By Joe Lamport
Mohammed Abdullah began working at seven years old, carrying 75-pound
loads. When he first arrived in New York City, he worked two shifts
at gas stations in the Bronx, and moonlighted by selling food to
fellow West Africans.
But Abdullah is not a poster child for child labor laws; quite
the contrary. The Ghanaian immigrant who now owns two popular African
restaurants in the Bronx is thankful for his childhood jobs, and
he seems eager to offer his children, and those of his relatives,
the same experience.
"My children, at nine years old, Ill start giving some
housework," Abdullah said. "My older teens 16 or
17 I let work in the restaurant."
Child labor laws, he believes, can stymie parental efforts to discipline
their children, and his views are shared by other immigrant parents,
as well as by their religious leaders.
Without experience working as a child, "when a kid gets older,
he dont get a job," said Luis Ortiz as he watched his 11-year-old
son George arranging mangoes, oranges and apples for sale on fold-up
tables. The boy helped his father flatten empty boxes and lean sticks
of sugar cane against a wall. And he used a simple device to peel
oranges as cars pulled up to his fathers roadside fruit stand.
Without a job, Luis was saying, "he ends up lazy. And then they
go to Manhattan and sell drugs."
Jeffrey Newman, president of the advocacy group the National Child
Labor Committee, disagrees. "We as a society decided a hundred
years ago that the importance of children having a childhood and
not being exploited for work overrides the notion of work,"
he said. These children can and should learn the value of work,
said Newman, but this can be done at school, through such activities
as training programs.
Children under 14 are generally prohibited from working in New
York. State and city labor investigators reported just 13 minors
in violation of child labor laws in 2001. But Newman said the Department
of Labors numbers reflect only actual citations issued.
At least 30,000 children are working illegally in the city, he
said. As many as half of the child laborers are immigrant children
who are particularly vulnerable, he added, because their parents
usually are not aware of child labor laws.
This is not exactly hidden. When an accident at a Park Avenue construction
site killed five workers last year, Newman noted that one of the
witnesses quoted in newspaper accounts was a 16-year-old worker
at the site who escaped uninjured. State and federal labor laws
prohibit minors working in construction.
Immigrant children sometimes pose as young adults to find employment.
At car washes, in restaurants and at construction sites, they work
along side adult workers, who are sometimes older brothers or sisters
who have helped them get hired. New York Citys garment district,
where hidden sweatshops employ children, has particularly earned
the attention of New Yorks Department of Labor investigators,
the department said.
Although as a child in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican
Republic, Luis Ortiz helped his parents at home, he did not have
to work, as some of his poorer friends did. But their experiences
affected him nonetheless. "If a child is poor in Santo Domingo,
hes got a real problem," Ortiz said. "There the
government doesnt do anything for children. A child will work
and work and maybe hell be fed for it and get very little
In New York City, the government is more generous, Ortiz said.
Public education allows children to learn at school and public assistance
for their parents means children do not have to work to help their
families. But they risk losing discipline, he said. Ortiz said he
was aware of child labor laws and was helping young George focus
There is at least one way that immigrants might be indirectly responsible
for the decline in child labor. Surveys conducted in July over the
last two years by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the
proportion of children enrolling in summer school in the country
continues to rise while the proportion employed in the work force
continues to fall.
"The development of other activities is one of a number of
factors that may be causing that trend," said Karen Kosanovich,
an economist and child labor expert at the U.S. Department of Labors
Bureau of Labor Statistics. "When I was a teen in the 1980s,
we didnt have soccer."
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