While it allows thousands of migrant children to be exploited working brutal jobs inside the United States, the Biden administration is spending $5 million to reduce child labor abroad, this time in Latin America as well as the Caribbean. Adding insult to injury, the millions of American taxpayer dollars will go to an offshoot of the famously corrupt United Nations that claims to be devoted to promoting social justice and the international recognition of human and labor rights. It is known as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its African-born Director General, Gilbert F. Houngbo, says his life mission is to improve the prospects of the world’s most vulnerable people.
It is not clear how the ILO will use the multi-million-dollar U.S. grant to reduce child labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, but the Biden administration explains that the project will enlist government, employers, and workers’ organizations to address labor rights challenges in supply chains. Then the entities will utilize “negotiated sector-specific pacts” to tackle the problem. “The project will bolster collaboration among these pact members, build their capacity, enhance engagement with local community organizations and other labor stakeholders,” the Department of Labor (DOL) writes in its announcement, adding that the project aims to “increase worker voice throughout select supply chains.” Brazil is set to receive the most intervention because Biden signed a 2023 pact with its leftist president, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, to empower workers in the South American nation and the grant falls under that category.
Known as Partnership for Workers’ Rights (PWR), the U.S.-Brazilian deal centers around countering discrimination in the global workforce, protecting workers from climate change heat stress and raising awareness about the dangers of hazardous heat exposure, among other things. Above a large photo of Biden shaking hands with Lula da Silva the PWR website explains that more than 2.4 billion workers are impacted by workplace heat stress, posing a risk to the individuals and their families as well as their communities worldwide. “Heat stress increases mental strain and other accidents and illnesses at work, as nearly 20,000 lives are lost annually due to the 23 million occupational injuries attributable to excessive heat,” according to the PWR. “Heat can severely affect workers’ mental health, leading to increased stress, anxiety, and cognitive impairments.”
Back home in the United States thousands of illegal immigrant kids released into the country by the Biden administration are performing dangerous jobs for low wages instead of attending school and the government does not seem terribly concerned. A mainstream newspaper published a scathing exposé last year that includes dozens of specific cases and shameful details of migrant children working in low-paying, hard-labor jobs throughout the country. The reporter of the lengthy piece, titled “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” interviewed more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states and found a secret workforce in practically every industry, violating child labor laws established in the U.S. nearly a century ago. “These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” the article states.
Examples include 12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee, underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina and kids sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota. In many American towns children wash dishes late at night, the story reveals. Underage migrants run milking machines in Vermont, deliver meals in New York City and harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Thirteen-year-old girls wash hotel sheets in Virginia. A 14-year-old boy works a construction job instead of going to school, a 15-year-old girl packs cereal at night in a factory, and a 13-year-old boy works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, at a commercial egg farm in Michigan. The list goes on and on, with the cheap—and illegal—underage labor boosting profits for both covert operations and global companies. Seems like the Biden administration should consider allocating funds to combat the crisis here in the U.S., especially since it created it.
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