The US Division of Labor (DOL) Monday announced new measures geared toward combatting youngster labor and, specifically, the exploitation of migrant youngster labor.
The measures introduced Monday embrace an interagency taskforce, data-driven investigations, mandated follow-up calls “to any youngster who calls the Office of Refugee Resettlement National Call Center with a security concern” and an attraction to Congress to boost the utmost penalty the DOL could require a toddler labor legislation violator to pay. The DOL addressed an occasion of exploitative migrant youngster labor earlier this month after they ordered Packers Sanitation Providers to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties for using not less than 102 youngsters in “hazardous” meat packing jobs. Below the Fair Labor Standards Act, the DOL could solely assess a high-quality of $15,138 per youngster. Nevertheless, the DOL mentioned this determine is “not excessive sufficient to be a deterrent for main worthwhile firms.”
Since 2018, the DOL has noticed a 69 p.c enhance in unlawful youngster labor, and “the division discovered 835 firms it investigated had employed greater than 3,800 youngsters in violation of labor legal guidelines” over the past fiscal 12 months. The DOL is at present pursuing over 600 extra youngster labor investigations. Unaccompanied migrant youngsters are particularly weak to labor exploitation. In line with an investigation by the New York Instances, greater than 250,000 unaccompanied minors arrived within the US prior to now two years, and caseworkers estimated “that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant youngsters ended up working full time.”
