Alarm as Florida Republicans move to fill deported workers' jobs with children: 'It's insane, right?'
Category: News & Politics
Via: bob-nelson • 4 weeks ago • 22 commentsBy: Upton Sinclair (the Guardian)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Beneath the smugness of Ron DeSantis, at Florida leading the nation in immigration enforcement lies something of a conundrum: how to fill the essential jobs of the scores of immigrant workers targeted for deportation.
The answer, according to Florida lawmakers, is the state's schoolchildren, who as young as 14 could soon be allowed to work overnight shifts without a break - even on school nights.
A bill that progressed this week through the Republican-dominated state senate seeks to remove numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and allow them, in the Florida governor's words, to step into the shoes of immigrants who supply Florida's tourism and agriculture industries with "dirt cheap labor".
"What's wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? That's how it used to be when I was growing up," DeSantis said at an immigration forum with Donald Trump's "border czar", Tom Homan, in Sarasota last week.
"Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be [doing] all this stuff."
Unsurprisingly, the proposal has alarmed immigration advocates and watchdog groups concerned about child labor abuses and exploitation.
They point out that there is nothing "part-time" in the language of the companion senate and house bills currently before lawmakers, which instead will permit unlimited working hours without breaks for 14- and 15-year-olds who are schooled at home or online, and allow employers to require 16- and 17-year-olds to work for more than six days in a row.
"It's essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year," said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), an independent research and economic analysis group.
"It's important to remind people that teens can work. They can get that experience and some extra money if they need it. But there have to be protections in place to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this that's absolutely not going to happen."
Meanwhile, an attempt by the state senator who sponsored the bill, the Sarasota Republican Jay Collins, to paint it as an issue of parental rights rather than a way to cover Florida's deportation-driven labor shortfall also failed to impress critics.
"We're not talking about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair," he told the chamber on Wednesday, referring to the 1906 novel that described horrific and dangerous conditions endured by cheap immigrant laborers, including children, in Chicago's meat-packing industry - an environment that still exists today.
DeSantis, he insisted, "is talking about those soft skill benefits to children growing", and said his bill was aimed at teenagers working in places like grocery stores.
Tsoukalas rejected Collins's claim. "There's different arguments that people will put on the floor in order to do what they think it takes to get a bill passed. Given some of the justifications that state leaders have made in recent days, it's clear that they are linking the immigration issue and child labor," she said.
"When the sweeping anti-immigrant bill of 2023 passed, we did warn there would be impacts on the labor force and the economy given how reliant we are on immigrant labor. Of course, not all of those people are undocumented, but as we've seen recently at the federal level all types of people, even permanent residents, are getting threatened with deportation.
"Combined with what's going on at the state level, that absolutely is a concern. It's no surprise that last year, and then again this year, we're talking about the need to fill gaps with other forms of labor."
According to the US Census Bureau, more than 27% of Florida's workforce is foreign-born.
The Farmworker Association of Florida, which represents tens of thousands of low-income, immigrant laborers, says about 60% of its membership is undocumented, and most vulnerable to detention and deportation. Others are among half a million Haitians nationwide who Trump has ordered to leave the US by August after he rescinded their temporary protected status.
Pushback from FPI and other groups persuaded Florida lawmakers to drop some of the harsher provisions in a child labor law that passed last year, and opponents are dismayed to find them back under consideration.
The state was singled out in a 2024 report by Governing for Impact and the Economic Policy Institute that recorded a surge in workplace injuries and violations involving minors - some in the agricultural industry where hazards include exposure to toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery.
The report noted a corresponding push in at least 30 mostly Republican-controlled states to weaken workplace protections for children, and warned the second Trump administration would seek to escalate the rollback.
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"We've been saying since 2023 that this is a way for them to exploit minors, it was when they passed this large, anti-immigrant omnibus and the same year that they tried to pass the first law gutting child labor protection," said Thomas Kennedy, spokesperson for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
"The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has always been net migration and they'll never go for that because of their politics. So their only answer is to widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger."
Kennedy and Tsoukalas are hopeful that Republicans who said they were uncomfortable with some parts of the bill will ultimately decide to vote against it. According to the Miami Herald, the Republican state senators Nick DiCeglie and Tom Wright helped move it out of the commerce and tourism committee on a 5-4 vote, but said it "needed work".
Republican Joe Gruters joined three Democrats in voting against, saying: "We need to let kids be kids."
Kennedy, however, pointed to another Republican bill that progressed this week that would allow employers to pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage.
"To recap, they made the state hostile to immigrants. They deported a bunch of people, or scared people into not coming, or moving out of the state. They exacerbated worker shortages, so now they're trying to gut child labor protection standards, while at the same time passing a law that would allow them to classify these children and other workers as interns," he said.
"It's insane, right?"
