A friend just shared a CNN article with me: Florida debates lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants.
Yes, they want to return to unregulated child labor to fill the gaps after they’ve deported or scared off everyone they could abuse freely in the workplace.
But regardless of the law, this is nothing new.
Decades ago, my wife taught kindergarten at a school in an agricultural town which I will not name. Her class was about 60% Spanish speakers and of those, a very large percentage came from the migrant camps.
But that's not where the bus picked them up. In the morning, the kids would go out into the fields at first light—the light before sunrise, depending on season from 4:30 am to 6:30 am. They'd help their parents pick and load vegetables until the school bus would pick them up about 7:30 and drive them into school. At 8:00 the kids would start school hungry and exhausted from hours of backbreaking work in the fields.
Those were kindergarteners—5-year-olds!
But the families were paid by the bushel, not by the hour, so they had to have all hands on deck to be able to afford food. And the school system knew this well enough to have the busses go to whichever fields were being harvested that day.
That was in the 1990s. For all I know the practice could still be going on.
The far right just wants to drive the whole nation into the kind of cruelty with which they've always treated the poorest among us.
Charles Dickens didn't have anything on America today!
