Confronted With Child Labor in the U.S., Companies Move to Crack Down

Many major U.S. companies — including some of the country’s biggest consumer brands — say they are taking steps to eliminate child labor in their domestic supply chains amid revelations that children are working throughout American manufacturing and food production.

As hundreds of thousands of migrant children have crossed the southern border without their parents since 2021, growing numbers have ended up in dangerous, illegal jobs in every state, including in factories, slaughterhouses and industrial dairy farms, The New York Times has reported in a series of articles.

Working to exhaustion, children have been crushed by construction equipment, gotten yanked into industrial machinery and fallen to their deaths from rooftops.

Now, McDonald’s says it is requiring private inspectors to review overnight shifts at slaughterhouses that provide some of its meat, where children as young as 13 were cleaning heavy machinery. Suppliers for Ford Motor Company must now scrutinize the faces of employees when they arrive for work. Costco is commissioning more audits with Spanish-speaking inspectors.

Corporations have relied on private auditors to check for safety and labor problems at their suppliers, but those inspectors repeatedly failed to spot ongoing child labor violations, The Times reported in December. Auditors left factories in the afternoon, even though children are most often hired to work at night. They examined paperwork to check ages, but children tend to submit fake documents. And they focused on workers hired directly by plants, although children are often brought in by outside staffing agencies or contractors.

Along with McDonald’s and Costco, Starbucks, Whole Foods and PepsiCo are revising the kinds of audits they require at their suppliers. The changes include enhancing reviews of night shifts and shifts run by outside contractors, such as cleaning companies, and moving away from announcing audits in advance.