I think the thing that shocks me the most is that the punishment from the Department of Labor is a very mild slap-on-the-wrist. A small fine and a promise not to do it any more. This should basically be the end of that company entirely. Instead they just have to point the finger at some low-level managers, fire them, and keep on rolling. I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor. The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
If Hyundai/Kia drops them, that would at least be a much bigger penalty than the DOL imposed.
> The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
Minors can totally consent to labor; it's pretty common too (see: child actors). The issue with children working in factories is a (1) safety and (2) exploitation issue, not a consent issue—in fact even adult parents (who can presumably consent) aren't allowed to get exemptions for their children in some high-risk situations either. There are lots of exemptions for child labor though, especially in areas where safety and exploitation risks are deemed to be lower. Worth reading: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/youthlabor/exemptionsflsa
Edit to clarify (since some people seem to be reading this different): this isn't my opinion, support, or opposition on what I believe children can or should consent to; I'm just discussing labor laws here.
Can you cite the part where the law says that a minor can consent to labor? Every mention of "consent" in the link you gave only mentions "consent by the [minor's] parent or guardian" or similar phrasing.
an exemption from a child labor prohibition doesn't equal consent
the Department of Labor has an exemption for children working in their parents business because that's the only way they could get the prohibitions passed, since children cannot speak for themselves on the matter after recognizing that children can't legally consent to anything which is why there are prohibitions on the matter.
what you are writing is a wild distortion of the concept of consent, that many people consider dangerous to harbor.
there is legal consent restrictions (ie. even if someone says okay, its not valid), as well as societal consent recognitions such as when power dynamics are not in someone's favor and some extremes of that we don't allow to happen.
even for things they are allowed to do autonomously, there are age restrictions on that.
I read an article in the New York Times maybe around ten years ago where some researchers called some labor departments to report child labor (it wasn't actually happening that they knew of; the point was to see how they would respond). They were basically uninterested and didn't follow up.
This is apparently a common response. Check out Reveal’s major investigative series on the punitive and profit-driven rehab industry which depends on unpaid labor. The government has done virtually nothing about it for 50 years.
Unless there is enough behind it to become a viral news story (a photo, video, a document) there is little incentive for these authorities to act.
For this reason, ensuring the freedom of whistleblowers, Wikileaks and others is so important. Without that, it becomes much easier for the authorities - which we trust our rights to - to do nothing and get away with it
SL Alabama told Reuters in a statement that a staffing agency had furnished some employees to the plant who were not old enough to work there. SL said it had cooperated with regulators, terminated its relationship with the staffing firm, agreed to fines and other corrective actions, and replaced the president of the facility.
It sounds like JK USA will rightfully be destroyed by this. If it really was just a handful of kids employed by a sub sub contractor I don't see why everyone in the whole factory should lose their livelihoods. The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
> The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
I started mowing lawns at 12. Pretty heavy machinery; massive spinning blade, could lose an arm! Luckily I had that opportunity, I was able to make money and pay for clothes. Learn responsibility, self-respect, etc.
I do think child labor laws are there to protect children. However, we don’t know the circumstances and I think in most cases child labor laws do more harm than good. Here are some important details:
> In a separate statement on Tuesday, Alabama’s state DOL said it had levied around $35,000 in total in civil penalties on SL Alabama and JK USA, a temporary labor recruiting firm. JK USA employed five minors between the ages of 13 and 16 at the plant, the state DOL said.
To me, it could be as simple as a few guys brought their kids who wanted to make an extra buck. They could have just been picking up metal scraps. We don’t know. What I can say is in high school I knew multiple people whos family worked in metal works and the kids would help out and get paid. Some kids were as young as 10, but everyone was safe and it appeared to be in everyone’s interest
We still allow slave labor in general in the US[1] and farm labor for 13 year olds. That’s not to defend this practice but to point out it’s not as big an ethical leap for someone already observing situations close to this and rationalizing it as just pushing the envelope a bit in their mind.
[1]see the text of the 13th amendment and how private prisons operate if you are one of the 10000 today whose just learning this
Welcome to current year. Its all good as long as the children been exploited are not the children of the people who vote for you. Its all green as long as the coal or oil burning is being done away from your borders.
> Welcome to current year. Its all good as long as the children been exploited are not the children of the people who vote for you.
That's been happening forever, not just the current year. Child labor sweatshops were a major source of industrial productivity for centuries the world over until relatively recently.
