Editors’ note: Earlier this year, we posted a piece from a revcom that went into how “across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of [immigrant] children starting at age 12 are illegally working dangerous jobs, many of them 12-hour shifts, six days a week. Their exploitation is feeding us and clothing us. This cruelty is, and has been, a major cog in the global system of capitalism-imperialism.” That piece, which we are reposting here, was prompted by an article by investigative journalist Hannah Dreier in the New York Times Magazine exposing the prevalence of migrant children working in horrific conditions in the U.S. Dreier recently came out with a new article (“The Kids on the Night Shift,” New York Times Magazine, September 18, 2023) on immigrant children working in plants operated by giant chicken-processing corporations Perdue and Tyson in Accomack County, Virginia.
Fourteen-year-old Marcos Cux's arm was shredded working at Perdue slaughterhouse. Image: New York Times magazine cover
Dreier focuses on one of those children, Marcos, who began working at the Perdue plant at age 13. Like many others in Guatemala, Marcos’s family is facing desperate poverty in a country wrecked by decades of U.S. intervention and domination as well as climate change driven by capitalism-imperialism. They saw their only hope for survival as having Marcos make the dangerous trek, by himself, to the U.S. so that he could find work and send money back home. While the U.S. has increasingly militarized the southern border and stepped up repression of immigrants and refugees, more than 300,000 “unaccompanied minors” have entered the U.S. since 2021 according to Dreier. The U.S. expels many of the adults who are caught crossing the border without documents, but minors who arrive at the border by themselves are generally allowed in under a 2008 law. Those behind that law say it is meant to “protect” children from harm from human traffickers and others. But whatever the intentions of those backing the law, the reality is that most of those children, like Marcos, have ended up being ruthlessly exploited, with an unknown number seriously injured or even losing their lives at work.
From midnight to 6 am, Marcos worked with the night shift crew, using corrosive chemicals and high-pressure hoses spraying hot water to clean the slaughterhouse machinery. Then he rushed home to the trailer park where he lived with his aunt and her family (who had come from Guatemala earlier and who all worked at one of the chicken factories), and then rushed to the school where he struggled to learn English. But in February 2022, as he was working the night shift his left arm became caught in the heavy machinery, which tore the arm down to the bone. Today, Marcos still doesn’t have full use of his heavily scarred arm. And he is back at work, under conditions even worse than before… in “a job that even the most desperate migrants shunned: sifting through industrial chicken warehouses and pulling out dead birds.” He has no choice… because going back to Guatemala is not an option, with his family now in even more dire straits, heavily in debt to the smugglers who brought Marcos to the U.S. It really is the case, as the writer of the piece we are reposting below notes, that so-called “solutions” to the problem of migrant child labor coming from those like Biden and various reformists “will do absolutely nothing to transform the conditions that compel millions of children across the planet to begin working for their survival (and their families’ survival) almost as soon as they can walk.”
Marcos’s story is one of what tens of thousands of other migrant children in the U.S. are going through. A system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—in which horrors like these go on and on is intolerable… all the more so because it does NOT have to be this way! The situation requires with utmost urgency that millions take up the Declaration from the revcoms: WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.
Dear Revolution:
Remember when rapper Lil Xan said he went to the hospital for eating too many Hot Cheetos and it was all over the news? Well, kids illegally working at the Cheetos factory in Michigan are actually having their health destroyed by Hot Cheetos. Huge batches of spicy dust fill their lungs and make them sting. Moving heavy pallets all night makes their backs ache. Their hands get caught in conveyer belts.
Federal law classifies this work as so hazardous that no child should be allowed to do it. And yet across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of children starting at age 12 are illegally working dangerous jobs, many of them 12-hour shifts, six days a week. Their exploitation is feeding us and clothing us. This cruelty is, and has been, a major cog in the global system of capitalism-imperialism.
