Since the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, there have been ever more complaints from capitalist firms that there are fewer and fewer workers. 1.13 million people have died due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States alone. For the majority of survivors, working conditions were so terrible, compared to the pay and benefits received, that many up and left their jobs; the prospects of a better paying job with a better work environment outweighed the risk of losing nearly all of a worker’s income.

Despite the employers’ lamentations, the number of working people has not decreased since the beginning of the pandemic – even now the number of people registering for unemployment is at an all time low. The average age of the U.S. population is also increasing rapidly: the number of people in the older generation is greater than that of younger generations. These older people are currently at the age of retirement from the labor market, preparing for their end-of-life experiences. Whatever the reason for this, American employers are not shy to sound the alarm that they aren’t generating as much surplus value as they’d like because there just aren’t enough workers to do the job.

This self-made problem is creating a desperate clamor in state governments to remedy the lack of labor power for firms, resulting in the loosening of child labor regulations. But this wasn’t just a quick change of mind – employers have been violating bourgeois law regarding child labor well before any changes were made. Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., a Wisconsin based company, was caught employing children at 13 meatpacking plants across the country in November 2022. In Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas, children were employed to clean meatpacking facilities for JBS and Cargill, everything from conveyor belts to industrial bone saw machines.

Packers Sanitation Services previously suggested underage workers could have misrepresented their age to bypass the company’s verification measures. Further, the company claims that any children or the managers who would have hired them no longer work for PSSI. The firm’s Vice President even claims the company has a zero tolerance policy on employing people younger than 18 years of age! But even with these moralist exclamations the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division soberly stated:

“Make no mistake, this is no clerical error, or actions of rogue individuals or bad managers, these findings represent a systemic failure across PSSI’s entire organization to ensure that children were not working in violation of the law. PSSI’s systems in many cases flagged that these children were too young to work, and yet they were still employed at these facilities”.

In December of 2022, it was discovered that Alabama suppliers for Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Corp. were employing children in their factories. Throughout the investigation, the companies alluded to supporting an Alabama task force set up to combat human trafficking. But when inspectors arrived at their facilities, they reported that workers were seen escaping out the back of the facility to avoid being questioned. Hyundai, in response, summarily re-organized their supply chains to stop receiving supply from these facilities.

In both these cases, the official response from the U.S. government was to issue monetary fines and deliver written orders to stop the employment of children – but monetary fines are nothing more than a slap on the wrist to capitalist firms. In the case of Packers Sanitation Services Inc. LTD, the Department of Labor fined the company $1.5 million. With a reported revenue of over $500 million, the effort of the State was merely to inform the company they violated the law.

The lax attitude of the state towards the employment of children across American capitalism has begun to take a new form as well in the degrading of child labor regulations. In Wisconsin last year, legislation passed which changed the latest time minors can work to from 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM on a school day and as late as 11:00 PM when the work day doesn’t fall on a school day. Senator Mary Felzkowski, who authored the bill, said it was aimed at helping small businesses deal with a nationwide worker shortage. The measure was backed by the State’s hotel, restaurant and grocery industries, who were affected the most by the so-called labor shortage. The Wisconsin Restaurant Association said in June 2022 that it supported extending workers hours for teens to help solve staffing issues.

This year, also in Wisconsin, legislation to lower the minimum age for a person to distribute alcohol has been proposed. Currently a person must be 18 years or older to distribute alcohol in the state, which the proposed legislation would lower to 14. The authors of this bill, Sen. Rob Stafsholt and Rep. Chanz Green, claimed that “the current age limit on serving alcohol causes workforce issues due to an establishment’s underage employees only being able to do part of their job”. A double-play by the bourgeois State in Wisconsin – restaurants and bars who benefit from minors working later hours now reveal the joy they’ll experience when children as young as 14 must distribute alcohol to adults—after all, it was part of their job to begin with!

In Ohio, a similar bill, Senate Bill 30, is being considered, which would allow children as young as 14 to work till 9:00 PM. Children currently cannot work later than 7:00 PM during the school year, but both bills make it so working until 9:00 is an opportunity for which children can get a parent’s permission during the school year. According to the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), during the school year, children can work no later than 7:00 PM. The law in Wisconsin avoids violating this standard by making the statute only applicable to employers whose sales volume is under $500,000 or who conduct inter-state commerce; essentially, the new law only applies to workplaces not covered under the FLSA. The bourgeoisie of Ohio aims to request that the Federal government amend the FLSA so the state ordinance is permissible.

