Child Labor

A McDonald's franchise owner in Baltimore County must pay nearly $30,500 in back wages and child labor penalties because he failed to pay overtime and broke child labor laws, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The department reported that Bill Taylor, president of B&D Taylor Inc., which owns the McDonald's on Sweet Air Road in Phoenix, has paid $20,502.05 in back wages to five workers, two of whom are still in his employ. The workers were not compensated for overtime hours, federal officials said.

A McDonald's franchise owner in Baltimore County must pay nearly $30,500 in back wages and child labor penalties because he failed to pay overtime and broke child labor laws, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The department reported that Bill Taylor, president of B&D Taylor Inc., which owns the McDonald's on Sweet Air Road in Phoenix, has paid $20,502.05 in back wages to five workers, two of whom are still in his employ. The workers were not compensated for overtime hours, federal officials said.

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Some things have changed as Turkey has moved from Third World country to the makings of a powerful industrial economy, banging on the gates of Europe as surely as did the armies of the Ottomans 300 years ago.The last time I was here you'd sit in a restaurant by the Bosporus and as you finished them off you'd throw your empty wine bottles out the open window into the fast-moving current. Things are tidier now.Tidier, too, is the child-labor situation. There are health and welfare safeguards that did not exist on my last visit.

Catherine Myers, a retired paint laboratory technician whom Nazi soldiers forced to work at a labor camp during World War II, died of heart disease in her sleep Monday at Locust Lodge in Riviera Beach. The Pasadena resident was 77. Born Katarzyna Prokopczyk, she was raised in a village about 25 miles outside Pinsk, Poland. She lived in a log cabin lighted by a kerosene lamp and heated by a wood stove. By the time she was 8, she was learning Russian in her village school as Soviet soldiers were beginning to occupy Poland.

The U.S. Department of Labor said yesterday that it is assessing a $14,100 fine against a Chestertown poultry processing plant for child labor violations.Mark L. Fisher, president of Chestertown Foods Inc., said the plant had not violated any rules and would appeal the fine to an administrative hearing. "We followed all applicable hiring practices, including requiring identification," he said.The Labor Department cited Chestertown Foods for 24 violations, involving hiring nine workers ages 13 to 15 years.

The Howard County Friends of Central America and the Caribbean will sponsor a meeting and potluck dinner at 7 p.m. Friday at Wilde Lake Interfaith Center.The meeting will focus on the use of child labor in Central America for the benefit of the United States garment industry.Speakers include Judith Yanira Viera of El Salvador; Claudia Leticia Molina of Honduras, and Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee in Central America.The labor committee is sponsoring a national tour by Ms. Viera and Ms. Molina.

U.S. Labor Department crackdowns on child labor violations and an expanding pool of unemployed older workers have caused many restaurants in Maryland and around the country to stop hiring youths under age 16.Meanwhile, child labor violations in the food service industry are likely to continue until antiquated federal laws are changed, restaurant operators admit.Under federal law, 14- and 15-year-olds can work only 18 hours a week and have to stop work at 7 p.m. -- the middle of the busy dinner period -- during the school year.

NEW YORK -- Behind a cramped and noisy garment shop, sandwiched between old three-decker homes in a section of Queens, 9-year-old Guang Jiang is spending his day hunched over a work bench helping his father stitch women's dresses together.He is being paid 25 cents an hour."My son comes to the factory to help me count the garment material," his father, Kong Jiang, told a state garment industry inspector. Said the boy, in newly learned English: "I just come to work when my father tell me to do so, to make easy for my father to work faster."

THERE WAS a time when all children worked from an early age, whether around the hearth or in the fields. But after reformers attacked the worst excesses of the Industrial Age, when less fortunate children were forced into factory work and other unsuitable jobs, governments in developed countries passed laws to make sure that their young people were at school, not at work.Despite a consensus in much of the world that childhood should be reserved for schooling and that children should be spared the burdens of wage-earning, a recent report from the International Labor Organization highlights the persistence of the problem.

After four days of sweeps by federal inspectors earlier this year, the Labor Department has fined 43 Maryland employers more than $45,000 for child labor law violations involving nearly 200 minors.Violations were found at 40 percent of the 110 establishments checked, virtually all of them in food service and sales, the agency reported.Most of the alleged violations involved 14- and 15-year-olds who worked too many hours or too late at night. Federal law limits them to 18 hours weekly during the school year, working no later than 7 p.m.; they may work 40 hours a week during vacation.

