Child labor is back. The Labor Department’s wage and hour division recorded a 37 percent increase in 2022 in the number of minors employed in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which outlawed most child labor way back in 1938 and imposed strict limits on the rest. The 37 percent increase was over the previous year. Over the previous decade, the number of minors employed in violation of the act was up 140 percent.
The surge in child labor reverses what had been, for most of the past 20 years, a significant decline in the number of minors employed in violation of the FLSA. Nobody knows exactly why the numbers started to climb in 2015, but probably it was because the labor market was getting tight. The unemployment rate, which had been falling since 2010, dropped in 2015 to 5 percent, which was then considered full employment. Workers were getting hard to find. The unemployment rate has since fallen further to 3.4 percent.
The violations began piling up just as Republican state legislators, many of them newly in the majority, went on the attack against child labor restrictions, pressing in various ways to expand the number of work hours and work settings available to teenagers aged 14 to 17. (With exceptions for farm families, child actors, and a few others, child labor under age 14 is illegal.) One Wisconsin bill went so far as to ban the phrase “child labor” from state employment statutes, requiring that the offending term be replaced by “employment of...
The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) has issued a formal apology to Professor Wazi Apoh, Dean of the School of Arts and Professor of Archaeology at the University of Ghana, following the c...