Charles Dickens' novels turned it into an adjective in English bearing his name that described (among other things) the indifference of those in power to child labor.
There’s a reason why industry likes to pursue business in places like Alabama with awful infrastructure and education.
Expenses for things like conversion of documentation to pictures instead of text (the workers are functionally illiterate) are one time, but you can pay someone $13/hr instead of $25/hr in a less regressive place.
When I worked with some NASA engineers from Alabama, I had trouble taking them seriously due to their accent! They were the ones getting stuff done, though. Statistically, Alabama ranks significantly better than California for both child and adult literacy. Are you perhaps a bit biased in your opinion of people from the south?
This is a really bigoted comment that generalizes a whole state.
If it would be racist for any random country, eg. 'Mexico' or 'Nigeria', why is it ok for an American state?
Alabama isn't bad because of its infrastructure or education. Here's a hint: if you condition on demographic characteristics (i.e. split state populations into obvious demographic categorizations), educational disparity across states is almost eliminated.
> I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor.
I don't see where any children were "imported". Instead it seems like some 13-16 year olds got jobs. (Note, none of the children were 12). You brought up consent (which later responses delve into 'parental consent') and I have no clue what the parents thought.
Still, they did violate child labor laws and should be punished. I agree with that principle.
The consequences didn't seem that mild. They paid a fine of $7,000 per minor. They agreed to destroy any products the children were involved in producing. They implemented new methods to prevent this in the future. They fired the third party staffing agency that found the children (and which I would agree should have other consequences). And, far from "firing low-level managers", the president of the factory was fired.
>I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor.
Is there anything to suggest that they were actually trafficking humans? I think it is far more likely that they were illegal immigrants already in the States.
I did a paper route and opened a store before school. I loved the work - the above is crazy talk. Plenty of kids delivered papers near me. Now I make mid 6 figures. I learned a ton opening that store that has served me through life even though the actual work is totally different.
Part of the problem is that if the DOL goes after every underage worker in the economy, the biggest offenders by far would be family businesses and restaurants.
It's all well and good to make parents send their kids to school. But at a certain point the punishments can exacerbate child poverty.
Working in a family business is protected. Even working as a 13-16 year old in some jobs is allowed as long as it’s outside of school hours. We allow for a gradual introduction into working for children instead of a hard line at 18.
What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
I work on ESG consulting and part of the speech we give is "... ESG is not only environmental, there's other important areas to improve like making sure there's no kids working on your company, blah blah" kind of like a joke and it then triggers more jokes from the other side like "Oh you got us, time to change our plans" etc ... and then we never talk about the subject again because who is going to actually do that, right? Right?!
Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
I worked from 12 in a fairly industrial business and mostly appreciated the experience because I was in poverty. Meanwhile the school I was actually forced to go to was abusive.
Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.
The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.
Forbidding child labor isn't enough on its own, it should come with enough social support for families that they don't need to send their kids working. A non-coercive education system would also be fantastic :-)
It is extremely unusual for this kind of labor abuse to be carried out by American companies. As the articles note, these are Korean-owned and Korean-operated companies.
FTA: "Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13."
There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world, so that the company can put the all important "Made in USA" label on the product. There's at least one all-Chinese factory outside of Las Vegas. There was a Chinese-run industrial marijuana farming operation shut down in Arizona last year.
And this is not unique to the United States. There are similar operations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
Lots of newspaper articles about it over the last ten years or so.
It's probably pretty common in American-owned industries known to use human trafficking, but trafficking exploits populations our society isn't concerned enough about to proactively monitor. The agency Hyundai used for workers is not Korean– it's Guatemalan– and it likely supplies farms, food processing plants, and other businesses that need lots of low end labor. Check out the Frontline documentary on human trafficking in food processing plants. The worst offender was an egg processor based in Maine.
A friend who worked for a union that organized poultry plant workers said some of these plants– all large, American companies with names you see in every grocery store— essentially ignored labor laws entirely. One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees.
> There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world,
That doesn't make it ok, does it? What you're describing sounds a lot like the conditions that migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are working in.
The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil, no matter who operates them and where the workers are from.
In fact, no country caring about human rights should. I'm from Germany and in the early Covid phase in 2020 it became clear that there are a lot of east European workers in our slaughterhouses, with them living in very tightly packed quarters (for which they had to pay exaggerated prices to their employers) leading to a massive spread of the disease. At the time, many politicians cried that something will have to change, but of course nothing happened and the whole thing was forgotten as quickly as it had come to light.
