U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis was on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” this afternoon. In response to a question about enforcement of illegal immigrant employment, she spoke in harsh terms about the Bush administration’s weak labor enforcement record. Solis even called the Bush Labor Department “negligent” — by far the strongest (and most impolitic) language about her predecessors. During the remainder of the segment, she was pretty diplomatic, speaking of trying to balance the needs of employees, unions, small businesses, and even large corporations. But a word like “negligent” on a national radio show portends major changes at DOL.

As of this post, audio isn’t up, but late Tuesday it will be here — it’s about 15 minutes into the interview.

More news this week in the case of Agriprocessors Inc., the Iowa kosher slaughterhouse busted for all sorts of labor and immigration violations last year.

The Des Moines Register reports that the Iowa Attorney General has dropped 110 child labor charges. This might sound like outstanding news for the company — if not for the fact that there are still 9,201 counts remaining against the business, executives, and some employees.

Apparently one of the supposed child laborers turned 18 during the period of violations, so prosecutors had overcounted (the charges include one count per day of violation). Prosecutors still allege 32 under-18 workers at the plant, seven of whom were under 16. They were doing things children are legally not allowed to do, such as operate heavy machinery like meat grinders.

It’s the most extreme case of factory child labor that’s come to light in recent years, though by no means the only one.

The Wall Street Journal has a short feature story today about the Obama administration’s plans for tougher labor regulation, including the Department of Labor hiring 670 new investigators (something I wrote about two months ago).

The WSJ article is largely told from the perspective of the Fortune 500, with U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims about supposed “heavy-handed enforcement” going largely unchallenged. (Naive question: How can there be heavy-handed enforcement if they just started hiring the people and making appointments?)

In a perfect world, the argument would be about where to find the money to protect individual workers from being exploited by (some small percentage of) companies. But this story follows the Beltway framing of the issue: big unions versus big business. The reporting even mentions a decision to refrain from requiring financial disclosure from unions, something with only a tenuous connection to the issue at hand. At least in this case, I don’t know what major corporations have to fear (if they’re not breaking the law). But I do know that their worries on regulation are, at best, overblown, given that the Obama administration change are thus far aren’t even bringing enforcement staff numbers up to Clinton-era levels.

The story does note two key department appointments:

• M. Patricia Smith, the nominee to be the department’s top lawyer, is commissioner for New York State’s labor department, and is known as a tough regulator who has stepped up worker protection.
• Mr. Obama’s nominee to head OSHA, David Michaels, is an epidemiologist and research professor at George Washington University known for studies on the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals.

This week, the Department of Labor announced a series of citations against blueberry farms and contractors in North Carolina. Five of the nine farms cited, and two of 17 agricultural labor contractors, were employing underage workers.

To its credit, the DOL’s Raleigh District Office did uncover many, many violations by a number of companies. The penalties, though, seem a bit light. They totaled just $31,445 – barely $1,000 per violator. And the agricultural employers were forced to repay only $40,010 in wages, or about $93 per employee. The low numbers aren’t all that surprising. Because DOL’s investigators are judged on fines paid – as opposed to, say, amount of citations – fines are often negotiated down. That doesn’t leave employers with much incentive to follow the rules.

At lease one of these cases was extreme: a child (or children?) picking blueberries was only eight years old, young even by the standards of migrant agriculture workers. Yet the fact that so many farms are guilty is further evidence that illegal child labor is more than just an occasional problem in the agriculture industry. These cases also show that practices first spotted along the Mexico-U.S. border are migrating along north along with the workers.

As promised last week, here is the second half of my examination of official Department of Labor documents on child labor enforcement. Today, I’m looking at the DOL 2008 annual performance and accountability report (link) from last November.

As you may know, the Bush II administration expanded the government’s performance and accountability system during its tenure. This makes it easier to see whether administration officials and department heads think their agencies are or were doing a good job. Of course, these things are pretty biased toward the positive (most of the stuff in this particular report claims the department was “effective”), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth checking out.

The biggest surprise is how little child labor shows up in the 300+ page report. You’d think, given the number of speeches then-secretary Chao gave about child labor, it’d be one of the metrics the department would use to assess itself. But there’s very little about the Wage and Hour Division (the unit that investigates violations) at all.

Search for the word “child labor,” and you’ll find all sorts of references to the DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), which has prevented or withdrawn more than 1.2 million children from exploitive child labor in over 75 countries worldwide through its international technical assistance projects and grants, and by partnering with NGOs, faith-based groups, and local governments. That figure is cumulative since FY 2001 — in 2008, the number was 196,312, so it’s likely increasing year-over-year. The performance indicators look great: in some cases, ILAB is actually exceeding its goals.

Now, I don’t want to downplay this important work, and there’s no question that what’s happening abroad is far worse than what’s happening in America. But it seems odd that so much time and money is devoted to the global problem. DOL is even funding a national child labor survey in Rwanda, without taking basic stock of what’s going on here in the U.S.