Legislators in Iowa have passed Senate File 542, which allows children 14 years of age to serve alcohol. The bill also permits children to work later than 7:00 PM. Brad Epperly, a lobbyist for the Iowa Grocer Industry Association, said during a state committee meeting that “everybody has a worker need right now, I think the latest statistics are young people from 16-24, the job participation rate is like 56%. It’s awful low.” The law also expands where children can work, letting teenagers do light assembly work in manufacturing plants and giving state officials authority to issue waivers so teens could work in other industries. This loophole includes any work environment as long as children work in connection with “work-based learning or a school or employer-administered, work-related program.” The bourgeoisie Iowa’s Democratic Party establishment are calling for the state’s governor to veto SF542 because of the contradiction, but the fate of this law remains to be seen.

In March of this year, the state of Arkansas eliminated the requirement for children who seek work to acquire a work permit, and made it so that employers no longer need to verify someone’s age or that a child has consent to work from their guardians. The Arkansas state governor, who pushed for the change, claims the provision was obsolete and created a burden on employers. The Governor’s Office claimed that “protecting kids is most important, but this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.” This, however, means the state will not have a means of enforcing child labor regulations!

Minnesota Legislation HF260, which is currently in the state’s House of Representatives, would allow children aged 16 and 17 to work in and around construction and building projects.

In all of these cases, the supporters of the legislation claim it is to alleviate a tight labor market, where the price of labor is high, even in historically low-paying jobs like in restaurants or general labor. The reintroduction of child labor will decrease the price for labor across any category where it is allowed while subjecting children to dangerous working conditions, working long hours even during the school year. Whatever moral opportunity is being created is farcically dangled in front of the edifice of a quickly failing economy and a constantly dropping rate of surplus value. The capitalists of America have shown that no amount of progressive morals will keep capitalism from returning to its most primal behaviors, consuming as much labor power as possible to generate profits and reproduce the possibility to make more profit in the future. Like vampires, their intoxicating accumulation of profit must continue, and if that means abandoning more than a hundred years of progressive liberal regulation on child labor, so be it.

Bourgeois crocodile tears over losses in profits aren’t new; recall that in 1848, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx called out the capitalists for their rank outlook towards the next generation of humanity:
     “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
     “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.
     “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
     “Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
     “But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
     “And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
     “The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor”.

Since the 1930s, most child labor in the US was done away with through the New Deal, which, not even ten years after its passing, was slowly degraded by the bourgeoisie of the United States, and for what? Well, as was said in the Manifesto, for the benefit of Capital! For the private gain!

Even after this point, Marx’s investigation of capitalist production relations reinforces what was stated in the Manifesto. Here he introduces the cost of labor the capitalist must pay – the wage – and the need to generate surplus-value over an ever-increasing working day, or that which goes beyond the reproduction of the labor power which produces the commodity the capitalist sells. What benefit does the capitalist gain from employing children?

What justification did the bourgeoisie in England give for the employment of children in the mid-1800s? Marx, in section 3 of the first volume of Capital, simply quotes the reports of crown-sanctioned doctors and factory inspectors: “[i]f, on the one hand, Senior proved that the net profit of the manufacturer, the existence of the English cotton industry, and England’s command of the world’s markets depend on ‘the last working-hour,’ Dr. Andrew Ure, on the other hand, showed that if minors, instead of being kept the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory, are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world, they will be deprived, by idleness and vice, of all hope for the salvation of their souls”. Children are protected by the haven that is the factory, and what exactly are they protected from? Certainly not the hazardous environments that exist in factories, where heavy machinery and materials zip past humans who are just one misstep away from mortal disaster.

This wasn’t just a declaration by Marx—he shows that the plant inspectors of the time knew of the depraved conditions firms forced children to work in:

“The atmosphere of the flax mills, in which the children of these virtuous and tender parents work, is so loaded with dust and fiber from the raw material, that it is exceptionally unpleasant to stand even 10 minutes in the spinning rooms: for you are unable to do so without the most painful sensation, owing to the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, and mouth, being immediately filled by the clouds of flax dust from which there is no escape. The labor itself, owing to the feverish haste of the machinery, demands unceasing application of skill and movement, under the control of a watchfulness that never tires, and it seems somewhat hard, to let parents apply the term ‘idling’ to their own children, who, after allowing for meal-times, are fettered for 10 whole hours to such an occupation, in such an atmosphere…. These children work longer than the laborers in the neighboring villages…. Such cruel talk about ‘idleness and vice’ ought to be branded as the purest cant, and the most shameless hypocrisy…”.

What the bourgeoisie of the 19th century displayed was the general attitude capitalists have towards the working class, when it comes to the profits their companies generate: if the duration of child labor is reduced to a full 10 hours, their morals – together with the net profits of their employers—will vanish, both being dependent on this last, fatal hour (See Repts., Insp. of Fact., for 31st Oct., 1848, p. 101). Their moral compass is obfuscating not a contempt for humanity, whom they very much depend on to generate their profits, but rather their love of profit over the needs of other men whom they see as alien to their needs and wants.

