The Return of Child Labor

For years I have been haunted by a grainy video I saw in 2023, when I was interviewing poultry processing workers in Green Forest, Arkansas. In those months I spoke often with the organizer Magaly Licolli, who directs Venceremos, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the rights of poultry workers. One day we were sitting in her office in Springdale a few miles from the headquarters of Tyson Foods, the largest meat processing company in the US and, after the Brazilian firm JBS, the second largest in the world. After the subject turned to child labor, she pulled out her phone and showed me footage that another laborer had recorded of two migrant children, fourteen and fifteen years old, working as chicken catchers in a cavernous rural poultry house. The video was dark, but it was clear that they were using their bare hands to grab each chicken by the feet and hurl it into a nearby crate. Their bodies showed up only in outline, like ghostly shadows.

Earlier that year, Licolli told me, six chicken catchers—four adults and two children—had come to Venceremos’s office to seek help. The two minors were asleep when they arrived, she said, “because they hadn’t slept for so many hours.” The catchers explained that the contractor who hired them had denied them a week’s wages because—although they had worked fourteen-to-fifteen-hour days under physically extreme, sometimes dangerous conditions—they hadn’t managed to finish crating 56,000 chickens. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the catching and cooping of poultry for transport or market is strictly prohibited for minors under the age of sixteen.

After some asking around, Licolli found the name of the contractor, called him, and told him he had to pay the chicken catchers. “Otherwise, I would have involved the Department of Labor,” she told me. The contractor agreed. Licolli drove to Decatur, some thirty miles from Springdale, to pick up the money, and “that’s how that was resolved.”

In the years that followed, I thought back to those teenagers often. Who was the contractor they worked for? How many other minors did that employer hire? How many other children were working dangerous fifteen-hour shifts? In its brevity and ambiguity, their story seemed to show the predicament of so many children laboring in the poultry processing industry and other dangerous jobs across the US. Working in informal arrangements, they have come to rely on advocates like Licolli to push for their rights, sometimes through similarly informal channels. Many of the children she met in Arkansas, she said, had arrived at the US–Mexico border as unaccompanied minors. The teenagers in this case, she explained, were K’iche, the largest Indigenous Maya ethnic group in Guatemala, and like most immigrant children in the industry, they had “come with a mind [to] making money to send…back to their very poor families.”

I met with Licolli during a historic nationwide spike in child labor violations. That fiscal year, according to The Washington Post, the US labor department “found 5,792 minors working in violation of child labor laws,” an increase of 49 percent from the previous year and “an 88 percent increase since 2019.” Pete Gess, the economic policy director of Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families, noted in a 2024 report that Arkansas’s Department of Labor and Licensing had identified a 266 percent increase in child labor violations from 2020 to 2023. 

At the time I lived in downtown Little Rock, among sprawling, old, ruinous houses. Often I heard Spanish while walked down the street and looked up to see visibly underage immigrant children working on roofing crews. Sometimes I would shout up to ask them where they were from and wait for them to respond—“Guatemala” or “Mexico.” That same year Arkansas was one of eight states that made national headlines for systemic child labor violations: that February the Department of Labor found six children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen working the night shift for a third-party contractor called Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI) at a Tyson Foods plant in Green Forest, where they used harsh chemicals to clean blood, fat, bone, gristle, and skin from machines powerful enough to decapitate a worker.

Even as these violations proliferated, lawmakers in Republican-led states were taking aim at the regulations themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, fourteen states introduced or passed bills that weakened child labor laws. Two laws in particular, both passed in 2023, were at the forefront of this trend. One was in Iowa; the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which monitors child-labor legislation, called it “one of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor laws in the country” for, among other things, “allowing state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations.”

The other was in Arkansas. Less than a month after the Labor Department announced its findings about the Green Forest plant, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had served as Donald Trump’s press secretary during his first term, signed a bill called the Youth Hiring Act. By removing a century-old Division of Labor permission that required a parental signature for any child under sixteen seeking employment, the law effectively eliminated the only database that had kept track of working minors in the state. Sanders maintained that “all child labor laws will still apply and we expect businesses to comply just as they are required to do now.” But when I spoke to child advocates like the policy analysts Nina Mast and Reid Maki about the bill two years after it passed, both stressed that it had reduced state oversight at a time when child-labor violations were increasing.