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Welcome to the 18th Century.
When we were teenagers my brother and I worked in our father's factory during summer school vacations, but it was a family business and I don't see anything wrong with that. As it happens neither of us wanted to take it over, both of us became lawyers, so our father ended up selling the business. As well, many kids might find it advantagous to have a part-time job, for the income, or the experience, but I don't agree that they be PUT to work if it isn't their choice. IMO doing a part-time job is more beneficial than sitting on ones ass all day playing video games. Let's see to what extent the Florida government will enslave the kids.
I delivered newspapers every day of high school. In college I spent my summers as an official, licensed guide on the Gettysburg battlefield. Those were part-time jobs, for pocket money. My family didn't have a lot of money, but we never went hungry.
In Florida, they're going to need child labor, so they'll have to set it up as necessary for survival.
I don't think either of us has any concern about teenagers doing part-time work so long as it's voluntary, but it crosses MY red line if it's full time and/or mandatory. And of course full time required apprenticing for a skill that a person has chosen to do should not be a problem.
Somebody's got to pick the oranges...tho I don't see how picking at night is going to work...unless they outfit the kids with miner's lamps
A machine to pick from trees is possible. In 1970s FMC made an experimental one, but apple pickers were cheaper. With advancers in robotics it could be successful now
good point
Florida will soon be a 3rd world shit hole. The GoP is working overtime to extend that moniker to the rest of the country too.
That ship has sailed. The next phase of this plan will be for child labor to be mandatory. Those who refuse will be deported to a Salvadoran prison.
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This article makes it sound like forced child labor. No one will be “forced” to work. That said, many of us without a gold spoon up our ass started working at 14-15.[✘]
Link?
First provide proof that “forced” labor is actually happening.
This article is baseless to begin with in that regard.
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Insane, cruel, and very very dangerous. Tearing down public schools and sending kids to become indoctrinated to a life of perpetual labor with no chance for a better life.
This is not making America great.
Many kids will never get out of the loop of a job to go to any higher education. Especially poor kids who may become literally enslaved not only to a job but to unscrupulous parents taking the kids money.
Scary!
Sounds like the Hunger Games...
Sounds like the future
You're so right! It's obviously better for these kids to remain pampered in the public school system which continually lowers standards just to keep pushing kids through the system, then con them into useless degrees in colleges and universities bought with borrowed money they will never be able to pay back and will end up in the same perpetual labor with no chance for a better life in order to enrich the very progressives that put them in that position in the first place.
I mean, it certainly could not be the case that these bills could possibly teach kids work ethics, self-reliance, self-respect and a sense of taking charge of their own future. That'd be nuts, right? It certainly couldn't be possible that this sort of thing might teach kids something about the adult world that awaits them. It certainly couldn't be the case that parents could use something like this to teach their kids that if they want a car, a house, college money, then these are the sorts of things they will have to do to get them as adults. It certainly could not be the case that if a kid wants to go to college someday without incurring ruinous debt that will doom their future, they just might have a head start on saving money for it if someone would be willing to hire a 14 year old in the first place.
But what am I saying? I, myself, am evidence of the cruelty of child labor when an unscrupulous local grocer offered me a job when I was only 16. Rather than playing with my friends, I had to actually work to earn the money that allowed me to do more with the time off I had. In the false sense of self-reliance the job gave me, I was able to take the burden of having to buy all my clothes off of my parents and bought some of them myself. If I wanted to go to the movie theater, I could pay for it myself rather than have to ask them for the money. All thanks to those cruel bastards, the conservatives, who forced me to learn about self-sufficiency, responsibility and prepared me for the realities of adulthood.
And let's not forget the parental abuse. I remember the one single day, when I was about eleven, when my parents were struggling so hard to put food on the table, my dad took me and my younger brothers to an apple orchard to pick apples off the ground to fill crates with. Dad got paid by the crate. I didn't understand what we were doing at the time. I just thought, even as boring as the task was, how cool it was to work with my dad. Little did I understand at the time how I was just exploited, according to the left, anyway.
Nope. It's obvious that the moment these bills pass, they're going to lower the state's children into mines and not let them see the light of day for the rest of their lives and only lower food down to them if they meet their quotas.
What you up against here is the academia bias. Much of which is liberal elitist. Few of them have ever gotten their hands dirty. Digging ditches, picking fruit, getting a journeyman trades license, etc, etc.
In their defense, it is their reality since all of that type of work should only be performed by the unwashed masses and is very much so beneath them.
The Leftist reaction to all of this is classic. It has little connection to any actual facts. It's mostly just narrative taken to be fact. Anyone who bothers to do the research will see it. For instance...
Is pretty much revealed to be nonsense when you actually look at what the senate and house bills actually say. It's just another Chicken Little sky is falling nonsense.