Just when Americans thought they had seen it all when it comes to reality television, CBS has come up with a humdinger: Kid Nation. For 40 days in April and May, CBS sent 40 children, ages 8 to 15, to a former ghost town in New Mexico to build a society from scratch. With no access to their parents, not even by telephone, the children set up their own government, laws and society in front of reality television cameras. But CBS, the network that got the reality ball rolling in 2000 with Survivor, had more in mind when it decided to run this social experiment of sorts.

Nike Inc., once a principal target of activists protesting the use of sweatshop labor, has been pardoned by investment firms that screen companies for their social and environmental records. The Bethesda-based Calvert Group mutual fund company announced yesterday that Nike now meets its standards for being a good corporate citizen. KLD Research & Analytics Inc., a Boston firm that provides research to institutional investors, also determined earlier this summer that Nike has become an acceptable investment for the socially conscious.

Robin S. Biddison, a former high school teacher who worked to protect children from labor abuse in the Depression era, died of heart failure Thursday at the Edenwald retirement community in Towson, where she resided for the past 11 years. The former Belvedere Square resident was 95. Born Robin Smith in Reading, Pa., and raised in Wyomissing, Pa., she was a 1929 graduate of Goucher College, where she earned a liberal arts degree and belonged to Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority. In 1930, she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation traveling fellowship in vocational guidance.

Though most of the University of Baltimore graduates seated before him yesterday were receiving degrees from the Merrick School of Business - and probably hoping for good management positions as a result - John J. Sweeney put in a plug for working for a union. "We pay real money for real work," the president of the AFL-CIO told a commencement gathering at the Lyric Opera House. "But I can assure you the psychic income that comes from making a real difference is worth much more than the money."

THERE WAS a time when all children worked from an early age, whether around the hearth or in the fields. But after reformers attacked the worst excesses of the Industrial Age, when less fortunate children were forced into factory work and other unsuitable jobs, governments in developed countries passed laws to make sure that their young people were at school, not at work.Despite a consensus in much of the world that childhood should be reserved for schooling and that children should be spared the burdens of wage-earning, a recent report from the International Labor Organization highlights the persistence of the problem.

Child labor reformA picture is worth a thousand words, so learn a little bit of history through the photographs at the Hagley Museum's exhibition titled "Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine's Crusade Against Child Labor." The exhibit will run from Saturday through Aug. 23 in the museum's Henry Clay Mill Gallery. The photographs were part of a project sponsored by the National Child Labor Committee in 1906 to document the harsh working conditions of children in this country.The Hagley Museum is on Route 141 in Wilmington, Del. The exhibit is open from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission for the exhibit is $4 for adults; $2 for children ages 6-14 and free for children under 6. Admission to the 235-acre museum is $9.75 for adults; $7.50 for students and seniors; $3.50 children ages 6-14 and free for children under 6 years of age. For more information, call 302-658-2400 or visit Hagley's Web site at http:/www.

AS KATHIE LEE GIFFORD tells it, a few weeks ago she was merely a talk-show entertainer and guilt-free celebrity endorser of products and services. Now, she says, she is chastened but eager to contribute to the fight to stamp out child labor around the world.Ms. Gifford's awakening came rather harshly, after negative publicity -- that dreaded bane of endorsers -- revealed that her line of clothing was being manufactured in sweat shops using child labor in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and New York City.

SEWAPURI, India -- As the summer sun labored toward the desiccated plains of northern India, Amarnath Kumar, a straw-thin 10-year-old boy, and three friends crept away from the red adobe hut that had been their prison for 18 months. Across the blistered soil of fallow wheat fields, the boys hurried north, avoiding other people, hurrying into the descending darkness.Behind them, in the adobe enclosure, they left other children -- children bought or stolen from their parents, taken to toil as virtual slaves on the carpet looms of eastern Uttar Pradesh.

The U.S. Department of Labor said yesterday that it is assessing a $14,100 fine against a Chestertown poultry processing plant for child labor violations.Mark L. Fisher, president of Chestertown Foods Inc., said the plant had not violated any rules and would appeal the fine to an administrative hearing. "We followed all applicable hiring practices, including requiring identification," he said.The Labor Department cited Chestertown Foods for 24 violations, involving hiring nine workers ages 13 to 15 years.

WASHINGTON -- For decades, America's labor leaders had a ''foreign policy'' of virulent opposition to global communism. Today their number-one target is global capitalism, and they have begun an effort to counter the power of multinational corporations.AFL-CIO president John Sweeney charges that the multinationals ''scour the globe in search of places where working people have low wages and no rights.'' Fear of a job exodus to such places was the underlying reason for union opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.