Recall what was published in the Children’s Employment Commissioners Report of 1863:
     “For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation.
     “William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He ‘ran molds’ (carried ready-molded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mold) from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. ‘I work till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks’.
     “Fifteen hours of labor for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: ‘I turn jigger, and run molds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week’”.

In this example, Marx shows that employers will sacrifice the wellbeing of children to increase profits, in this case by extending the working day to which these children are subjected. But whereas in the 19th century legal regulation was limited or non-existent, today in the US legal regulation is being modified to accomplish the exact same thing capitalists employed 160 years before. This is because the threat to the ruling class by the US working class is so low, and the oppression characteristic of the interests of capital has been overwhelmingly unchallenged since the New Deal was passed. So too has the strength of organized labor declined rapidly.

Today, that protection provided by the factory to children is an opportunity to be seen as a contributing member of capitalist society. The increase in the working day for children is said to be the solution to the lack of adult workers. In reality, as Marx’s work shows, these children are employed to squeeze every last amount of surplus labor-time as can possibly be squeezed from the population employed in today’s factory, to generate every last possible amount of surplus-value, and to have proof, at the end of the fiscal year, that the rate of surplus value from last year has been surpassed.

Certainly, the fact that the bourgeois outlook on children and their place in society has not changed over our shared global history and across the vast space between nations is soberly understood by the communist movement. Our Party has denounced the passive calls to change the way things are by liberal politicians in Italy when Lorenzo Parelli died on the job in 2022, participating in a school-work vocational training program, where the bourgeois regime used its time-tested role of making itself the promoter of debate on the issue. In the United States, and across the planet, this “debate” is something created by the regime – not about how to stop the employment of children, but how to make children “productive”, and the legality of their productivity. Nothing more, nothing less.

When the callous attitude of the Italian bourgeois regime brought about only civil discussion and debate on the matter, student workers took to the streets to protest the indifference they received. In a predictable response, the Italian State mobilized the police to suppress the protest. The national nature of this movement, and the swift punishments meted out by the bourgeois State, led the grassroots union organizations of Italy to stand in solidarity with the movement. Our Party welcomed the declaration, a step towards a united class acting to fulfill its needs against the demands of capitalist firms. However, these calls for solidarity foist children into a category separate from the rest of the working class. Our Party concluded as such:

“The so-called student movement, composed only of students who want to be made to fight for supposed student goals, sanctions this confinement, in a fictitious and transitory social condition. Equally, from its outside, it is propped up by union political opportunism, which calls for the “workers-students union” of the labor movement with the “student movement”, which is accorded dignity”.

Bringing students and children into the working class movement is no myth to be realized either, but something that has happened with great regularity in capitalist society. In 1912, Massachusetts passed a law which reduced the length of the working day for women and children from 56 hours a week to 54. The American Woolen Company of Lawrence, MA, naturally, increased the speed of their machinery to make up for this loss of time. In response, workers at the mill, both adults and children, walked off the job in protest. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) came to the city to assist and began a program to transport children away from the increasingly physical conflict between striking workers, on one side, and the scabs and police, on the other, who protected the company. To save face in light of this turn by the workers, who were becoming more and more organized and centralized in their efforts, the city’s political leadership demanded that the striking workers immediately stop sending their children to other states. The workers refused, and so…

“[w]hen the next group of children prepared to depart the train station, they were met by police and soldiers. The police refused to let them board the trains and launched an attack on the group. A 7-year-old was given a black eye when she was picked up and thrown into a paddy wagon by police. Another witness testified to children being thrown around like rags. Citizens across the country were horrified by the events.”

The federal government in Washington launched an investigative hearing into this event, which brought attention to the employment of children younger than 14. Capitalist society compels adults to sell their children into wage labor, either through fraudulent means or by modifying the law so that their actions are acceptable and without punishment. But during the early 20th century the focus was, as it is today, on depriving children of an education.

Society follows through with the ever-increasing demand of capital to bring children into the toil of waged labor, yet again. As a powerful yet unintended effect on the fast-changing nature of today’s society, which the communist movement has embraced, the fusion of education and productive labor increasingly smashes the bourgeois myth that education must be done in isolation from the productive process. But we communists take this a step further, because, although these workers may still be learning their skills, they are nevertheless workers, and so their struggle must be brought into the class organizations of the proletariat! Where the student is disenfranchised from any compensation for their labor, it is the aim of the united class and its organs of economic struggle to ensure that these workers are reimbursed for their labor! Where that labor is reimbursed at the minimum rate allowed by society, but the length of that working day is subject to constant revisions by capital, the united class economic organizations must put a stop to excessive working time in relation to learning time. It is through the unity of the working class, whose Youth Division is united in the proletarian struggle, that we will break away from the body- and mind-crushing conditions of capitalist society.