Packers Sanitation Services (PSS) employed 102 children as young as 13. Here a child (face blurred) is cleaning a slaughterhouse. Photo: @Jake_Burdett retweeted
A New York Times report on migrant child labor in the U.S. by Hannah Dreier, “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” searingly exposes that whether you shop at Walmart or Whole Foods, it’s likely you consume products in part produced by illegal child labor in the United States. These are just two of the stores and companies that Dreier’s report names directly. She also names the largest meat processing company in the world, JBS, and the second-largest food and beverage company in the world, PepsiCo (behind only Nestlé, a company notorious for relying on child slave labor in Ivory Coast in West Africa for its cocoa production).
A complete list of companies, retailers, and brands the writer of the Times article names, but surely an incomplete list of all that are complicit, includes: Ben & Jerry's, Fruit of the Loom, General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Chewy granola bars, Cheetos, J. Crew, General Mills (whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley), PepsiCo (which owns Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats), and an unnamed commercial egg farm in Michigan, along with products in stores including Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods, and foods produced at a leading contract manufacturer, Hearthside Food Solutions.
Migrant children, girl, 6, and her brother, 9, pick blueberries to increase family income. Photo: AFOP.org
Shocked, but not Surprised
In response to the Times exposé, many people have been surprised to learn that their cars, food, and other basic necessities are produced in part by illegal child labor. Now, even the least political people I know are buzzing about this nightmare and what we need to do about it.
Personally, I was not surprised. I was shocked, angered, and disgusted by the horror of it all. But not surprised.
To be clear, I was not aware that there has been a significant increase in the illegal employment of migrant children in the U.S. And I was not aware that a great many of the migrant children who are working here do not just work to send money back home to their families. (These children come mostly from Central America and, as I learned from the Times piece, from Guatemala, specifically.)
Instead, many of them are working to pay back debts owed to their smugglers, working to pay rent at their sponsor’s house, pay for food and clothes bought for them by their sponsor, and so on. These are debts children should NOT in any case whatsoever have to pay. No child should pay to be alive! Children should be cared for and supported unconditionally. Instead, after a full day of 8th grade, these kids are going to a factory to put in a 14-hour shift at a job with machinery so dangerous that it sometimes rips people’s legs off, scalps them, chemically burns them, and sometimes even kills them.
Before this exposé, I had also read accounts and reviewed mass data demonstrating the magnitude of the issue of child labor, as part of an honest endeavor to truly see and understand the world we live in, all of the horror it causes for so many people. I was well aware that there are some 500,000 migrant children working in agriculture in the U.S., harvesting a quarter of the food we consume. I was well aware that there are at least 160 million child laborers worldwide. I had read accounts of the children who mine the crystals in our phones, mine the cobalt for Tesla batteries, or pick the bananas we eat for breakfast. They are all worked to the bone in extremely hazardous conditions which often severely injure or kill them. How can any decent person accept this?
Shortsighted “Solutions”
What I was actually surprised at was the public’s reaction to the Times article. It garnered such public outrage that it filled all my social media news feeds, along with many proposed “solutions.” It even prompted a response from President Biden himself promising to crack down on child labor violations.
Many people responding to this New York Times report called for solutions which I can completely understand emotionally. But these solutions are shortsighted in that they demonstrate a lack of understanding of the system which dominates the world and defines the life conditions and choices of the billions of people living on this planet. Some people call for boycotting the brands involved. But, if you were to actually try to boycott all products involved in child labor, you’d be walking around with no clothes on and nothing to eat.
Another “solution” put forth by many grappling with deeply ingrained systemic issues from labor exploitation to racial oppression is this: “Why can’t all the people who hate all this injustice just separate from society and form an intentional community in which we produce our own goods ethically, take care of each other without need for the police or government, and so on?” And in a similar vein, “Why don’t we just use mutual aid to all support one another instead of relying on the system at all?”
Here’s one big problem with that proposed “solution”—it will do absolutely nothing to transform the conditions that compel millions of children across the planet to begin working for their survival (and their families' survival) almost as soon as they can walk. Ask yourself—what would a small community of people striving to break free of their own dependence on a global system of commodity production do to end the savage exploitation of Indonesian children on plantations producing palm oil for beauty products marketed worldwide?