Nationwide, the number of minors employed in violation of federal law remains at near-record highs. After falling to 4,030 in the 2024 fiscal year, the figure rose to 5,272 in 2025. Hazardous work violations, such as those the labor department has investigated in Arkansas’s meatpacking industry, have more than doubled since 2015, according to federal data. The state-level legislative push to dilute child-labor reporting and enforcement, meanwhile, has only gathered force. According to the EPI’s reporting, lawmakers in thirty-three states have by now introduced bills that weaken child labor laws. In 2023 Arkansas and Iowa were two of four states to successfully enact such legislation; now, three years later, fifteen states have done so. This wave of legislation may not directly affect the undocumented migrant children at the center of many recent high-profile child-labor investigations, who often take jobs via informal arrangements or under aliases, but it seems likely to discourage states from taking action to protect them and other vulnerable minors. Partly in response to these rollbacks, other legislatures have meanwhile strengthened their protections against child labor, from liberal strongholds like California and New York to red states like Texas and Alabama.

“When I started at the Wage and Hour Division in 2021,” Jessica Looman—who spent four years running the federal agency’s efforts to enforce labor laws across the country—told me in June 2025, “I did not think that by the end of 2022 our number one issue would be finding hundreds of children employed in the meatpacking industry in America.” Gess, at the Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families, stressed when we spoke in Little Rock that child labor “shouldn’t be a political issue.” In recent years, however, it has become precisely that. The rollback of child labor protections in Arkansas, I came to see, reflected a broader, increasingly politicized national campaign to weaken labor regulations, expand youth employment, and redefine the limits of hazardous and dangerous work for children.

Our current approach to regulating child labor dates back to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which barred minors under eighteen from hazardous occupations. In 1941 a Georgia company, Darby Lumber, challenged the law and arrived at the Supreme Court, arguing that the states, not Congress, should have the power to regulate employment conditions. The justices, however, unanimously upheld the FLSA.

Over the past several decades Republicans have made repeated attempts to roll back child labor legislation. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan addressed Congress to propose the Youth Employment Opportunity Wage Act. “Studies over the past decade,” he insisted, “have repeatedly demonstrated that the minimum wage has reduced job opportunities for large numbers of our youth.” But lawmakers and labor organizations warned that the act would leave workers more vulnerable to exploitation, and the bill failed. In 2011 the Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called child labor laws “truly stupid” and proposed putting poor children to work sweeping the floors of their classrooms: “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school.”

That same year several state legislators proposed bills to overturn youth-employment regulations. In Maine, Republicans tried to pass the “Enhance Access to Workplace for Minors” act, which would have allowed sixteen-and-seventeen-year-olds to work overnight shifts and unlimited hours on school nights, as well as lowered their wages. A limited version of the bill passed, easing restrictions on working hours. In more recent years, as Republican lawmakers and pro-business groups again began seeking to roll back child labor laws, they increasingly started speaking about defending parental and personal freedoms against government overreach.

Then, around 2020, several developments laid the groundwork for a sudden rise in child-labor violations. As Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl wrote in a 2023 report for The Washington Post, the labor shortage induced by the Covid-19 pandemic “created a huge need for workers” even as “large numbers of undocumented minors entered the United States looking for work,” driven from countries such as Honduras and Guatemala by political and economic turbulence. In 2008 Congress had passed an anti-trafficking bill that included provisions preventing the Department of Homeland Security from sending back undocumented minors crossing the US–Mexico border. The intent was “to protect children who might otherwise come to harm on their own in Mexican border towns,” the journalist Hannah Dreier wrote in one of her landmark reports for The New York Times on child labor at sites including Tyson and Perdue plants. Over the following years, she noted, the policy became “widely known in Central America, where it shapes the calculations of destitute families.”

