So, THIS is the America maggers wanted? Putting
children to work? Right now it will be 14yo, but wait,
as things progressively get worse, they will approve
children as young as 8yo to work...AND will permit the
children to work more than 6 days in a row with
unlimited working hours without breaks...YUP, keep them
uneducated indeed!!
"Alarm as Florida Republicans move to fill deported
workers’ jobs with children: ‘It’s insane, right?’
Beneath the smugness of Ron DeSantis, at Florida
leading the nation in immigration enforcement lies
something of a conundrum: how to fill the essential
jobs of the scores of immigrant workers targeted for
deportation.
The answer, according to Florida lawmakers, is the
state’s schoolchildren, who as young as 14 could soon
be allowed to work overnight shifts without a break –
even on school nights.
A bill that progressed this week through the
Republican-dominated state senate seeks to remove
numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and
allow them, in the Florida governor’s words, to step
into the shoes of immigrants who supply Florida’s
tourism and agriculture industries with “dirt cheap
labor”.
“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be
working part-time now? That’s how it used to be when I
was growing up,” DeSantis said at an immigration forum
with Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, in
Sarasota last week.
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even
import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at
these resorts, college students should be [doing] all
this stuff.”
Unsurprisingly, the proposal has alarmed immigration
advocates and watchdog groups concerned about child
labor abuses and exploitation.
They point out that there is nothing “part-time” in the
language of the companion senate and house bills
currently before lawmakers, which instead will permit
unlimited working hours without breaks for 14- and 15-
year-olds who are schooled at home or online, and allow
employers to require 16- and 17-year-olds to work for
more than six days in a row.
“It’s essentially treating teens who have developing
bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow
employers to schedule them for unlimited hours,
overnight and without breaks, and this is during the
school year,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy
analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), an
independent research and economic analysis group.
“It’s important to remind people that teens can work.
They can get that experience and some extra money if
they need it. But there have to be protections in place
to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this
that’s absolutely not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, an attempt by the state senator who
sponsored the bill, the Sarasota Republican Jay
Collins, to paint it as an issue of parental rights
rather than a way to cover Florida’s deportation-driven
labor shortfall also failed to impress critics.
“We’re not talking about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair,”
he told the chamber on Wednesday, referring to the 1906
novel that described horrific and dangerous conditions
endured by cheap immigrant laborers, including
children, in Chicago’s meat-packing industry – an
environment that still exists today.
DeSantis, he insisted, “is talking about those soft
skill benefits to children growing”, and said his bill
was aimed at teenagers working in places like grocery
stores.
Tsoukalas rejected Collins’s claim. “There’s different
arguments that people will put on the floor in order to
do what they think it takes to get a bill passed. Given
some of the justifications that state leaders have made
in recent days, it’s clear that they are linking the
immigration issue and child labor,” she said.
“When the sweeping anti-immigrant bill of 2023 passed,
we did warn there would be impacts on the labor force
and the economy given how reliant we are on immigrant
labor. Of course, not all of those people are
undocumented, but as we’ve seen recently at the federal
level all types of people, even permanent residents,
are getting threatened with deportation.
“Combined with what’s going on at the state level, that
absolutely is a concern. It’s no surprise that last
year, and then again this year, we’re talking about the
need to fill gaps with other forms of labor.”
According to the US Census Bureau, more than 27% of
Florida’s workforce is foreign-born.
The Farmworker Association of Florida, which represents
tens of thousands of low-income, immigrant laborers,
says about 60% of its membership is undocumented, and
most vulnerable to detention and deportation. Others
are among half a million Haitians nationwide who Trump
has ordered to leave the US by August after he
rescinded their temporary protected status.
Pushback from FPI and other groups persuaded Florida
lawmakers to drop some of the harsher provisions in a
child labor law that passed last year, and opponents
are dismayed to find them back under consideration.
The state was singled out in a 2024 report by Governing
for Impact and the Economic Policy Institute that
recorded a surge in workplace injuries and violations
involving minors – some in the agricultural industry
where hazards include exposure to toxic chemicals and
dangerous machinery.
The report noted a corresponding push in at least 30
mostly Republican-controlled states to weaken workplace
protections for children, and warned the second Trump
administration would seek to escalate the rollback.
Related: Ron DeSantis tried to crusade against
undocumented students. Florida is fighting back
“We’ve been saying since 2023 that this is a way for
them to exploit minors, it was when they passed this
large, anti-immigrant omnibus and the same year that
they tried to pass the first law gutting child labor
protection,” said Thomas Kennedy, spokesperson for the
Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has
always been net migration and they’ll never go for that
because of their politics. So their only answer is to
widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go
older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger.”
Kennedy and Tsoukalas are hopeful that Republicans who
said they were uncomfortable with some parts of the
bill will ultimately decide to vote against it.
According to the Miami Herald, the Republican state
senators Nick DiCeglie and Tom Wright helped move it
out of the commerce and tourism committee on a 5-4
vote, but said it “needed work”.
Republican Joe Gruters joined three Democrats in voting
against, saying: “We need to let kids be kids.”
Kennedy, however, pointed to another Republican bill
that progressed this week that would allow employers to
pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage.
“To recap, they made the state hostile to immigrants.
They deported a bunch of people, or scared people into
not coming, or moving out of the state. They
exacerbated worker shortages, so now they’re trying to
gut child labor protection standards, while at the same
time passing a law that would allow them to classify
these children and other workers as interns,” he said.
“It’s insane, right?”
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