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Workers Are Funding Private Equity’s Child Labor Exploitation
Public employees’ retirement savings have funded the private equity takeovers of companies that used child labor in dangerous factories.
www.levernews.com
Public employees’ retirement savings have funded the private equity takeovers of companies that used child labor in dangerous factories.
That company, a sanitation contractor called Packers Sanitation Services Inc., has been repeatedly bought and sold by private equity funds that manage retirement money for state and local public employees, according to a Lever review.
In other words, public officials have been using the retirement savings of unionized teachers, firefighters, and police officers to capitalize — and help Wall Street executives profit from — an outsourcing business that has used low-paid immigrants and even children for hazardous work in slaughterhouses.
These revelations are part of a broader trend. Child labor violations are rising sharply in the U.S., including in hazardous industries, according to the Department of Labor. Republican lawmakers in several states are moving to relax child labor laws in order to help employers find more workers in a time of historically low unemployment.
And that comes off the cusp of this story:
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders Just Signed A Law That Will Roll Back Child Labor Protections
The governor’s office called the work permit process “an arbitrary burden,” but the federal solicitor of labor said children shouldn’t be allowed to work dangerous jobs, “full stop.”
Under the new law, children under 16 no longer have to get permission from the state’s Division of Labor to get a job, nor will they need to have their age verified or submit things like their work schedule for a permit. In addition to no longer needing to get a work certificate, children won’t need their parents’ consent.
It seems like this is a serious blunder (in the form of a major messaging inconsistency) from state-level republican governors and legislatures with regards to how their stance on this contrasts with their stances on other issues. Most state-level GOP bills regarding other topics are framed around the concept that "parental choice, parental consent, and parental notification are paramount for anything involving a minor"
And while I'm sympathetic to some of those initiatives...like thinking that parents should have to consent for a minor to receive certain treatments and procedures and have some say in the process, and suggesting that parental notification should factor in if a child discusses certain things with the school counselor (barring circumstances where they're reporting abuse from their parents, of course), and wanting to have parents have a say on what reading materials are in elementary school libraries (although I'd likely disagree with many conservative parents on where "the line" is)
Moves like this seem to shoot the whole "we're protecting the innocence of children" narrative in the foot.
It's kinda hard to take a person seriously on the topic of protecting minors (and their innocence) if the legislative proposals are "We need to make sure 14 year olds don't read any books with a sexual theme in the library...but it's okay if they go clean up severed animals heads, handle dangerous chemicals, and mop up blood in a meat packing plant"
I would like to think it's a case where most GOP voters are just unaware of these other issues... but if they are aware of it, and still think that a book that says "it's okay to be gay" being present in a Jr High library poses a bigger risk to children than this:
...then I think their priorities might be a tad skewed, or perhaps their statements have been dishonest. If they're not okay with the former, but okay with the latter, then they're not interested in "protecting children" as much as they're interested in "insulating their Childrens' religious upbringing from criticism"