When the 2008 law was passed, fewer than ten thousand unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border each year. By 2014 that number had risen to 68,541; by 2021 it had risen to 144,834. During the pandemic, as Melissa Sanchez reported for ProPublica, an increasing number of immigrant teenagers started working in factories at night while attending school during the day. “Many of them passed through the federal network of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors that came under scrutiny in 2018 during the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents,” she wrote. “As they waited weeks or months to be released to sponsors, they grew anxious about their mounting immigration debts, desperate to get out and work so their relatives back home didn’t suffer the consequences of a loan default.”

Child labor violations have risen dramatically not simply because these minors entered the country but because, once they got here, contractors were willing to exploit them to do dangerous jobs. Looman, the former Wage and Hour administrator, told me that the most frequent question people would ask her division was: “Why is child labor increasing?” In some sense, she said, “the very simple answer to that question is: because employers hired them.”

Large companies in the poultry processing industry, where child labor is especially prevalent, frequently rely on third-party contractors to fill various jobs in the supply chain. The largest of these third-party contractors is PSSI, which provides slaughterhouse cleaners and employs over 15,000 workers. (Its owner, in turn, is the private equity giant Blackstone.) By contrast, the companies that contract catchers to work at chicken houses are often small and local, and have little online presence.

Those chicken catchers, as the filmmaker Diana Campos has noted in her short documentary The Price of Poultry, work at “the bottom of the poultry industry hierarchy.” Large commercial chicken houses can hold between 30,000 and 50,000 chickens, and laborers often report working up to fifteen-hour shifts loading the birds by hand for transport to processing plants. (To work such long hours, Licolli told a local paper last December, some kids working as chicken catchers have relied on methamphetamine.) Campos was raised in Northwest Arkansas by Mexican immigrant parents; her father, who she interviews in the film, worked in the poultry industry for twenty years, including as a catcher. The people working catching shifts, she recounts partway through the documentary, “are often undocumented and sometimes children.” 

Beyond the exhausting hours, chicken catchers are at risk of serious injuries and exposed to ammonia and other hazardous chemicals, extreme heat, and respiratory illnesses. In the recent Netflix documentary Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy, the comedian Mo Gilligan interviews chicken catchers laboring under these conditions, along with advocates and journalists (including Licolli and myself). One undocumented chicken catcher shows his hands, with deformed, swollen fingers splayed in different directions. From time to time, he tells Gilligan, he loses control over them: “Sometimes when we sleep, our hands are throwing chickens.”  

Catching and caging poultry are not among the seventeen hazardous occupations the Department of Labor prohibits for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, but the department, recognizing their risks, explicitly bans them for minors under sixteen. The sector’s layers of subcontracting and labor outsourcing, however, often obscure accountability. When Tyson and other meatpackers hire third-party providers, these providers are the first to shoulder the financial liability for employment practices and safety violations.

The Department of Labor’s findings at that Tyson plant in Green Forest were part of a months-long investigation into PSSI. Over the period in question, the department announced in February 2023, PSSI had hired more than a hundred minors to work overnight shifts at poultry plants across eight states, operated by large companies including Tyson, Cargill, and JBS; the contractor had to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties, the highest fine the government was legally able to impose. PSSI has denied knowingly hiring minors, although in the aftermath of the penalty NBC News reviewed a June 2021 PSSI report and found that the company had disciplined an employee who hired the same minor twice in six months under two different identities. In response to the fine, PSSI replaced its CEO, launched a $10 million fund to fight child labor, and, in 2025, rebranded as Fortrex.

The investigation had by then prompted some changes in compliance protocols around third-party agreements in the industry. Tyson mandated random third-party and internal audits of its sanitation partners’ hiring registries, while JBS USA canceled its contracts and started hiring its own cleaning crews. And yet allegations of child labor at Tyson persist. In 2024, according to unsealed court documents reviewed by the Arkansas Times, the Department of Labor searched a pair of the company’s plants in Arkansas after receiving anonymous tips, one from a mother who claims to have “overheard children between eleven and thirteen years old” discussing their work on the night shift in Green Forest and another from a teacher who said that one of their fourteen-year-old students talked about working at the facility in Rogers. Earlier that year, Tyson shareholders voted down a demand from Venceremos and an Arkansas faith-based organization that the company audit its plants for child labor. In 2025 the Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley opened a congressional investigation into the company after receiving a new whistleblower complaint from a plant in an undisclosed location. “To be clear,” a Tyson spokesperson told the press in response to the Arkansas Times report, “we do not allow the employment of anyone under the age of eighteen in any of our facilities, and we do not facilitate, excuse or in any other way participate in the use of child labor.”

