Since it signed and ratified an international treaty pledging itself to outlaw the exploitation of child labor, in 1999, the United States is backsliding so far that it may violate that pact, leading foes of child labor say.

To correct that problem, and to update child labor laws which have been basically unchanged since 1938, they introduced new and more comprehensive legislation in Congress on June 13.

The foes of child labor, led by Linda Golodner of the National Consumers League, AFT Vice President Antonia Cortese, and Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., released a Child Labor Coalition report documenting the U.S. record on the issue. Golodner and Cortese co-chair the coalition.

The report, Protecting Working Children In The United States says the Labor Department has not updated rules banning children from working in particularly hazardous jobs -- despite a 3-year-old federal study identifying hazards -- and that Labor Department enforcement of child labor laws dropped byy 21.6 percent in the last four years.

It also noted a non-partisan federal report in 2002 criticizing DOL's performance has been virtually ignored, and that the Environmental Protection Agency ignored a 5-year-old recommendation on limiting pesticide exposure for child farmworkers.

"These failings are deeply troubling in themselves, and they also raise the question of whether the U.S. government is in compliance with the 1999 international child labor treaty" crafted by the International Labour Organization, the report says.

"Over 200,000 of our young sons and daughters are injured in the workplace every year and a young person is killed on the job every five days," Lantos declared. Gesturing to side-by-side photos of a smudged, hard-hatted coal miner and a teenaged waitress, he challenged listeners to say which of the two "is more exploited."

"With school and work, the waitress is working 75 or more hours a week. The mine worker was limited to 58 hours--30 years ago," Lantos added. He said university studies show teenagers who work more than 20 hours a week on top of their school work suffer academically and are more likely to use drugs and alcohol.

But the stories of what happens to young people on the job go far beyond exploitation, especially in farms and fields, said Lantos, Golodner and Cortese. And lack of modern laws and enforcement leads to tragedy, they pointed out.

"Last month, a 15-year-old Florida youth was electrocuted while working on a high-wire pole with a chain saw" despite rules banning such hazardous work, Golodner noted. One reason, her coalition's report says, is lack of enforcement. "DOL has the equivalent of only 34 full-time investigators available to enforce (child labor) law, even though there are an estimated 3.2 million workers under the age of 18," it documents.

The report also stated that even when child labor violators are caught, the fines are small: A maximum of $11,000 and an average, last year, of $717.78. "These problems are being ignored" by the Bush administration, Golodner added. Lantos blamed Congress, which has not comprehensively changed child labor laws -- due to lobbying by employers -- since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. "We intend to use the 'shame factor' to change that" inaction, he added.

"The worst moment of my 25-year career here came when I chaired a hearing on this issue and had to tell the mother of a 16-year-old boy -- whose son was trying to comply with Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery deadline, and whose car hit a lamppost on a slippery road and was instantly killed -- that 'Congress is unable to pass legislation to save 16-year-old boys,'" he said.

AFT's Cortese, who knows the conditions affecting migrant farmworkers' children in upstate New York, said "thousands of 10-11-12-year-old children are working in the fields." Lantos' bill extends child labor law -- including a ban on all work by children under 14 -- to farms. "It takes these children out of the fields and puts them into the schools. If students aren't in school, we can't teach them," she said.

Cortese pointed out that those migrant farmworkers' children, many of them U.S. citizens born and raised in South Texas and Florida, travel northwards with their families to pick crops in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota and elsewhere.

Lantos' "Youth Worker Protection Act," which he has introduced before -- and which went nowhere in the GOP-run Congress -- would extend federal child labor law to farmworkers' children. It also would ban youths aged 16-18 from "occupations particularly hazardous...or detrimental to their health or well-being." And it would ban work during school hours, limit work hours to 4 hours on school days and 8 on other days, ban work before 7 a.m. and after 10 p.m. and ban work on six consecutive days.

It also allows civil suits against violators, orders DOL to list violators' names, addresses, penalties and facts about the violation in 30 days, and increases penalties to up to $100,000 in fines, depending on circumstances, and 3-5 years in jail.

For more information
View the text of the Youth Worker Protection Act.