"Child Labor Redux: Why Now? What to Do?"

This article analyzes the current tight labor market is motivating some businesses to seek to replace what were formerly low-wage jobs for adults with even-lower-wage positions for child workers. Fissuring — “companies’ offloading the costs and burdens associated with being a direct employer onto other, intermediary businesses” — a usage Weil coined, is a major factor. Neither the Department of Labor nor the Wage and Hour Division has sufficient funding for investigators to monitor more than a fraction of the businesses and industries they are responsible for. The article focuses on recent American child-labor abuses and attempts to enforce the “values about what constitutes just work” implicit in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Child-labor abuse is a global problem and is worse in developing economies.