In June 2025 I interviewed a Tyson contractor who works at several facilities in Arkansas. (She requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.) When she first began work, she was given a tour of the plant in Springdale. “I was scared to be in there,” she told me. “And I’m an adult.” The “giant tubs where they wash the chicken” were “almost the size of my house,” she said. “There’s just an open hole. I mean, you have to climb up these stairs, a steep staircase.… And it’s water-filled with these big chickens bouncing around, almost like a washing machine.” On the production floor, she said, “It’s loud. It’s disorienting. It’s wet and slippery, and you can’t hear people talking to you. You have to wear earplugs for ear protection. But that also means that you can’t hear instructions…. A lot of people complain about headaches, a lot of chemicals going on. It’s just not a place that any child should be.”

The Arkansas Youth Hiring Act made this already opaque system still harder to regulate. When the law passed in 2023, it eliminated the requirement that children under sixteen get an employment certificate, signed by their parents, from the Arkansas Department of Labor and Licensing, which meant that the state was no longer required to verify their age. Children that age in Arkansas commonly work in fast food, bagging groceries, customer service, or seasonal work like lifeguarding; the act did not change safety or hourly protections, nor did it affect the laws that regulate hazardous jobs. It did, however, signal a rollback in state oversight of the conditions in which minors were working, precisely at a time when employers in the state were under scrutiny for child labor violations.

Sponsored by the Republican representatives Rebecca Burkes and Clint Penzo, the bill cast itself as a matter of parental rights, promising to “streamline the hiring process for children under sixteen” and “restore decision-making to parents” without government interference. Alexa Henning, Sanders’s spokesperson, echoed that language in a statement upon the signing of the bill: “the Governor believes protecting kids is most important, but this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission for their child to get a job.” When the law went through the Public Health, Welfare, and Labor Committee, according to a local news report, Burkes argued that it would give parents the freedom to dispense with the “paperwork that has to be done before the minor can accept a job.” The legislation, she noted, “came to me from the Foundation of Government Accountability [sic].”

Burkes was not the only state legislator to propose child-labor legislation from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm called FGA Action. In their Washington Post investigation of the group, Bogage and Paúl noted that the FGA had, in 2023, also helped draft several other bills, including Iowa’s; the organization, they wrote, seemed to have “found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions.” There are larger culture-war dynamics at play here: the same legislators who argue for “parental rights” when it comes to child labor have, for instance, passed laws that strip parents of the right to approve gender-affirming medical care or certain counseling for their transgender teenagers, including in Arkansas, which banned gender-affirming medical care in 2021.

After Sanders signed the Arkansas Youth Hiring Act, Nick Stehle, the FGA’s vice president of communications, wrote an op-ed for Fox News defending the law from “partisan attacks” by “out-of-state elites.” (Stehle, Burkes, and Penzo did not respond to requests for comment.) “We’re not talking about sending junior to work the graveyard shift at the factory Sunday through Saturday,” Stehle, who lives in Arkansas, wrote:

We’re talking about bussing tables a couple nights a week after school, working the check-out counter on weekends, and staying busy during summer…. The main push for this reform didn’t come from big business. It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish.

Representative Tippi McCullough, who is serving her fourth term in the Arkansas House, voted against the bill. “I think it’s terrible,” she told me in 2025. “I don’t think it’s needed. I think, as a matter of fact, it’s harmful. I don’t think it’s pro-parental rights. I really think parents should want there to be safeguards and checks on these kinds of things.” (The New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose made a similar point in a piece responding to the law: “Wouldn’t parents have more of a decision-making role, not less, if their explicit permission were required before their fourteen-and-fifteen-year-olds could work up to forty-eight hours a week, six days a week?”) Before serving in the House, McCullough was an English teacher and coached basketball. “I just always felt like that was a time for kids—maybe the only time in their lives—to be able to concentrate on school and extracurricular things and sports,” she said. “I mean, there’s going to be plenty of time to work the rest of your life.”

