A major U.S. food sanitation company was fined last week for employing over 100 kids as young as 13 years old

in dangerous jobs cleaning equipment at meatpacking factories. But this fine amounted to a minuscule fraction of the company's profits,

and lawmakers in other states are actually moving to loosen restrictions on child labor,

proving yet again that capitalism's thirst for exploitation,

in fact, knows no limits.

We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded

impossible even a few weeks ago, but is not only realizable, but an imperative necessity. We are very excited to have Professor Richard Wolfe join us again for our regular weekly segment where we talk about the biggest stories related to the economy.

I'm your host, Brian Becker.

The Socialist Program, this program, brings you content

three days a week, thanks to the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash the socialist

program. We appreciate all of your support and encourage you if you're not a patron to become a patron today

if you enjoy listening or rely on this show or both. Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of the

organization Democracy at Work and the author of many books, the latest being the sickness is the

system when capitalism fails to save us from pandemics or itself.

Be sure to check out all of his work at r d wolf.com. That's r d wOLFF.com. Professor wolf,

welcome back. Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. Thank you so much. This story, this development, this new phenomena,

well, not new, this old phenomena coming back with a greater frequency now in the United States.

Child labor is a major issue and a major phenomena all over the world, in fact, or most parts of the

world. But we have a labor shortage,

as we've been told by the Federal Reserve over and over again and by the mainstream media.

And the story goes basically like this. Because some number of workers have mysteriously not

re-entered the workforce after COVID. There is a labor shortage,

...