve -outs where there can be compassion. And it’s in that, in community organizing, that we can really find some hope for addressing this widespread issue.

Troy Brown Luke Hendricks, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. That’s all we have time for. We’re so delighted that you took the time to join us.

Luke Hinrichs Thank you for having me.

Nolan Mascarenhas I also want to thank you for a wonderful conversation. It opened my eyes to the huge child labor violations that persist despite long -standing regulations and what the path towards progress

Troy Brown could look like. And of course, an incredible thank you to Nolan Mascarenas for being such a great co -host today.

Nolan Mascarenhas Of course, Troy, if you’re interested in reading Luke’s full article or learning more about the flaws in our legal system, check out The Flaw Magazine at theflaw .org.

Troy Brown And if you enjoyed this episode, first make sure to check out the show notes. There’ll be some awesome links and references there. And make sure you subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to your podcast, rate and review five, five points, five stars only. You can also check out flawschool .org for more content. Thank you all for listening. Looking forward to talking at you in the future. Remember the bell doesn’t dismiss you. I dismiss you.  Uh, okay. Class is dismissed.

Luke Hinrichs

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