Search for “youth worker(s)” or “child worker(s)” in the report and you get nothing. Search for “child” and you get references to child support, but not to the millions of kids who actually work. What’s more, among migrant and seasonal farmworkers, one of the environments where children are most likely to be working in violation of laws, the department scores itself 38 out of 100.

Why? I don’t know. There are no details in the report, and the last time the program was measured was more than five years ago.

Alright, back from vacation and back to the blog. Some great research to share with you the next few weeks, here’s the first installment.

So you may be wondering, what’s the George W. Bush record on child labor? For now, I’m going to ignore the critics and let the Department of Labor make its own case.

The public affairs office at DOL under Elaine Chao (above) clearly thought its Wage & Hour Division was doing a great job when they put out this 2008 recap (link) boasting $1.4 billion in back wages collected since fiscal 2001. But the overall numbers, particularly on child labor enforcement, were mixed (at best).

There’s a Scribd chart at the bottom of this post, in case you want to follow along…click the box on the top right corner to bring it to full screen.

The first thing you notice is that WHD is pretty focused on collecting back pay, or money owed to employees that companies aren’t paying. The numbers have gone up and down, but in general, the trend seems to be going up — WHD is collecting more money for American workers than it did in 2001. It’s also spending less time on each case, which has two plausible explanations: they’re being more efficient, or they don’t have the staff to perform the jobs as well as they did before the Bush years. What is clear is that DOL has not increased the numbers of workers it’s helped since 2001.

On child labor, things don’t look as good. DOL proclaims “strong child labor enforcement,” and brags about the 4,734 minors it found illegally employed in 2008. I’d say, “Great job!” — if not for the fact that this number is half what it was in the last year of the Clinton administration. The figures show a steady decline, with most violations coming from hours.

The same goes for total number of cases and hazardous order violations. And while $4.2 million in fines may sound like a lot, that averages out to less than $1,000 per child employed in violation. Investigators’ time devoted to child labor did increase from 6.7 percent to 6.9 percent, but the total number of hours spent still only accounts for the time equivalent of about 30-something full-time employees — to protect a population of about 6 million 16-to-19 years olds, plus younger kids working in agriculture. DOL blames some of the declines in cited violations on a decrease in the population of younger workers, but the decline in hours spent is far greater than that shift.

In terms of what was planned for 2009 — and presumably things have changed under new DOL secretary Solis somewhat — WHD says child labor will be a priority focus. But it’s concentrating initiatives on shopping malls, retail stores, and theaters — the places where poor and minority children are least likely to work.

One last tidbit: More than a third of child labor violations cases (438 of them) came in cases in which the primary Act being investigated was unrelated to child labor. In many of those, the primary Act was the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA). Essentially, that means WHD investigators are stumbling upon child labor violations on farms. Part II coming next week…

U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis is in the process of adding 250 new investigators to enforce labor laws. When the hiring is complete – I’m told it’s well underway, but will take months – it’ll increase the investigative enforcement staff by more than one-third. What sort of effect will throwing bodies at the problem have? Short answer: Not much, without a lot of other significant changes.

First of all, 100 of those investigators are focused exclusively on stimulus-funded projects. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that until the stimulus is over (presumably, these positions will last beyond that period), DOL is really adding only 150 investigators. And as the Department acknowledged in its press release, there’s been a significant loss of experienced personnel (seldom replaced, even by younger workers) during the last several years. To the point where, even with an additional 250 investigators, numbers are likely still below mid-1990s levels.

While I haven’t tracked down the exact data just yet, take a look at child labor enforcement in particular. Back in 2006, a Child Labor Coalition report looked at the number of investigations in fiscal 2005, and the amount of time DOL employees spent on the issue. The 1,784 investigations in 2005 was a 31.5 percent decline from the year before – the lowest number since the mid-1990s. CLC divided the number of investigative hours devoted to child labor, and estimated it accounted for about 23 full-time DOL employees – that’s just a bit more than half the figure during fiscal 2001, when the hours required about 43 full-time employees. Since child labor is ostensibly the top priority of the agency’s investigators, we have no reason to believe that the larger picture is much different. And I’m told by former DOL employees that the situation worsened during the remaining years of the Bush administration.

So more staff is probably a good thing, but it’s likely not enough to make serious progress – particularly given the culture that Solis inherited at DOL. That’s typified by a Government Accountability Office report from March, which made the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (the unit responsible for enforcement) look incompetent. GAO auditors posed as complainants and also reviewed data on actual complaints. They concluded that WHD was failing to protect workers. From GAO:

We found cases where WHD inappropriately rejected complaints based on incorrect information provided by employers, failed to make adequate attempts to locate employers, did not thoroughly investigate and resolve complaints, and delayed the initiation of investigations for over a year.

Mostly, GAO focused on wage theft (workers who go underpaid by greedy employers), but one of the fake calls was an anonymous tip about children using heavy machinery. The complaint was never recorded in WHD’s database. “WHD claims that among complaints, child labor complaints are its top priority, but four months after GAO left an anonymous child labor complaint, WHD had not conducted any investigative work,” GAO wrote. If you don’t have time for the full report, The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse wrote a good summary of the findings back in March.

