GOP's Attack on Child Labor Threatens Our Daughters

By Susan Feiner
WeNews 
April 12, 2011

http://www.womensenews.org/story/equal-payfair-wage/110411/gops-attack-child-labor-threatens-our-daughters

It's Equal Pay Day, a time to remember those 600 extra hours
that women work each year to catch up with male wages. For
female teens exploitation at work is advancing, as GOP
lawmakers in several states try to relax child labor laws.

(WOMENSENEWS)--It's Equal Pay Day, a time to review the
reasons why so many hard working women find themselves
chronically running short on cash.

Women need to work 15 weeks into 2011 to earn what men earned
in 2010. Think about all that work: 40 hours multiplied by 15
weeks. That's 600 hours. On top of that work there's the
cooking, cleaning, picking up, dropping off, dressing and
bathing.

But this is not news. We've been trying to get paycheck
fairness for years.

What's more notable right now is the GOP-led attack on child
labor laws that will affect female teens disproportionately.

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Gender disparities in child labor are startling. In the 16-19
age group 176,000 boys in 2010 were paid below the minimum
wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For girls
last year the number was 304,000.

Fully 12 percent of young women, versus 6.9 percent of young
men, are already paid sub-minimum wages. These teens mostly
work in food preparation or serving, with jobs such as burger
flipping, hash slinging, French frying and soda jerking with
the highest levels of teen employment and sub-minimum wages.

Republicans in several states (Utah, Ohio, Minnesota, Maine
and Missouri) are proposing sweeping changes to child labor
legislation, including allowing sub-minimum wages for workers
under the age of 20.

At the $5.25 per hour rate proposed by Maine Republicans,
young women wouldn't get to equal pay day until June. 

The Ones We Don't Count

And those are just the ones we count.

Studying child labor is difficult since the only way to know
if workers are under 16 is if employers get work permits.
Most states require work permits to make sure that younger
teens are in school. But 40 percent of young workers were
employed in violation of regulations requiring these permits,
according to research published in the September 2008 issue
of the American Journal of Public Health.

The same public health study discovered that nearly 37
percent of surveyed youth were working in prohibited jobs or
using equipment deemed too dangerous for young workers.

Missouri's Republican-backed legislation would make it
impossible to track minors at work since it would repeal the
requirement that 14 and 15 year olds obtain work permits. In
a move to affirm Missouri's lead in the race to the 19th
century, the proposal would remove the state's authority to
inspect workplaces where teens are employed and eliminate
rules requiring firms to keep records about child workers'
health, safety and work during school hours.

Maine's proposed legislation isn't any better. It would allow
employers to pay teens a mere $5.25 per hour for the first
180 days on the job. Back when I myself was a teen starting
out at work in 1970, I would have earned just 95 cents an
hour. I repeat, 95 cents per hour. The federal minimum wage
has been above $1 per hour since 1956!

Currently teens can only work until 10 p.m. on school nights.
Republican lawmakers, including Missouri State Sen. Jane
Cunningham, Utah State Sen. Mike Lee and Maine Rep. David
Burns, want kids to work until 11 p.m. I guess they've never
heard of homework. Or eight hours of sleep.

And it doesn't appear that they know much about the risks
that young women run in the workplace.

Professor Susan Fineran, a colleague here at the University
of Southern Maine's Women and Gender Studies Program, shared
her research just this week at a Department of Education
conference in Washington, D.C. She found that 35 percent of
students surveyed reported that they'd been sexually harassed
on the job during the school year.

Letting young women work one more hour at night is almost
sure to widen that sexual-harassment window. Maybe that's the
desired result? Why else would Missouri Republicans advocate
letting children under 16 work in any capacity in a motel,
resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished?
Currently such work is tightly regulated.

Missouri parents should be worried for other reasons too. The
new budget just passed by the Republican-controlled House
eliminates investigators who examine child labor complaints.
In 2010, those investigators discovered more than $450,000 in
violations of Missouri's child labor laws and recovered more
than $700,000 for workers from minimum and prevailing wage
violations.

These fines are a tiny fraction of actual wage and hour
violations. Nationally and in every state child labor laws
are barely enforced. In North Carolina, for example, of
employed teens nearly 37 percent reported a violation of the
hazardous occupations orders, such as prohibited jobs or use
of equipment, 40 percent reported a work permit violation, 15
percent reported working off the clock and 11 percent
reported working past the latest hour allowed on a school
night, according to the American Journal of Public Health
study.

No wonder hundreds of thousands of 16- and 17-year-old
workers are injured on the job every year. In 2006, 70 teens
died from on-the-job injuries.

In spite of all this, a trio of conservative groups
(Generation Joshua Project, the Home School Legal Defense
Association and Parentsrights.org) oppose the U.N. Convention
on the Rights of the Child.

What could be next? How about shortening the school day and
using school buses to drop teens at their sub-minimum wage
jobs?

[Susan F. Feiner is professor of economics and professor of
women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine
in Portland. For more information:

"US Child Labor Violations in the Retail and Service
Industries: Findings From a National Survey of Working
Adolescents" study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509604/ ]

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