> There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
The one's in Milan are terrifying, and often have some mafia (often southern) and triad affiliations, an Italian movie about the Camorra briefly goes into he detail of just how dark that part of the fashion industry is. I lived in Italy during the later end of the financial crisis and it was pretty common to see hordes of Han-Chinese come to Emilia Romanaga who had fled Milan and look for work on farms and restaurants.
Seeing tons of refugees living in parks and waiting all day in the piazzas made it feel like I was living in the 21st century version of Salo, which is a fucked up sordid tale from the 20th Century.
> run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world
I find this incredibly interesting and somewhat surprising, can you substantiate the scale of this problem a little bit more, or link 3-5 map locations?
ESG is a complete farce in implementation, or at least that's what I gathered once I learned that a tobacco company like Altria can have a 79/100 ESG score.
If there's enough "other stuff" that can bring a company who's existence causes death and disease as its main impact on society to 79/100, I don't really care about the scoring system.
I am amazed. Having worked in and around US Manufacturing plants my entire adult life, I have never once even see anyone that could be considered a child working in any plant I have ever been in, and I have been in alot of manufacturers. All of owned by American entities and people.
As Reuters reported, migrant children from Guatemala found working at SMART Alabama, LLC and SL Alabama had been hired by recruiting or staffing firms in the region. In a statement to Reuters this week, Hyundai said it had already stopped relying on at least one labor recruiting firm that had been hiring for SMART
I hope the right agencies step in to help these kids … brutal as it may be it just might be possible that the kids did not receive any assistance so this (working) was probably their only way of surviving.
Since they were reported missing to the police, I would assume that you’re right and these kids were trying to survive on their own for one reason or another.
I'd really like to know more about the "oppressive" part. Were these 12 year olds lying about their age to get a summer job? Or were these children getting pimped by a staffing firm?
I think there should be a huge divergence of punishment options based on the actual details.
I remember having a paper route when I was 10 years old. Yeah, not the same thing as a factory line job, but I wanted the job for extra money.
If these kids were forced to work, that's horrible, fine the company, punish them hard.
But if these were kids working a few 4 hour shifts a week because their parents worked there, then that's entirely different. Not legal, but not the same as exploiting some youngster against their will.
Yeah I wonder if the Dad was a manager so he put his son to work or something. They said these were "documented" citizens which I assume means they're not illegal child immigrants. The only other thing we know is that most of these factories were set up by Koreans companies, so they're probably not super small mom and pop shops. The fact they didn't go more in depth into their situation makes me wonder if it's because it goes contrary to the narrative, I know Reuters has a habit of doing that
>A Reuters investigative report in July documented children, including a 12-year-old, working at a Hyundai-controlled metal stamping plant in rural Luverne, Alabama, called SMART Alabama, LLC.
> In a statement on Wednesday, SL Alabama said it had taken "aggressive steps to remedy the situation" as soon it learned a subcontractor had provided underage workers.
It's hard to believe no one noticed 12 year olds working in manufacturing. It would be one thing if they were 17 and this were some legal technicality.
Willful violation of the law and a "oops weird" cover up. The fine will likely be a fraction of the money they saved.
They noticed because of escalating local news coverage, probably:
"Reuters first reported on July 22 that allegations surfaced about SMART’s labor practices after a Guatemalan girl reportedly working at the Hyundai-owned auto supplier went missing from her family’s Alabama home."
When our contract with the child labor ends we will put out a search for a replacement contract company. This time when we say "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP Labor on the bid we will specify we don't mean "Child labor cheap" just regular old undocumented slave labor cheap.
Worth noting that one of these suppliers appears to have been majority-owned by Hyundai itself. The Hyundai subsidiary apparently targeted the families of recent immigrants.
I had a friend who had a really bad home life. His mom was abusive and mentally unstable. He moved out at 15, and "child labor" was why he could rent and eat.
Nonetheless it should by far, exceedingly, not be the norm.
I myself had a job in my school at ~15 myself, it was nbd and I was happy for some spending money that my mom couldn't provide.
@dang - the title in editorialized and misleading. The actual title is: "Korean auto giant Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain"
The article only mentions Korean owned suppliers operating in the US, some directly controlled by Hyundai, which were investigated by Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies.
I think this is a relevant observation, given that it changes the emotive thrust of the headline from "foreign country has better standards than our country!" to "our country has good standards that ensure foreign investors don't end up employing child labor".
