Representative Rich McCormick, R-Georgia on the Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Georgia Rich McCormick's Republican congress member suggested that children at school, instead of getting free meals as part of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), should be forced to eat themselves.
The news-defender Pamela Brown asked the member of the US representative house, as Trump's Federal Fining Freeze would influence programs such as NSLP, made meals available with low income. McCormick replied with the statement that children's work laws should be canceled, and that the child hunger and poverty are due to children.
In the interview, McCormick said: “Before I was 13 years old, I chose berries in the field before the Children's Labor Act excluded this. I was a paper boy and when I was in the high school, I worked through and through. They tell me that children who stay at home instead of going to work at Burger King, McDonald's in summer should stay at home and get their free lunch instead of going to work? I think we need a top-down rating. “
When he was asked for clarification, he continued: “I mean how many people have their start in fast food restaurants when they were children, and not just a ceiling rule that gives all children for lunch in the high school, Who are able to go out and actually go out and actually get out of a job and do something that makes it valuable, thinks about her future instead of thinking about how to swim the government if you don't need it. “
McCormick's attitude is a symbol of the ruling class as a whole and its efforts to loot all social programs that reduce the effects of poverty in order to offer more tax cuts and state subsidies. Trump's return to power immediately intensified these plans when he tries to impose a “Milei model” in America, which is based on the extreme right president of Argentina that cut off all public expenditure with the exception of the police, the catchers and the military would .
McCormick and Trump's message to school children of the working class is: “Work or starve”. Nobody, no matter how old or how young is, to be freed from wages. If you do not make profits, you are not worth a ham sandwich for the capitalist class.
The school lunch program is just one of many programs that are targeted by Trump and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) under the direction of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. In the school year 2022-2023, the recent period in which data is available, over 28 million students received advantages from the NSLP, so that they were able to receive meals free of charge or at school.
If the program is shortened, these ten million children would be hungry. Free school meals are their only guaranteed food source for the most impoverished students. Due to the low wages, families of the working class usually explain the advantage of their budgets and bought fewer foods in grocery stores in order to have more for other bills and expenses, especially since food prices continue to rise.
As it is reactionary, McCormicks is claim that children's work laws should be abolished and the historic clock should be converted back to the days when children worked in the coalemins and textile mills and many were turned into cribs before they became adults.
In fact, children in America have set up in recent years. According to a report by the Ministry of Labor in November 2024, there are currently more than 1,000 open investigations into child labor in various industries.
The report says:
The conditions that the children's work laws provided in the 1930s once seemed to be a chapter from the history books, but in the past two years it has also become clear in today's modern economy, 100 -year -old work problems can still occur. Investigations by the department's wage and hourly department (WHD or the department) have revealed an alarming increase in children's employment in order to work under dangerous conditions in industries across the country.
The report states that the largest examined violations of food services, retail, construction, caretaker services, meat product wholesalers, furniture production and sawmills include industries.
On January 15, 2025, the Ministry of Labor published an explanation in which announced to agree with Perdue Farms and Human Resources, Staff Management Solutions LLC and SMX LLC due to punishments in connection with violations of child labor. The Ministry of Labor had investigated Perdue and the HR to employ children “in dangerous professions in the accomac facility to process chicken and other products with devices such as electrical knives and heat sealing. Employers also allowed the children to work after 7 p.m. during a regular school week. “
Child illegally employed by the Packers Sanitation Services in Wisconsin in a case in Perdue Farms [Photo: Department of Labor]
The agreement stipulates that Perdue pays an overall resistance of $ 4 million in order to support between “the children, organizations that are committed to victims of child labor and support additional work to prevent child labor”. Perdue also pays a civil penalty of $ 150,000. Nobody is charged criminal. According to Forbes, Perdue Farms recorded sales of 10.3 billion US dollars in 2024.
In response to the investigation into child labor and the exposure of the obvious violations of the great industries, the legal rights of the lawyers with scrap protection against the employment of children proceed.
In 2023, Iowa passed laws that allowed children from the age of 16 to work in industries that were previously only over 18 years old for adults. This includes production and restaurants that serve alcohol. The law also enables 16-year-old to work for a long time and eliminates the restrictions of the number of hours that students can work during school. The IOWA legislation is currently promoting a new law that would reduce the punishment for companies that violate the child working law of a maximum of 10,000 US dollars to only $ 2,500.
At the beginning of the new year, changes to the children's work laws in Indiana also came into force. Now the state has no limits to how late 16- and 17-year-olds can work, and there are no regulations for work during school. The law also grants exceptions for child labor for children aged 14 who broke off the school in order to work full -time.
The abolition of the children's work law proposed by McCormick only leads to the increased exploitation of impoverished children who are forced to give up basic education so that they can work to support themselves and support their families. It goes hand in hand with the malignant attack on immigrants who aims to share workers and create a climate of terror, which facilitates brutal exploitation of the entire working class.
The fight against child labor was central to the fights of the American workers' movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Laws that prohibit the attitude of children were obtained by the working class in highly contested battles and strikes, in most cases by socialists.
As early as 1869, the knights of the work, one of the first workers' organizations in the United States, took over to his program. Such demands were also taken over by the American Socialist Party, the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the industrial workers of the world (IWW).
Mary Harri's “Mother” Jones, member and work organizer of Labor organizer, organized the “March of the Mill Children”, Mary Harris “Mother” in 1903. Do you want to go to school, not the mines! ”
During the textile strike from 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, led by the IWW, over 30,000 million workers strike against practically every factory in the city. The strike was nothing less than a struggle with workers who were opposite the state militia armed with bayonets.
After a few weeks, the IWW manager “Big Bill” Haywood organized the children of the Lawrence workers, many of them, to send supporters outside the city. When the hungry children flown out of the trains and the miserable treatment of workers in Lawrence became known, an immense amount of support from other employees flowed into the city to maintain the strike.
In one case, the police and militia forces attempted to prevent additional children from attacking the group of women and children with clubs and being injured. Some women were thrown into prison cells while wearing their babies.
Striking Lawrence workers send their children to live with supporters in other cities. [Photo: Library of Congress]
The support for the Lawrence strike spread far beyond the borders of the United States, whereby the workers in Sweden and France refused to unload mill products. In Rome, the workers protested from the US consulate.
The Russian revolution inspired millions all over the world and in the United States and encouraged the semi-support factory professions and general strikes that established the mass unions of the congress of the industrial organizations (CIO).
The ruling class feared an “American October” and made a tactical withdrawal from the mass movement of workers and granted limited reforms. It was not until 1938, according to Roosevelt's law on fair work standards in Roosevelt, would a federal ban on child labor. Even then, the law provided for significant exceptions, especially in agriculture. Today, the agricultural industry remains one of the largest employers of children approved by the law. Young people with a migration background in the fields are among the most exploited workers.
Today, the ruling class is of the opinion that they can stop the democratic and social gains that generations gained through bitter class struggle. In order to prevent Trump and his ILK from removing these rights, the workers have to unite independently of the breed or ethnic background and mobilize their collective strength.
This requires to free yourself from the union's bureaucracies that offer all its services for Trump's government of oligarchs and fascists and build up rankless committees that workers themselves in every factory, school, in the neighborhood and in every work Workplace can be checked. Today's task is to build the International Workers Alliance of Rang-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and prepare the working class for the upcoming battles.
The worldwide socialist website is the voice of the working class and the management of the international socialist movement. We rely exclusively on the support of our readers. Please donate today!