Multiple experts I spoke with argued that removing the permitting requirement would make child-labor violations harder to track. Annie B. Smith—a law professor at the University of Arkansas, where she directs the civil litigation and advocacy clinic and the human trafficking clinic—explained that “there’s less of a state role ensuring that children aren’t working, or that if they are working, they’re supposed to be working.” Debbie Berkowitz, now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, served as chief of staff and then senior policy advisor for OSHA from 2009 to 2015. “What Sarah Huckabee Sanders did,” she told me in June 2025, “is allow employers to hire kids in jobs without their parents knowing, without the state knowing.”

In any case, advocates argued, safeguards for kids should rely on more than parental decision-making. “We just fundamentally feel that parents don’t know best,” Maki, the Director of Child Labor Advocacy for the National Consumers League, told me when we spoke. “They’re not looking at accident reports and poultry plants. They’re not looking at the number of kids on farms who are being dismembered or losing limbs. They just have no idea what the dangers are.” In January 2025 researchers at the University of Maryland found that states with work permit requirements had 15.5 percent fewer child-labor violation cases per million people and 35.2 percent fewer minors working under illegal conditions than states without such rules. 

That June I wrote Sam Dubke, Sanders’s communications director and speechwriter, to ask whether the governor wanted to comment on those findings and elaborate on what she was doing to prevent an increase in child labor violations in the state. “Governor Sanders takes child welfare seriously and signed legislation creating tough new civil, misdemeanor, and felony penalties for child labor violations, punishing bad actors while still giving teenagers the opportunity to learn skills in the workplace,” Dubke wrote. “All federal child labor laws are still enforced.” A month after signing the Arkansas Youth Hiring Act, Sanders did sign a bill that increased fines for child labor violations from $1,000 to $5,000 and criminalized breaking the laws knowingly. In June 2025 I emailed Steve Guntharp, the chief of staff at the Arkansas Labor Department, to confirm how many employers had been fined since the increase. The answer was two.

It was in 2023 that the Economic Policy Institute started tracking laws rolling back child labor protections across the country. “We realized this was really a much more widespread effort, legislatively, across many different states,” Mast, a policy and economic analyst at the EPI, told me, “and no one at the time was really paying that much attention to it.” In 2024, indeed, six states rolled back child labor protections. (Seven, meanwhile, passed bills that strengthened them.) According to the institute’s reporting, that year Alabama stopped requiring work permits for minors under sixteen, Florida let companies “schedule 16–17-year-olds to work more than eight hours per day on Sundays and holidays and for more than six days in a row year-round,” and Indiana rolled back protections for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds doing hazardous agricultural work. All three bills, the EPI noted, were supported by the Foundation for Governmental Accountability. The following year West Virginia, like Arkansas, passed legislation that eliminated youth work permits for fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds; Indiana passed a law that allowed sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to work the same hours and shifts as adults and eliminated the requirement for employers to secure written parental consent to schedule them for late shifts on school nights.

Trump has made no explicit statements about child labor since taking office, but last year, as Maki and his coauthor Todd Larsen have observed, the Trump administration “identified twenty-one offices for closure within the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division” and cut staff at the agency responsible for enforcing federal child labor laws. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 blueprint for a second Trump term, called for watering down the Department of Labor’s hazard-order rules “to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent,” observing that “some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.” The federal regulations have not yet been rolled back, but this past year three state legislatures—in West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania—introduced bills that would “weaken hazardous work protections for minors enrolled in work-based learning programs,” according to the EPI. West Virginia’s passed, removing the state’s specific list of hazardous occupations that were previously barred for minors under sixteen, among other things.

