This isn't a very controversial provision, for one simple reason. Manual elevators all but disappeared decades ago. But it points up a disturbing truth about Colorado's whole package of child employment statutes: It's hopelessly out of date. Michael McArdle, the state Labor Department's policy director, readily admits this. "A lot of these statutes haven't been revisited in years," he says.
Until fairly recently, antiquated child labor laws didn't provoke much debate, in Colorado or any of the other states where they exist. But that's changing.
The tight labor market all over the country is causing employers to hire more and more minors--but many of the jobs they are performing didn't exist when the laws were written. And the jobs the law does cover are largely obsolete. Colorado is just one of 17 states that set an age threshold for operating manual elevators. It also prohibits young people from railroading, paper-lacing, meatpacking and rubber- making, industries in which few of them could obtain work even if they wanted to.
Mississippi forbids minors between the ages of 14 and 16 "to work in any mill, cannery, workshop, factory or manufacturing establishment." Its list of hazardous occupations does not include more modern-day threats--such as handling of nuclear or radioactive chemicals, or exposure to asbestos. And it is silent on the question of how old someone needs to be to sell services door-to-door, or work the counter in a shopping mall.
The workplace that American young people inhabit has changed in the same way that the national economy has changed in recent years. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 51 percent of working youth now have retail jobs, and 34 percent work in service industries. Only 8 percent work in agriculture, 4.4 percent in manufacturing and 2.4 percent in construction. But those are the occupations that dominate the child labor statutes in most of the country.
"When most of these child labor laws were created, there weren't fast food restaurants, and there weren't occupational violent crimes," says Darlene Adkins, of the National Consumers League Child Labor Coalition. "Young people being in a cash-based business with public contact is something fairly new."
Most state labor officials willingly agree that their own laws could use some revision. But such revamping is easier said than done-- especially when legislators are hesitant to bring more confusion to an issue that has confounded employers and officials alike for years.
The overlapping of local, state and federal laws has always been a hassle for employers--for example, under federal law, 14- and 15-year- olds can work, as long as they limit their work to three hours per school day and 18 hours per school week. But many states restrict minors of this age from working altogether. And while federal law says that these minors cannot work before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m., state laws often set different cutoff times. What's more, many states forbid minors to hold occupations that are permitted under federal law.
Some states, such as Missouri, seem interested in resolving the confusion by liberalizing the system, freeing teenagers, for example, from the requirement that they obtain mandatory work permits. But in numerous other places, a booming youth work force seems synonymous with rising child labor abuse, and the urge for more regulation, and more enforcement, is growing.
There is one fact that nobody disputes: More and more young people are on the job these days. It is estimated that 5.5 million youth between the ages of 12 and 17 are employed in the United States, not including those employed illegally. Two-thirds of American high school students are working--in contrast to 1950, when fewer than 5 percent had school-year jobs. Half of those employed students work more than 15 hours per school week, and one-sixth work more than 25 hours per school week. According to "Beyond the Classroom," by Laurence Steinberg, as many as 80 percent of high school students will have a part-time, school-year job at some point before they graduate.
Many state work-force officials are convinced that, in the rush to fill vacancies, little attention gets paid to the details of child labor laws. In Tennessee, for example, the Labor and Workforce Department reports that employers are hiring more youth than ever before, but they're cutting corners and failing to get proper documentation.
Last year, Tennessee brought in a record $140,000 in child labor penalties. That is in part because Tennessee, unlike most states, has toughened its penalties in recent years. Prior to 1993, Tennessee could assess only civil fines for child labor law abusers. Now, if a violator doesn't pay the fines, the state can take the firm to criminal court.
Illinois, whose penalties remain unchanged, reports no increase in the number of official violations. But Connie Knutti, the state's labor standards enforcement manager, says that given the current laxities of enforcement, it's hard to be sure what is really going on in the workplace. All working youth, she says, are supposed to be issued a work certificate, a copy of which must be given to the Illinois Labor Department, as a method of tracking how many young people are working. But a lot of employers, out of either ignorance or indifference, aren't following the rules. "The violations may have been there, but we don't know. There's a very serious problem with lack of data," Knutti says. "We've done a lot of outreach, but we don't know how many children are working."
Adkins echoes concerns about proper enforcement and penalty assessments. "The number of enforcement officers varies depending on the states and resources available. But whether the resources are there to adequately cover the number of workplaces is another question," she says, claiming that under the current standards, the average business can expect to be inspected for child labor violations once every 80 years. "I think most employers can feel fairly confident that if they do something wrong, they won't get caught."
Adkins thinks that some states are pursuing a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, fearful that tightening the laws could potentially bring damage to a robust economy. "There aren't enough 16- and 17-year-olds for McDonald's, so employers want 13- and 14-year-olds," she says. "They're reaching more and more out to teen employees, and states don't want to rock the boat."
For all their reluctance, however, states do seem willing to go after one common enemy in the area of child labor: Almost all state labor departments agree that the practice of employing minors to sell products door-to-door is dangerous, increasingly prevalent and very difficult to stamp out.
"I look back over the last decade, and I just see a disturbing upward trend," says Nevada Labor Commissioner Terry Johnson. Last September, his agency made door-to-door selling a prohibited occupation for all children under the age of 16, joining a growing list of states to adopt such a rule in the wake of widely publicized tragedies. In Wisconsin in 1999, several teens were killed in a traffic accident while working for a door-to-door magazine sales company whose driver had a suspended license. Florida officials report that children have been showing up at 10 p.m., on doorsteps far from their neighborhoods, to sell candy bars.
Even with tighter rules, however, the battle promises to be uphill-- some of the door-to-door companies are notoriously slippery. "This type of work attracts people who are willing to evade radar," says Johnson. Many door-to-door marketers mimic a nonprofit sales pitch, conning buyers into believing that their purchases are supporting charity. Actual nonprofits are exempt from the door-to-door age limits.
But youth peddling is far from the only controversial aspect of child labor these days--and sometimes, public opinion bends the other way, in favor of more lax restrictions. In Snowmass, Colorado, last year, town residents were up in arms after a reporter from the local newspaper informed a supermarket that its employment of 9-year-old boys to bag groceries was a violation of state law. The reporter hadn't started out to do an expose--she discovered the information inadvertently while researching a feature on the grocery-bagging youngsters. But irate parents called for a boycott of the paper.
The issue was caught up briefly in the national media, with several youthful baggers appearing for interviews on network news. One of the boycott leaders, a town councilman named Mark Brady whose son was among those fired, wrote angry columns that appeared in the Sacramento Bee and the New York Times. "After the firing of my son and his fellow baggers gained national attention, I heard from parents across the country who sympathized," he wrote. "Clearly, there is support for common sense in rethinking our child labor laws."
Michael McArdle, of the state Labor Department, doesn't deny this. "We get lots of calls from people who don't understand the laws or don't agree with them," he says. "Snowmass is definitely not unique."
