Employers of Underage Workers Rarely Punished

Farmers and factory owners who illegally hire underage children generally get away with it.

The U.S. Department of Labor, charged with enforcing the nation’s child labor laws:

* Fails to find the most vulnerable victims of child labor.

* Maintains a secret fine schedule that undercuts the $10,000-per-violation child-labor penalty imposed by Congress.

* Fails to bring criminal cases against repeat offenders.

* Does not seize goods that are the product of illegal child labor, as provided by law.

These are among the findings of a five-month Associated Press investigation of child labor in America.

U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman did not dispute them. “It’s not acceptable for employers to think they can skirt the law, that the Department of Labor is not serious about enforcing the law,” she said. “And I am on a path of making sure that we are more aggressive on that front.”

Last year, at least 290,200 minors worked illegally in the United States, according to an AP analysis that used the government’s own statistics. Labor Department investigators found 6,735 child labor violations at 1,546 establishments.

One-fourth of those establishments were fast-food restaurants, department records show. The typical violation the department uncovers is a high school student working later than the law allows on school nights.

The children the department does not find are the most vulnerable ones--the very young, the illegal immigrants, the impoverished.

The AP found many such children working illegally in dozens of fields and factories from coast to coast. But Labor Department officials around the country say those children are nearly impossible to find.

“I don’t believe we have ever found it,” said Jorge Rivero, Labor Department district director in Miami.

Less than an hour away, however, near Homestead, Fla., the AP found eight underage children harvesting beans on several farms on a single day in November.

Maria Echaveste, an assistant to President Clinton, said it’s easy--and unfair--to say the government doesn’t care about children who work.

Echaveste, who picked strawberries as a child in California and who, until February, headed the Labor Department division responsible for enforcing child labor laws, said enforcement has historically been a low priority.

The last major federal campaign against child labor came in 1990, when Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole led Operation Child Watch.

Soon, Herman said, the government will try again. Operation Salad Bowl, she announced, will be launched next spring in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture. The initiative, she said, will involve 50 farm inspections around the country.

But even when the Labor Department does find violations, it usually doesn’t do much about it.

According to the law, employers who hire children illegally are at the very least supposed to be fined. In 1990, Congress decided the fines weren’t high enough and raised the maximum penalty from $1,000 per violation to $10,000.

The average fine assessed by the department increased from $212 in 1990 to $887 last year--but nowhere near the maximum set by law.

A “Child Labor Civil Money Penalty Report,” which the department tried to withhold but the AP obtained, may explain why.

The secret report is used by compliance officers to set fines--fines almost always discounted significantly from the recommended maximum set by Congress.

The maximum fine, $10,000, is used only when a child working illegally is seriously injured or killed. Other fines are far lower.

Herman said she was unaware of the fine schedule until the AP inquired about it. She said she was concerned both by the difference between industry and agriculture and by the low amounts of the fines it recommends. Last month, Herman’s staff had begun to order changes.

In addition to civil fines, the law allows repeat offenders of child labor laws to be charged with criminal misdemeanors. Penalties include up to six months’ imprisonment for a second conviction.

But no one has gone to jail for federal child labor violations in seven years. Generally, it happens about once a decade.

One reason: The Labor Department doesn’t seem to know which lawbreakers are repeat offenders. Names of violators are often misspelled or entered in slightly different ways in the department’s computers.

Perhaps the toughest enforcement tool available to the Labor Department is the “hot goods” provision. This 60-year-old clause allows authorities to seize products that are made with illegal child labor.

Under this law, the taint of such labor stays on a cucumber from the moment a child picks it in Ohio to the day it sits in a jar of pickles inside a supermarket warehouse. Furthermore, if that cucumber is tossed in with a large batch of other cucumbers picked by adults, the entire batch becomes hot goods.

But the department rarely gets around to seizing anything. Herman said she has asked department lawyers to look into using the hot goods law.

Echaveste recalled arguing the point with Labor Department lawyers, who would tell her: “You can’t use hot goods on manufacturers, or even retailers.”

“I literally took the law and read it to them,” she said.

She is “still waiting” for someone to use it.