Solis announced the new investigators the day the report was released (presumably, in response to it). Clearly, though, without institutional change, 150 new investigators won’t have much effect on child labor law enforcement or anything else. To Solis’ credit, even critical labor advocates have said the current DOL and Obama administration have the right ideas and attitude, but systemic change doesn’t come easy.

As you may have noticed, news hooks mean almost nothing on this blog. In that spirit, today I’m reviewing the June 1991 Government Accountability Office report “Child Labor: Characteristics of Working Children.” (link)

Why so far back? Well, believe it or not, this seems to be the last time the GAO looked at the domestic child labor issue in a comprehensive way. The report, requested by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), examines:

• the economic and demographic characteristics of child workers
• the number of serious injuries sustained by children who the Dept. of Labor said were illegally employed
• DOL’s policies on penalizing employers for child labor violations.

There’s a lot to digest here, but one key number is the sheer size of the under-18 working population. Half of 16 and 17 year olds (3.5m kids), and one-quarter of 15 year olds (nearly 1m), were employed during the year they measured (1988). Children from high-income families were more likely to be employed, so clearly a lot of these kids are suburbanites working in record stores at the mall (nearly 48 percent were in retail). But — and this is in all the reports I’m reading — the low-income kids are more likely to be in hazardous industries like manufacturing and construction. Those two industries are responsible for one-quarter of all injuries associated with child labor violations. Poorer kids also worked more seasonally — more hours per week, fewer weeks per year.

Among 15 year olds, about one-fifth worked in violation of maximum hours or minimum-age laws. In the FY 1990 inspections, DOL assessed the maximum nonwillful penalty of $1,000 only when children were seriously injured; but it never assessed the maximum willful penalty of $10,000 against any employers, and didn’t refer cases for criminal prosecution. In general, the assessed fines are much lower than the maximums — the 1990 average was $283. Despite new authority given by Congress during 1991, in the cases where there wasn’t a serious injury, DOL increased assessed penalties by very small amounts. DOL was detecting more violations — a fourfold increase to 42,696 between 1983 and 1990. Serious injuries among illegally employed children doubled.

A few other interesting bits:

• At the time of the report, DOL was not routinely keeping penalty information on individual cases.
• The report barely mentions 13 and 14 year olds, who are employed only in agriculture.
• In 1990, the DOL initiated four nationwide strike force efforts called Operation Child Watch. It seemed successful, accounting for 65 percent of the investigations where violations were detected. But they didn’t plan to use it in 1991.

The other general thing that’s surprising to me: Babies born on the day the report became public are graduating high school right now. And yet, comparing this report to more recent ones, the dynamics of child labor don’t seem to have changed much.

U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard

Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) has a child labor bill (link1 and link2) that’s been kicking around Congress the past few sessions but hasn’t been introduced yet this term. It’s called the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment, and it would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the way the federal government regulates child labor.

I’ve looked at a Child Labor Coalition analysis of differences between the bill (the draft version from last spring, anyway) and current law. Comparing the two gives you a pretty good sense of what child labor advocates think is wrong with the way the government regulates youth workers.

The biggest changes have to do with the differences between agriculture jobs and non-agriculture jobs. Basically, young children are allowed to perform more hazardous work in agriculture than in any other industry. It’s largely a vestige of the (now-pretty-much-outdated) family farm, where parents and children worked alongside one another and were presumably “safer.”

Here’s how CARE would change that:

• Right now, the minimum age for “particularly hazardous” jobs is 18 — except for agricultural work. CARE would eliminate the differential.
• There’s a similar gap between agricultural and non-ag work for 12- and 13-year old kids. Right now, a 13-year old can’t work at McDonald’s, but if his parents allows it, he can do farm work. CARE eliminates that (while maintaining an exemption for the family farms that still survive).
• For 14- and 15-year-old kids, there are limits on when/how much they can work, such as limiting hours that interfere with schooling or the child’s “health and well-being.” Those limits don’t exist for agriculture work. CARE would change that.

Some other changes in the current version:

• CARE would increase the maximum civil penalty for violations from $11,000 to $15k, and institute a minimum penalty of $500, with a minimum penalty of $15k instituted for a violation resulting in serious injury, illness, or death.
• The $100k maximum penalty would apply to “subsequent violations,” not just “repeated violations” — presumably that means something like “if you do it one more time,” as opposed to “if you do it several more times.” Maximum imprisonment is increased from six months to five years.
• CARE would require the Secretary of Labor to file several reports and give data to Congress and publish it.
• Right now, if a worker gets sick or injured on the job, companies must log the information for possible inspection by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. CARE would require businesses to report such illnesses or injuries among workers under 18 direclty to the Department of Labor.
• The EPA has issued a Worker Protection Standard which limits worker exposure to four classes of pesticides. The Department of Labor only limits the two most dangerous classes. CARE would require DOL to regulate exposure among children to all four classes.