Trump’s immigration crackdown, too, has directly affected the landscape of child labor. The threat of deportation makes undocumented minors in the workforce more afraid than ever to report abuses, and the administration has made them still more vulnerable by systematically dismantling the legal support networks designed to help them—including by cutting funding to legal services that had long provided them with counsel.  

Elsewhere, state legislators have contemplated turning to minors to take jobs previously filled by immigrant workers. At an event in March 2025 with Tom Homan, Trump’s border tsar, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made that connection explicit. Rather than hiring “people illegally for cheaper,” he said, “I think we’ve chosen to go a different way in Florida.” When the state passed a policy requiring many employers to verify the immigration status of their workers online, he continued, critics “said, oh, you’re not gonna be able to hire people.” But those worries, he continued, hadn’t been borne out:

Yes, we had people that left because of those rules. But you’ve also been able to hire other people—and what’s wrong with expecting, like, our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up. Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when, you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts?

Five days after that panel discussion, a Florida state senate committee moved along a bill that would have allowed sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to work more than eight-hour overnight shifts before the start of a school day. “It was such a bad bill,” said Maki, who noted that it was “close to getting through” before it finally died elsewhere in the Senate. The bill’s sponsor, the Tampa Republican Jay Collins, defended it during a senate debate: “Ultimately, we’re not talking about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. We’re talking about them working at Publix, at Piggly Wiggly or jobs within the industry. This is a parental rights thing. Parents know their kids best.”

The Democratic state senator Carlos Guillermo Smith, meanwhile, spoke for the majority who voted against the legislation: “This bill is going to lead to exploitation of minors, exploitation of children.” A 2024 poll by the Florida Policy Institute showed that 74 percent of Florida voters sided with Smith against the bill, including 61 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents. “These leaders are kind of ignoring their own base, in some cases,” Maki said, in favor of “just pushing regressive policies on the public.”

When we spoke, Nina Mast told me that “all the organizing that has been done in opposition to these bills over the past few years” gives her hope that activists will continue fighting to keep legislators from rolling back child labor protections. In 2024 the Campaign to End US Child Labor, which represents a coalition of nearly fifty labor, human rights, and faith groups, worked with academics, survivors, and impacted communities to create a policy roadmap for local, state, and federal lawmakers. Their demands included guaranteed attorney representation for unaccompanied migrant children, the closing of loopholes in child-labor laws, “stronger consequences for child labor violations,” and the bolstering of labor rights across the board by, for instance, “raising the minimum wage, ending discrimination against farmworkers, regularizing the status of the current immigrant workforce, protecting the right to organize, and preventing states from eroding labor standards.” The National Education Association, a member of the coalition, has advocated for treating student labor exploitation as a critical threat to public education. As the Maine teacher Rie Larson put it in a 2025 NEAToday report, “Our children are not responsible for rescuing our economy.” 

Smith, the Arkansas lawyer, wishes that policymakers in Arkansas and beyond would focus on state-level interventions that address the economic needs of children and families more directly, to keep children from feeling pressured into hazardous workplaces in the first place. She also emphasized that states should pursue legislation that protects coworkers who see children doing hazardous jobs and decide to report it. Witnesses need to be able to file complaints without the risk of legal or workplace retaliation, she said, because “we know that there are simply not enough resources for the Arkansas Department of Labor or the US Department of Labor to be in every workplace.” Gess had another recommendation: finding legal pathways with which “to hold the primary company responsible for violations throughout its labor supply chain.” (Those could, for instance, be modeled on laws in other countries like Germany’s Supply Chain Act and France’s Duty of Vigilance law, both of which legally require companies to identify, prevent, and mitigate labor abuses across their global contractors.)

Many of the advocates I spoke to felt that such measures could do a good deal to help protect children like those chicken catchers that Licolli met back in 2023. But several of them also seemed unnerved by how quickly decades of consensus regarding the importance of protecting minors from hazardous work appears to be coming undone. “One hundred years ago, people started advocating to protect children because parents weren’t able to go into the workplace” and monitor conditions there, Gess told me. “Who knew a hundred years later we would be fighting some of the same battles?”