[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 45 (Thursday, March 9, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S730-S731]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Child Labor

  Mr. President, on another topic, when you stop by the grocery store 
to pick up your favorite box of cereal or some chicken breasts for 
dinner, would you ever guess you were buying a product that had been 
produced by exploited children? Not in America. Not in 2023. Sorry, I 
am afraid it is so.
  Last week, the New York Times ran an extremely important article 
about an investigation on what it deemed the ``new economy of 
exploitation.'' That economy is powered by young migrant children 
who arrived in this country without their parents and are working at 
unthinkably dangerous jobs in the American economy.

  But the exploitation is not limited to migrant children. In factories 
across the country, from North Carolina to South Dakota, children as 
young as 12 years of age--that is right, 12 years of age--are working 
in the dead of night, in some of the most grueling environments 
imaginable: freezing cold slaughterhouses and auto part assembly 
plants--12 years old. These children work as long as 12 hours per 
shift, and, for migrant children, many are under pressure to send money 
back home or to pay back the criminals who smuggled them across the 
border.
  Often, these children go to school in the morning because they are 
trying to learn to speak English and get an education. How can you 
learn when you are running on no sleep?
  Mr. President, I have some personal familiarity with some of these 
working conditions. When I was a college student, I worked two or three 
summers to pay my way through college. One of the jobs was on the 
railroad, a tradition in my family. Fortunately for me, I only have a 
minor scar to show for my time in the switchyard, but many others were 
not so lucky.
  The other job I had while I worked my way through college was in a 
meatpacking facility. I spent four summers there. I saw almost every 
aspect of that type of environment. I cannot imagine a 12-year-old in 
that dangerous environment. So when I hear young children are working 
long hours in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses, it is beyond 
horrifying. It is beyond unconscionable, and it has to end.
  These accounts of children working in slaughterhouses and factories 
are not only shocking; they are blatantly unlawful in America. Our 
Nation outlawed oppressive child labor almost 100 years ago. This is a 
problem that should be relegated to history books or novels by Dickens, 
but it is not.
  In fact, since 2018, there has been a nearly 70-percent increase in 
illegally employed children. When the number of children being forced 
to work dangerous and potentially deadly jobs is on the rise, it is 
clear that our child labor laws are not up to speed.
  Let me add the obvious. This is another condemnation of the failure 
of our immigration policy in America. Consider the fact that people 
desperately need workers--desperately. In every corner of my State of 
Illinois, they tell me one after the other: We need more police. We 
need more firefighters. We need more ambulance drivers. We need more 
healthcare workers. We need more workers in our nursing home--and on 
and on and on.
  And why are we facing these shortages? We are facing them because, 
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[[Page S731]]

