As the winter sun rises behind him, Carlos Esteban Rios sits in a Costa Mesa parking lot, waiting for a ride from a boss he’s never met and looking over some chemistry homework he might never turn in.
It’s a school day, Wednesday, Feb. 28, and Rios’ plan for the next few hours is this: He hopes to spend the morning working a backyard renovation project and then, with luck, catch a ride to school to attend his afternoon classes.
The hectic schedule is routine stuff for Rios. He says he works almost any hour, at almost any job – washing dishes, trimming plants, removing wallpaper – to finance his life here and send money to his family in Guatemala.
“If I don’t work, they don’t eat,” Rios said in his now preferred language, English.
But when he’s not working, Rios said, he goes to school. While he concedes he’s no fan of English lit or U.S. history, he loves math and environmental science. The chemistry project he is rechecking (it’s about the different properties of liquids) is important to him.
“I actually like this (stuff),” Rios said, holding out his papers and shaking his head in mock surprise.
“Funny, huh.”
Still, it’s not an even split. When Rios has to choose between work and school, work wins. Even today, if he can’t get a ride, the chemistry homework will be late or never turned in.
It’s been that way since he came to the United States in early 2021, when COVID-19 vaccines were just starting to become available. The vaccines, in addition to helping ease the pandemic, kicked off a national hiring spree – and an international mad dash for some of those U.S. jobs.
A lot of those dashers were kids. That includes Rios. The student who helps feed his family is still just 15, meaning he’s been working a treadmill of odd jobs since long before his first shave.
None of that work has been legal. Rios arrived on a temporary visa, but it expired a couple years back. What’s more, the Child Labor Act of 1938 makes it illegal to hire anybody under age 16 for most jobs.
Experts who track labor exploitation – including people who work with the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, a group in Orange County that’s trying to raise awareness about child exploitation and all forms of forced labor – suggest Rios falls into a gray area.
Because he’s not being held against his will, or facing a threat of physical or sexual or economic abuse, Rios is not a victim of human trafficking. But because he’s too young to legally choose work over school, and his employers are breaking the law (whether they pay him or not), he’s also not a fully free-will worker.
So, in that sense, Rios is part of what’s become a sweeping trend in Southern California and elsewhere – the rise of illegal child labor.
“Sex trafficking gets all the media attention, and labor trafficking is less visible, particularly when it involves children,” said Derek Marsh, a former deputy chief at the Westminster Police Department who now teaches criminal justice at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa and helps lead the school’s Global Center for Women and Justice.
“But it’s a big deal,” Marsh said.
“And it’s out there, everywhere, particularly over the past couple years.”
New face, old problem
None of this is new, of course. Child labor was a national cause in the early 20th century, and laws enacted in the early 1900s to prevent exploitative working conditions for children – and ensure that all children attended school – became templates for broader labor reforms that continue to help workers of all ages.
Since then, child labor in the United States has waxed and waned over time. Some industries (newspapers, ahem, and some types of agriculture) once relied on child workers and labor laws carved out exceptions for them. But many other industries have used young workers, often illegally, to fill gaps as needed.
In general, child labor rises and falls against the backdrop of the overall labor market. When jobs for adults are scarce, child labor isn’t used; when employers struggle to fill openings – as they are now – child labor ramps back up.
Though child labor most recently peaked in 2001 and fell steadily until about 2015, it’s been booming ever since. Federal data shows that illegal child labor – including cases of forced child labor trafficking – nearly tripled from 2015 through 2022. And though numbers for last year aren’t in, experts believe the problem continues to expand. In October, Labor Department officials told Bloomberg News they were investigating no fewer than 800 cases of alleged child labor exploitation.
The current surge of child labor, according to several experts, is driven by a few seemingly unrelated factors – rural hunger in parts of Latin America and Asia, an aging workforce in the United States and rising inflation.
“It’s not just an immigration issue. It’s an employment issue,” said a Labor Department lawyer in Los Angeles who prosecutes child exploitation cases, who said he could not be identified because he is not authorized to speak publicly.
“It’s a supply chain of vulnerable workers.”
Still, immigration plays a role.
While most adults exploited as forced workers are either native born or arrive here with legal status, child laborers typically are migrants and rarely legal residents. Their path into the country often follows the same routes – and sometimes with the same guides – as the international drug trade.
