Report Finds Restaurants Behind Push For Cheap Child Labor

The restaurant industry and their lobbying group have been revealed as the major pushers of legislation that would weaken child labor laws, as the industry hopes to exploit this source of cheap labor. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The restaurant industry and their lobbying group have been revealed as the major pushers of legislation that would weaken child labor laws as the industry hopes to exploit this source of cheap labor. Now that's what it is, right? You got, we're on a big, big cheap labor effort by corporate America right now. Whether it's hotels, whether it's restaurants, whether it's in industry of every kind. You got two things going on. You got people coming, children coming across the border, expendable, all the folks coming across the border are expendable. Use 'em up, ship 'em back, kill 'em if you have to, ship 'em back. But here you're talking about children, both immigrant children and US citizens, that they've figured out, we can make a lot of money by having these kids work in these dangerous jobs. We don't have to pay 'em as much. Right?

Right. And it's just like back in the old days, oh, well we hired the kids to go into the printing press because they're smaller and they can dislodge things and get this big machinery going again. That's how kids were losing fingers and arms and lives. But what we're seeing here with the restaurant industry behind the push, when I saw this story, it clicked for me. The restaurant industry itself is a massive employer of undocumented immigrants. It's typically an industry where you can manage to have a couple people where you just strictly pay in cash. There's not a lot of oversight. So to expand this to where they can bring in the migrant children, well, they know, okay, listen, I've got a couple folks in here who are undocumented. They've got kids, I can bring their kids in too. Pay them $5 an hour instead of $10 an hour. They can't say anything to complain about it. So it just expands this cycle of abuse that the migrant workers are facing.

I wrote a book, last book I wrote, it's called Inhuman Trafficking. It's fiction, but it's based on the cases that we've handled. And what we saw there was they were doing, they're recruiting workers in the restaurant business in Europe. Right. They'd go to Ukraine and they would say, you know, you want a job in the service industry, come to the United States. We can put you in a restaurant. Okay. The get 'em over here. They take all of their IDs away, they isolate 'em, they put 'em in a room with 20 other kids. They then say, you know, you're not making enough at the front desk. I mean, you know, you're a greeter, you can make a lot more serving. So they move 'em to serving. Oh, you can make a lot more if you can come over here, serve during the day and dance on the pole at night. And oh, by the way, you can make even more money than dancing on the pole if you will just meet Ted here. This little freakish guy, Ted. And all of a sudden the human trafficking goes into that. This is not exactly the same thing, but it's the same mentality. You've got an entire restaurant industry that says, we want these kids working in industrial freezers. We want 'em working in meat coolers. We want 'em to do an industrial laundry. We want to expand the hours, you know, well, let's expand the hours that they're able to work. It's nothing but exploitation.

It really is. And corporations also know that even for US citizens under the age of 18, for the first 90 days, you can pay them any wage you want. It does not have to be minimum wage.

And then fire 'em after 90 days.

Exactly. Well, what's the 90 day period? Well, that's the summer period for these kids that are still in school. So you get cheap summer labor, which is typically the busiest time for all these industries.

You'd be glad to know that the Koch family is behind this.

Yeah.

The Koch family, they're the ones really pushing this.