Media Continue to Blame Pro-Child Labor Bills on “Labor Shortage” Rather than Routine Corporate Greed

Journalists continue to take corporate America’s “labor shortage” pretext at face value.

As I’ve noted in these pages and on the podcast I co-host, Citations Needed, there is no “labor shortage” in the sense that there’s a shortage of labor. (Tight labor market conditions are not the same thing as an absolute shortage of labor, and can bring benefits, like increased leverage for workers.) There continue to be millions of Americans seeking work—or better work—at any given time. This isn’t World War I, there is no mass exodus of labor. Though Covid has killed off and disabled potentially up to 500,000 workers, this isn’t a sufficient number to create a genuine “labor shortage” in the sense that employers cannot attract workers with a higher wage and better working conditions. 

What we have, as several economists have explained over and over again over the past two years, is a shortage of adequate pay, a “shortage” of good jobs. What we have is organs of capital—trade and industry groups, Chambers of Commerce, pro-industry think tanks—running to the media and complaining about a “labor shortage” as part of a two-year-long strategy to suppress workers’ wages and gut pandemic-related aid programs like enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, SNAP extensions, eviction moratoriums, and, now, child labor protections.

It’s not a minor quibble—it’s essential that reporters not mindlessly accept the industry’s premise justifying all these anti-worker initiatives.    

Recent reports in Axios, Business Insider, Washington Post, and New York Magazine centered this alleged “labor shortage,” thereby repeating a key talking point used to justify gutting child labor laws. Even the New York Times exposé on child labor throughout the country took this line at face value without pushback. While the pieces are often critical of the laws themselves, there’s no reason these reporters should carry water for the alleged inciting incident justifying these long-standing far-right policy goals. Right-wing efforts to gut child labor laws pre-date the current “labor shortage” and the pandemic. Clearly, then, we have good reason to believe these supposed shifts in the labor market are pretextual, not explanatory.  

But New York Magazine’s Levitz accepts this premise with remarkable intellectual incuriosity. Writing last month:

On storefronts throughout the U.S., “Help Wanted” signs have become about as ubiquitous as the stars and stripes. Today, there are roughly two job openings for every unemployed American.

This historic labor shortage is propping up inflation as desperate employers raise wages to attract scarce workers, then boost prices to compensate for higher costs. Or at least this is what the U.S.’s top economic policy-makers believe.

Levitz is correct that there are two job openings for every unemployed person, or roughly 0.5 unemployed persons per job opening, seasonally adjusted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But this isn’t radically different from the 0.8 unemployed persons per job opening we saw pre-pandemic. Is the 0.6 unemployed persons per job opening from November 2022 that much different than the 0.8 unemployed persons per job opening from October 2019? If it is, why? How do the P.R. organs of capital justify going from 14 year olds not working to needing to work once we cross the 0.7 unemployed persons per job opening threshold? Shouldn’t Levitz be interrogating this premise rather than just accepting it as an unchallenged fact? 

Levitz follows this with a patented liberal “we meant well” framing for a widespread policy of child labor exploitation:

The first prong of this policy is open and intentional. The Federal Reserve has made no secret of its belief that beating inflation will require killing jobs and lowering wages. The second prong is a different story. U.S. officials have stumbled into what is in essence a child-labor trafficking policy, the cruelty and irrationality of which derive from negligence rather than intention.

Oh well, so long as the child labor regime wasn’t “intentional”! Of course, as the New York Times article in question lays out, it was the textbook definition of intentional negligence: Lawmakers in both parties, the White House, and industry had tremendous incentive to not meaningfully prosecute or regulate child labor exploitation, because it would help drive down wages and curb inflation. Capital, and its defenders in government, know that a large pool of easily exploitable, liquid, frightened immigrant child workers necessarily weakens the power of labor and helps drive down wages more broadly. And since driving down wages was the central mechanism our policy makers settled on for “cooling off” the economy and “reining in inflation” it follows this “negligence” was indeed intentional. Or, at the very least, we have good reason to suspect it could be, and have no reason to just assume everyone was “stumbling” into allowing widespread child labor exploitation.

With rare exception, there is no employer who cannot hire enough people at the right wage. What employers call a “labor shortage” is “the pool of applicants is too small and thus I have less leverage to drive down wages” problem. If I throw a party and only four people show up, this is not evidence of a “friend shortage”—it’s evidence that I may not be as cool as I thought I was. 

As Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019:

It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work: You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.

Criticizing efforts by Republicans (and the occasional Democrats) to gut child labor laws is a worthy journalistic goal. But if reporters just accept the key axiom justifying these laws then how useful is this criticism? Eighty percent of the ideological work is done for those trying to roll back protections. “Labor shortage” framing for the better part of 24 months has been used to justify all types of anti-worker policies—many of which pre-date covid. Perhaps reporters can either put this concept in scare quotes, attempt to problematize it, or put it in pre-pandemic context, rather than just mindlessly accepting the premise. It’s a very contested, very self-serving claim on the part of capital and “top economic policymakers”—a fact the average media consumer reading these stories would have no way of knowing.