I've read the article. And honestly the thing I've read is that it's possible for a company to do child labor in the US. And that this actually happens.
No comparing, no who is better, just the blunt reality of child labor in the US
Readit News
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hyundai-kia-auto-parts-supp...
(This links to more info.)
Wow.
I think the thing that shocks me the most is that the punishment from the Department of Labor is a very mild slap-on-the-wrist. A small fine and a promise not to do it any more. This should basically be the end of that company entirely. Instead they just have to point the finger at some low-level managers, fire them, and keep on rolling. I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor. The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
If Hyundai/Kia drops them, that would at least be a much bigger penalty than the DOL imposed.
Minors can totally consent to labor; it's pretty common too (see: child actors). The issue with children working in factories is a (1) safety and (2) exploitation issue, not a consent issue—in fact even adult parents (who can presumably consent) aren't allowed to get exemptions for their children in some high-risk situations either. There are lots of exemptions for child labor though, especially in areas where safety and exploitation risks are deemed to be lower. Worth reading: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/youthlabor/exemptionsflsa
Edit to clarify (since some people seem to be reading this different): this isn't my opinion, support, or opposition on what I believe children can or should consent to; I'm just discussing labor laws here.
the Department of Labor has an exemption for children working in their parents business because that's the only way they could get the prohibitions passed, since children cannot speak for themselves on the matter after recognizing that children can't legally consent to anything which is why there are prohibitions on the matter.
what you are writing is a wild distortion of the concept of consent, that many people consider dangerous to harbor.
there is legal consent restrictions (ie. even if someone says okay, its not valid), as well as societal consent recognitions such as when power dynamics are not in someone's favor and some extremes of that we don't allow to happen.
even for things they are allowed to do autonomously, there are age restrictions on that.
You are just supporting OP's point unwitting.
You can go “just discussing labor laws” somewhere else.
In short, I'm less surprised but it is appalling.
https://revealnews.org/american-rehab/
For this reason, ensuring the freedom of whistleblowers, Wikileaks and others is so important. Without that, it becomes much easier for the authorities - which we trust our rights to - to do nothing and get away with it
It sounds like JK USA will rightfully be destroyed by this. If it really was just a handful of kids employed by a sub sub contractor I don't see why everyone in the whole factory should lose their livelihoods. The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
The kids were reported missing to police, which is why they were found.
I started mowing lawns at 12. Pretty heavy machinery; massive spinning blade, could lose an arm! Luckily I had that opportunity, I was able to make money and pay for clothes. Learn responsibility, self-respect, etc.
I do think child labor laws are there to protect children. However, we don’t know the circumstances and I think in most cases child labor laws do more harm than good. Here are some important details:
> In a separate statement on Tuesday, Alabama’s state DOL said it had levied around $35,000 in total in civil penalties on SL Alabama and JK USA, a temporary labor recruiting firm. JK USA employed five minors between the ages of 13 and 16 at the plant, the state DOL said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hyundai-kia-auto-parts-supp...
To me, it could be as simple as a few guys brought their kids who wanted to make an extra buck. They could have just been picking up metal scraps. We don’t know. What I can say is in high school I knew multiple people whos family worked in metal works and the kids would help out and get paid. Some kids were as young as 10, but everyone was safe and it appeared to be in everyone’s interest
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[1]see the text of the 13th amendment and how private prisons operate if you are one of the 10000 today whose just learning this
Also see prison labour.
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That's been happening forever, not just the current year. Child labor sweatshops were a major source of industrial productivity for centuries the world over until relatively recently.
Charles Dickens' novels turned it into an adjective in English bearing his name that described (among other things) the indifference of those in power to child labor.
Expenses for things like conversion of documentation to pictures instead of text (the workers are functionally illiterate) are one time, but you can pay someone $13/hr instead of $25/hr in a less regressive place.
This is a really bigoted comment that generalizes a whole state. If it would be racist for any random country, eg. 'Mexico' or 'Nigeria', why is it ok for an American state?
(no, I'm not from Alabama).
I don't see where any children were "imported". Instead it seems like some 13-16 year olds got jobs. (Note, none of the children were 12). You brought up consent (which later responses delve into 'parental consent') and I have no clue what the parents thought.
Still, they did violate child labor laws and should be punished. I agree with that principle.
The consequences didn't seem that mild. They paid a fine of $7,000 per minor. They agreed to destroy any products the children were involved in producing. They implemented new methods to prevent this in the future. They fired the third party staffing agency that found the children (and which I would agree should have other consequences). And, far from "firing low-level managers", the president of the factory was fired.