“The cartels use routes for children that they use for everything else,” Marsh said. “Why reinvent the wheel?”
Rios might be lucky one
Upon arrival in the United States, young workers usually are turned over to third-party employment agencies that house the children and find work for them. The agencies also claim that the young workers owe big debts, for expenses related to their trip and their new lives in the United States. That so-called “debt bondage” later becomes long-term leverage, forcing children to work, sometimes with little or no pay, until the debt is satisfied.
The young workers are sometimes initially housed in regions with huge numbers of foreign-born residents – including Southern California, New York, Miami and Chicago, among others. From there, they are moved to other communities, often rural, where employers might need a lot of low-skilled labor but the community no longer has enough people to provide that labor.
Once there, the jobs that children sometimes perform, and the conditions in which they live and work, can make even Rios’ grueling work-school shuffle look rosy.
For example, late last year, the Labor Department said it had secured a $3.8 million judgment against a Southern California company, Exclusive Poultry Inc., for using child workers.
The company’s employees, according to the judgment, were as young as 14. Some worked 12-hour shifts, cutting and deboning chickens, at plants in La Puente and City of Industry. The judgment also noted that the company punished workers for complaining, typically by cutting or withholding their pay. Some money from the judgment will go to the workers as compensation for their labor.
And that’s just one of many examples.
Last month, federal officials said they found children working as equipment cleaners at meat processing plants in Iowa and Virginia. In July 2023, a 16-year-old worker died of injuries sustained at a meat processing plant in Mississippi – which labor officials later investigated as a crime because federal law sets the minimum age for meat processing work at 18. And in February 2023, the Labor Department announced it had secured $1.5 million in civil penalties against Packers Sanitation Services Inc. after finding the company had more than 100 underage workers in 13 states.
Everything we buy
Nearly a year ago, in an open letter to the meat and poultry industry, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack noted that federal investigators had found 835 companies had illegally employed more than 3,800 children. The Biden administration, he wrote, would be taking action and had created the Interagency Taskforce to Combat Child Labor Exploitation.
“The use of illegal child labor – particularly requiring that children undertake dangerous tasks – is inexcusable, and companies must consider both their legal and moral responsibilities to ensure they and their suppliers, subcontractors and vendors fully comply with child labor laws.”
But it’s hardly just meat and poultry.
Experts say the products made by children in the United States – or by the estimated 277 million children ages 5 to 17 who work either part-time or full-time around the world – touch virtually every point of the American economy. Textiles, electronics, electric vehicle batteries, so-called “fast” fashion, sporting goods; all have been linked to child labor and other forced labor cases around the world.
The Labor Dept. lawyer in Los Angeles, who prosecutes child labor violations, said it’s nearly impossible to avoid everything tainted by child labor.
“I’d be nude, and barefoot, because textiles and clothing are a big part of this. And I’d be walking. Cars are part of this, too. And I’d definitely not be using a cell phone or a computer. And I’d have to change the way I eat.
“This is a problem that touches everything.”
“‘Made in USA’ feels generally acceptable, but even that is probably risky,” said Carey Clawson, co-founder of the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking.
In January, her group said it would expand its local effort to raise awareness about human trafficking to include information about labor-related issues. Toward that end, she and others hope to urge people to be alert to forced labor locally, and to buy products and services they believe to be produced without the use of forced labor.
“I’m eating a lot less chicken these days,” she said, laughing.
Though the idea of ethical consumption has been around for decades, and linked to everything from climate change and racial justice to fair wages, it has had only mixed success. Efforts to boycott Starbucks haven’t boosted wages at the chain. But similar efforts – to avoid South African products as a way to end apartheid, and years earlier, to not buy California grapes as a way to help farm workers — did lead to some changes.
Clawson believes her group can make at least some impact by encouraging locals to shop smarter.
“It sounds trivial, but it’s important,” she said. “We’ve got to get the word out that people can make an impact on this problem, even if it’s just by personally being responsible for that they can change.”
Kelsey Morgan, co-founder of EverFree, a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims and a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine, said personal responsibility isn’t a far-fetched answer.
“Look, the people we’re talking about, in terms of forced labor, could be a waiter at a restaurant or a nanny down the street. It could be anybody. The problem is in front of us every day.
“The question is: Are we going to pay attention to it?”