Another “solution” is for the U.S. government to crack down on the issue, i.e., address child labor violation claims immediately, keep closer tabs on migrant children released by the Department of Health and Human Services, and vet sponsors better. Sure, some of the ugly growths produced by this cancerous capitalist system can be treated. But it’s the system itself that’s cancerous. Trying to repair its effects without getting to the root of the problem will not prevent the cancerous system from continuing to destroy the lives of literally billions of people. Ask yourself—what compels a mother in Guatemala to send her children on a perilous 1,200-mile journey in the hopes they’ll make it all the way and be able to provide a means for their family’s survival? This cancerous system exists and thrives off the hyper-exploitation of people, especially women and children, across this planet. Biden’s role as the head representative of the most powerful imperialist country in the world is to defend this very system.
Willful Ignorance?
Hannah Dreier, the author of the Times article, shares many different instances of teachers, case workers, and even managers at the facilities where the children work who report violations of child labor law. What happened to them? They were threatened, they resigned, or they reported over and over and over again but stopped doing so, as time and time again no action was taken.
Though many individuals Dreier interviewed demonstrate great concern for the lives of the children whose exploitation they are witnessing, she concludes that “the growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance.” It is apparent from her report that there are many involved who are “willfully ignorant” and so are complicit in the problem, but what is compelling them to continually ignore the violations?
There are despicable acts by individuals like the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, who compared migrant children to parts on an assembly line, asking why the bureaucracy he leads couldn't run things like one of Henry Ford's plants and discharge children from government detention centers with machine-like efficiency! But what, overall, is compelling individuals like him to run the kinds of government organizations and corporations which are stripping people, in this case specifically children, of their humanity, and en masse perpetuating exploitation and oppression? In order to march on, the system of capitalism-imperialism has certain necessities. It’s not just that Becerra is a heartless jerk (which he is); it’s that exploitation of children all over the world is built into this system he defends and represents!
Getting to the Root
To get beyond the ideas that we live in a world made bad by bad actors, or made bad by some evil streak natural to humanity itself, or made bad by some resolvable shortcomings in our own “democratic” government, or made bad by the wrong-colored or -gendered people serving as our representatives, I had to begin to understand the deep forces at play that compel billions of people to perpetuate an oppressive system even as they personally criticize the many injustices occurring around them.
In order to come to this understanding, I began to connect with, learn from, and become part of a network of people (revolutionary communists) who strive to accurately diagnose the problem at its core and develop an actual solution in order to emancipate all of humanity. And I’ve come to the scientific understanding that it is a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—which breeds and feasts upon such horror.
The fundamental law of this system is expand or die. Capitalists must compete with each other, cutting costs to raise profit in order to survive in the global market. They're driven to exploit more relentlessly at every turn, resulting in cases like the one presently discussed: where migrant children are laboring illegally and dangerously in our country in order to feed the needs of the dominating companies.
Any system that does this to its children should not be allowed to exist!
People who wonder why children and their families would risk everything, even their lives, to journey to the U.S. should read articles in the American Crime series on Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico.1 The U.S. has plundered and devastated those countries for decades, and is ultimately responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Then many of those who make it here are further persecuted, exploited, and vilified.
What Will YOU Do About It?
Next time you open a Nature Valley granola bar, think of 15-year-old Carolina Yoc. She works the night shift on a line that has already torn open the scalp of a fellow worker, and ripped fingers off others. After school gets out, she works a full shift on that line. She told the reporter, “Sometimes I get tired and feel sick. But I’m getting used to it.”
Next time you treat yourself to some ice cream, think of the migrant children in Vermont who run the milking machines at dairy suppliers for Ben & Jerry’s, and think of Ben & Jerry’s self-proclaimed value of “using ice cream to change the world” by “advancing human rights and dignity.” If you buy clothes from the J. Crew line because of its “Made in America” tag, think of the immigrant children in Los Angeles who sewed the tag in your new shirt.
Ask yourself—do you want to live in a world full of horrors like these? Or do you want to make revolution and build a socialist state working towards global communism? A society which produces according to people’s needs, not private profit, and in which all of humanity flourishes, and in which every single human being is cherished.
This is absolutely possible, but not under this system. Not without a revolution.
—From a young revcom
Bob Avakian: What is capitalism?