Is there anything to suggest that they were actually trafficking humans? I think it is far more likely that they were illegal immigrants already in the States.
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It's all well and good to make parents send their kids to school. But at a certain point the punishments can exacerbate child poverty.
What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.
The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.
It is extremely unusual for this kind of labor abuse to be carried out by American companies. As the articles note, these are Korean-owned and Korean-operated companies.
FTA: "Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13."
There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world, so that the company can put the all important "Made in USA" label on the product. There's at least one all-Chinese factory outside of Las Vegas. There was a Chinese-run industrial marijuana farming operation shut down in Arizona last year.
And this is not unique to the United States. There are similar operations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
Lots of newspaper articles about it over the last ten years or so.
A friend who worked for a union that organized poultry plant workers said some of these plants– all large, American companies with names you see in every grocery store— essentially ignored labor laws entirely. One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees.
That doesn't make it ok, does it? What you're describing sounds a lot like the conditions that migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are working in.
The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil, no matter who operates them and where the workers are from.
In fact, no country caring about human rights should. I'm from Germany and in the early Covid phase in 2020 it became clear that there are a lot of east European workers in our slaughterhouses, with them living in very tightly packed quarters (for which they had to pay exaggerated prices to their employers) leading to a massive spread of the disease. At the time, many politicians cried that something will have to change, but of course nothing happened and the whole thing was forgotten as quickly as it had come to light.
The one's in Milan are terrifying, and often have some mafia (often southern) and triad affiliations, an Italian movie about the Camorra briefly goes into he detail of just how dark that part of the fashion industry is. I lived in Italy during the later end of the financial crisis and it was pretty common to see hordes of Han-Chinese come to Emilia Romanaga who had fled Milan and look for work on farms and restaurants.
Seeing tons of refugees living in parks and waiting all day in the piazzas made it feel like I was living in the 21st century version of Salo, which is a fucked up sordid tale from the 20th Century.
I find this incredibly interesting and somewhat surprising, can you substantiate the scale of this problem a little bit more, or link 3-5 map locations?
If there's enough "other stuff" that can bring a company who's existence causes death and disease as its main impact on society to 79/100, I don't really care about the scoring system.
Not all of it is illegal. There is an exception for tobacco farming, which employs children as young as 10.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/child-lab...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/09/teens-tobacco-fields/c...
It varies from state to state and industry to industry.
And if they’re unpaid then you have much more leeway!
ESG is not needed to not have child labor.
As Reuters reported, migrant children from Guatemala found working at SMART Alabama, LLC and SL Alabama had been hired by recruiting or staffing firms in the region. In a statement to Reuters this week, Hyundai said it had already stopped relying on at least one labor recruiting firm that had been hiring for SMART
I think there should be a huge divergence of punishment options based on the actual details.
I remember having a paper route when I was 10 years old. Yeah, not the same thing as a factory line job, but I wanted the job for extra money.
If these kids were forced to work, that's horrible, fine the company, punish them hard.
But if these were kids working a few 4 hour shifts a week because their parents worked there, then that's entirely different. Not legal, but not the same as exploiting some youngster against their will.
> In a statement on Wednesday, SL Alabama said it had taken "aggressive steps to remedy the situation" as soon it learned a subcontractor had provided underage workers.
It's hard to believe no one noticed 12 year olds working in manufacturing. It would be one thing if they were 17 and this were some legal technicality.
Willful violation of the law and a "oops weird" cover up. The fine will likely be a fraction of the money they saved.
"Reuters first reported on July 22 that allegations surfaced about SMART’s labor practices after a Guatemalan girl reportedly working at the Hyundai-owned auto supplier went missing from her family’s Alabama home."
https://www.fox6now.com/news/hyundai-subsidiary-allegedly-us...
Who wants to bet those aggressive steps will be.
When our contract with the child labor ends we will put out a search for a replacement contract company. This time when we say "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP Labor on the bid we will specify we don't mean "Child labor cheap" just regular old undocumented slave labor cheap.
Dead Comment
Nonetheless it should by far, exceedingly, not be the norm.
I myself had a job in my school at ~15 myself, it was nbd and I was happy for some spending money that my mom couldn't provide.
The article only mentions Korean owned suppliers operating in the US, some directly controlled by Hyundai, which were investigated by Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies.
No comparing, no who is better, just the blunt reality of child labor in the US