Street Smart Economics | From a lack of resources to a movement for child labor, growing up in the US is bad and getting worse
The state of America’s children is not good. And there is every reason to believe that things will get worse as a result of the ongoing corporate push, supported by an increasing number of state governments, to roll back child labor laws.
The kids are struggling
There are many signs that our youth are suffering. One is the relative stagnation in the height of our children, especially relative to those in other countries. In discussing this development, two U.S. public health experts, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, noted in PBS:
"It’s striking that Americans are no longer the tallest people in the world. Not even close ... The gap is not, as might be supposed, a result of immigration: White, native-born Americans who speak English at home are significantly smaller, too, and immigration isn’t substantial enough to explain the discrepancy in any case. . . . Because height is a powerful indicator of social and individual health, America’s relative decline should ring alarms. Our young are coming up short — relative not just to gains in stature of the past but also to gains in stature in other rich nations."
According to data from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, a network of health scientists around the world, the mean height of 5-year-old U.S. girls barely increased over the years 1985 to 2019, from 112.2 to 113.3 cm. Perhaps more telling was their fall from 54th to 64th place in a ranking of heights of similar-aged girls from 200 surveyed countries.
The growth experience of 5-year-old U.S. boys was even more alarming. They actually became shorter over the same time period, falling in height from 113.9 to 113.7 cm. As a result, their relative standing went from 44th to 84th place when compared with similar-aged boys in the surveyed countries. The relative position of our 19-year-olds also tumbled, for females from 38th to 58th place and for males from 36th to 47th place.
Of course, height is not the only measure of well-being. But things are just as worrying when more holistic measures are used. For example, a recent UNICEF report included a summary table ranking countries according to child well-being outcomes as determined by an assessment of the mental well-being, physical health, and academic and social skills of their children. The United States scored 36 out of the group of 38 countries, with 38 being the worst rated. The United States ranked 32 for both child mental well-being and academic and social skills and 38 for child physical health. Only Chile, the United States and Malta were in the bottom third of rankings in each of the three well-being outcomes.
National conditions
There are reasons for this disturbing situation. As the authors of the UNICEF report note, “children’s experience of childhood does not exist in a social vacuum — it is rooted in the society in which they live.” And there are some obvious national conditions, reflecting the workings of the U.S. economy, that help explain the poor state of child well-being in the United States. One of the most important is the percentage of children living in poverty.
UNICEF uses a measure of relative child poverty in which children are considered to live in poverty if they live in a household with post-tax, post-transfer income, adjusted for family size and composition, that is below 60% of the national median per capita income. Using this measure, UNICEF calculated the child poverty rate for 41 countries. It was 30% for the United States, a rate 50% higher than the 20% average for the entire sample. Only three countries had a higher rate of child poverty.
One reason for this high rate of child poverty is the large share of low-paid workers in the United States. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) considers workers to be low-paid if they earn less than two-thirds of their national median wage. According to OECD calculations, the United States has the highest incidence of low-paid work among all 38 OECD countries and, at 22.2%, is near the top of all 43 surveyed countries.
Moreover, public policy in the United States does relatively little to help families offset the country’s harsh labor market conditions. Public spending on child education and care for children aged five and under averages $6,000 per child per year for all OECD countries. In Norway and Sweden it is roughly $12,000. In France it is near $9,000. It is $4,000 in the UK. And it is $3,000 in the United States.
Corporations on the attack
Ever on the hunt for opportunities to boost profits, and with little regard for the social consequences, corporations have begun encouraging state government to roll back child labor law protections in order to make it easier for them to employ young teens. With many state governments eager to comply, it is likely that our children will suffer a further decline in well-being.
For example, in June, the Iowa governor signed into law a bill that, among other things, allows:
- employers to hire teens as young as 14 for previously prohibited hazardous jobs in industrial laundries or as young as 15 in light assembly work.
- state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations, including demolition, roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation.
- teens as young as 14 to work six-hour nightly shifts during the school year.
While Iowa has gone the furthest in making young teens available to companies, it is not the only state moving in this direction. The Economic Policy Institute reports that ten states, including Iowa, “have introduced, considered, or passed legislation rolling back protections for young workers in just the past two years.”
The push to gut child labor protections is largely planned and funded by major rightwing foundations such as the State Policy Network, as well as business associations such as The Chamber of Commerce. These groups often work together to develop desired bills and then offer conservative legislators the arguments and lobbying support needed to win their approval in exchange for future campaign contributions.
Of course, for most of these groups, the attack on child labor laws is just part of their broader campaign to weaken state regulatory agencies, unions, minimum wage laws, public schools, and the list goes on. Their ongoing efforts have already gone far in shaping an economy that directly and indirectly works to enrich the wealthy at the expense of workers and the health and well-being of their families and children.
It is not hard to list policies that, if implemented, would help children thrive — establish a single-payer health care system, increase public school funding, boost state and federal minimum wages, pass worker-supporting labor laws and build affordable public housing, just to mention a few obvious ones. The problem is that the great majority of owners and managers of our leading corporations actively oppose these kinds of policies because they correctly see them as a threat to their profits and power. We need to redouble our efforts to build a powerful movement, one that draws together our many struggles, if we hope to overcome their opposition and win the changes we want and our children need.
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