For fourteen-year-old B., staying awake in class was a real struggle.
She would often miss classes at Walnut High School in Grand Island, a small town in the US state of Nebraska.
However, she did not miss classes due to teenage rebellion or running away.
Sometimes B, whose family is originally from Guatemala, was too tired to go to class after her 11 p.m. to XNUMX a.m. shift, six days a week, cleaning the cutting machines for animal carcasses at a local slaughterhouse.
Sometimes, even worse, she tried to heal chemical burns from products she had to handle, like industrial bleach.
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According to court records, B. was one of 31 minors found by federal inspectors last year to be working illegally as night cleaners at a Grand Island slaughterhouse.
They were hired by the Sanitary Service of Meat Processors (PSSI).
"The workers we spoke to seemed nervous and kept glancing at supervisors as we questioned them," says Shannon Rebolledo, the US Department of Labor official who discovered B.
"Most of the workers I spoke with later were confirmed to be minors or to have worked for PSSI as minors," reads her official testimony in this court case.
Overall, the ministry accused PSSI of recruiting at least 102 children, in eight different federal states.
In February, PSSI paid a $1,5 million fine after the government found that "children were working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment such as saws, circular saws or head openers."
Investigators found that at least three minors were injured while working for PSSI.
But B.'s case is far from unusual.
The United States of America - one of the richest countries in the world - has been engulfed by a wave of illegal child labor.
Federal inspectors found nearly 2022 children working illegally in 4.000.
This is the highest recorded number since the Ministry of Labor started keeping these statistics in 2023, when inspectors found 1.400 minors in the same situation.
This trend could not be predicted even by some who have been researching child labor for decades.
"I certainly did not think that at this stage of my career, I would suddenly be dealing with child labor in America, after more than 30 years of professionally dealing with child labor in much poorer countries. And that's why it's really a surprise," economist Erik Edmonds, a professor at Dartmouth College, told the BBC.
Child labor offers obvious advantages to the employer: legislation in some federal states allows minors to be paid half the minimum wage for adults.
A growing number of other states are considering following suit, encouraged by professional lobby groups in Washington.
Reform of Iowa's child labor laws went into effect this month (July 1), expanding the jobs and hours teenagers can work.
Iowa is the latest state to pass laws in violation of federal child labor regulations.
However, a May poll by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, found that in the past two years, at least 14 of the 50 US states have considered a proposal to legislate lower limits on child labor.
Eight states have already approved such laws.
The proposed laws allow, for example, the employment of fourteen-year-old children in six-hour night shifts and the performance of duties in demanding places, such as industrial laundries.
Teenagers in some states can now work in hazardous or physically demanding occupations (such as demolition or meat processing) from the age of 16.
They can even serve alcohol in bars, although they cannot legally purchase it themselves before the age of 21.
But this is contrary to national, federal law, according to which children aged 14 and 15 may work a maximum of three hours a day during school hours and never after a period of seven in the evening.
It bans children from working in sectors such as construction and food processing, which US law considers dangerous and "oppressive to children".
Adolescents aged 16 and 17 may not work with explosives, in mining or road construction.
"This is not a 19th century problem"
No one knows the true extent of the problem, since there are no official statistics on working children in the country.
"In the early 16s, the United States stopped collecting data on working children under 16, under the assumption that there were simply no children under XNUMX working in the country," says Professor Edmonds.
But federal inspections of companies can give us some idea of the scale of the problem, and experts agree that the statistics indicate that the problem is only growing.
After reporting a 69 percent increase in child labor last year compared to 2018, the US Department of Labor announced in late February that it had already opened at least 600 investigations in 2023 alone.
In one case in February, it emerged that more than 100 migrant children - some as young as 13 - were illegally employed to clean slaughterhouses in several states.
"This is not a 19th century problem, this is today's problem.
"This is a problem that we will all have to work on solving," said then-Minister of Labor Marty Walsh in a statement released on February 27.
Labor shortage
This increase in child labor in the US is caused by a number of factors that put pressure on socially and economically disadvantaged children to accept jobs that employers find difficult to fill.
The US currently has nearly full employment capacity - April's unemployment rate of 3,4 percent was the lowest recorded in the last five decades, and almost 340.000 new jobs were created in June alone.
US employers are finding it increasingly difficult to fill positions due to a shortage of candidates, and wages in the US have been growing at a rate above inflation over the past year.
All of this points to a labor shortage, a situation not helped by measures to discourage immigration, such as the automatic deportation of undocumented migrants who have crossed the border into Mexico.
Unaccompanied children and adolescents, however, cannot just be kicked out of the country if they cross the US border without permission.
As a result, the number of underage migrants crossing into the US has exploded.
In 2021 alone, there were nearly 139.000 unaccompanied minors in US custody, and in 2022 that number was 128.000.
Once turned over to immigration agents, these children and teenagers are allowed to spend a maximum of 72 hours in an immigration detention center before being transferred to shelters, where the federal government must provide them with food, health care and education.
Within 30 days, they are usually handed over to some kind of sponsor - ideally a parent or family member, or, failing that, a family friend or acquaintance.
Between 12 and 14 percent of children released in 2021 and 2022 were given to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives, according to an audit conducted in June by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, affiliated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Child migration lawyers told the BBC that, in reality, the US government does not know what happens to these children after they are handed over to guardians.
"We know that these children are usually placed with poor families, who already have many children, with financial difficulties, without documentation," said a lawyer who works directly with the child custody process, who spoke on condition of anonymity. due to the delicacy of the subject.
"I wouldn't be surprised if two-thirds of them work."
The US Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
Watch the video about migrant children in US custody:
Children under attack
In an interview with the BBC, experts say that children have been hit by specific areas of business that lack workers.
"While it is true that there is an increasing demand for labor, this factor alone does not explain the increase in child labor violations," says Chavi Kini Nana, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, a civil and criminal law expert who provides free legal representation. victims of human trafficking.
"This surge is fueled by corporate greed, supported by lobbyists and politicians, and a willingness to exploit vulnerable working populations to provide workers at the lowest possible cost."
Professor Nana claims that it is no coincidence that in recent years there has been a drastic jump in the number of unaccompanied minors at the border, just as there has been a jump in violations of regulations related to child labor.
She believes that companies have recognized a source of labor that can be easily exploited.
"These are children in a foreign country without guardians or means of living (in many cases). They saw an opportunity to save on labor costs and took it."
She thinks that companies are aware that they risk fines if they illegally employ migrant children, but they simply factor those costs into their business model.
"What they saved by hiring vulnerable workers, with little chance of invoking any rights, is much more than possible penalties," says Professor Nana.
"And in light of the mounting evidence of child labor, what have several states done? It has adopted laws that enable the employment of children while protecting them."
The BBC made repeated attempts to contact the principal of Walnut High School in Grand Island, Nebraska, but he could not be reached for comment.
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