years under President Trump, we stopped allowing legal migration into 
the United States, as we had in previous years, so fewer and fewer of 
these immigrant workers who are available to take on jobs that 
Americans are not waiting in line to fill.
  Behind the swinging doors of most of the restaurants and at some of 
the hotels in the city of Chicago were undocumented workers filling 
jobs which no one on the other side of that door would be interested 
in. So when we don't have a legal system to allow migration to come to 
this country and to fill the jobs, this is what happens.
  Yesterday, I had a meeting with the Illinois Farm Bureau. I meet with 
them every year. There were about a dozen farmers from all across my 
State. I know politically who they are. They are great people. They are 
not necessarily of my political party or my political faith. But they 
all said the same thing: Senator, we need workers on our farms. Dairy 
farms, livestock operations, orchards--farms that need workers every 
single day, and they don't have them.
  They said: Don't tell us that we ought to go into town and get the 
kids in high school to be our next generation of workers. They are just 
not interested, and they are not filling the jobs.
  And if we don't fill these jobs, these conservative, politically, 
farmers are going to find their farming operations paying a heavy price 
for it.
  Why in the world can't we acknowledge the obvious? The obvious is 
that, if we have an orderly process to screen people to come work into 
the United States from various countries, we can stop seeing the 
onslaught of thousands coming to our border. We have already seen this 
happening in specific instances through the Department of Homeland 
Security. We ought to be enhancing it and increasing it.
  I joined Senator Schatz last week when it came to this issue of child 
exploitation. He introduced a bill that would significantly expand and 
strengthen penalties for companies violating child labor laws.
  Let the word go out as clearly as it can from the floor of the U.S. 
Senate: If you have a business and you are exploiting children, you are 
in trouble. You are breaking the law, and you are going to pay a price 
for it. It is just not acceptable. So don't use the excuse that you 
didn't know. Find out.
  It would also apply these penalties to independent contractors. That 
is really important because some employers have managed to exploit 
children by hiring them through staffing agencies in an effort to avoid 
fines. Our bill would end this despicable practice.
  When a company hires little kids to work on a fast-paced assembly 
line, where these kids can be injured and even have their lives 
endangered, or when a company hires children to debone chickens or 
inhale toxic chemicals in an auto factory, a small fine and a slap on 
the wrist just won't do. We need to impose serious penalties on these 
companies so they will never hire exploited children ever again. That 
is what this bill wants to do.
  Importantly, the investigation from the New York Times illustrates 
that the humanitarian crisis in this country is rooted in the failure 
of this broken immigration system. From migrant children to farm 
workers, to families living under the threat of deportation, there are 
millions of people living in the shadows in this country and being 
exploited right under our noses.
  For those who entered the United States and are allowed to legally 
stay until their hearing date, there is a loophole in the law which 
makes life for them, in a legal way, almost impossible. Many of these 
people, though legally in the United States waiting for their asylum 
hearing, cannot legally work in the United States, depending on their 
circumstances, for 6 months to a year. What are they supposed to 
do? They want to work. There are jobs that need to be filled. We should 
find a way to do this in an orderly fashion.

  The Times reporting made it clear that unaccompanied migrant children 
are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. That just stands to reason. 
Our Federal Agencies have to do more to protect them.
  Finally, I want to acknowledge a broader truth about the State of our 
economy. It is no secret that employers throughout the country are 
struggling to find workers in Illinois, New Mexico--everywhere. There 
are 11 million job openings in America and not nearly enough workers to 
fill them.
  It is disturbing that some Republican State lawmakers have suggested 
loosening the child labor laws to fill these openings. To them, I 
suggest they read that New York Times piece and imagine if it was your 
child or grandchild. Do we want kids skipping school to sit in a 
factory for 12 hours sewing socks or shivering in an industrial 
freezer? Is that any way to care for kids, whoever they may be, or to 
prepare the next generation of leaders in our country--the doctors, the 
educators, the citizens? Of course not.
  The fact is, the quickest and most sensible way to address the labor 
shortage in our country is to fix the broken immigration system. Let's 
stop dancing around it. Let's face the music. We need to give 
undocumented immigrants living in the shadows a chance to be legal, and 
we should increase the number of working-age immigrants in this country 
by establishing new, thoughtful pathways for workers to legally enter 
America. We should pair this effort with new funding to bring order to 
the border. That is a priority. I share it with our Republican 
colleagues who talk about that almost exclusively.
  The fact that American companies are turning to children to address 
our Nation's labor shortage is a national disgrace. We bear 
responsibility right here in the U.S. Senate. We were elected to solve 
problems just like this. How many years have we been sitting back and 
saying the immigration system is broken; we have to change the laws? I 
will tell you: More than 30 years.
  Employers are counting on us to fix the immigration laws from both 
parties so workers can enter the markets in a legal and safe way. 
Unless Congress finally comes together to reform immigration in a 
bipartisan manner, these human rights abuses and embarrassment to our 
Nation will continue. What are we waiting for? Let's get it done.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican whip.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, before I begin, I just want to say that 
along with all of my colleagues, my thoughts and prayers are with 
Leader McConnell this morning, with his family, with his team.
  Along with our colleagues, I look forward to his speedy return to the 
U.S. Senate.