SlowShoe in gray, deletia
It's not the child labor laws, and regular saftey issues that are expensive its the 100's and thousands of permits and ludicrous fee's charged to operate a business.
I'll concede that Big Brother often pokes his nose where it's not needed, but I used child labor laws to illustrate that fact that multinationals favor those Third World workplace environments that either do not have, or do not enforce, child labor laws and similar niceties. Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Indonesia, China, Viet Nam, Pakistan, etc. Think Wranglers, Deltas, Nikes, Hathaway, Milwaukee, and similar stuff.
As it stands a corporation or large company could never use harsh labor or child labor in america this day in age.
Multinationals don't routinely violate child labor laws in the United States, but their use of child labor in other countries is well docµmented. On the other hand, many (most?) multinational service industries operating in America that rely on unskilled labor routinely violate immigration laws by hiring illegal aliens, a practice that increases our trade imbalance, takes jobs away from American citizens, and erodes our tax base. Congress could stem the flood of illegal aliens tomorrow by making it a felony to hire anyone without a valid social security card - but, that'll never happen because that would adversely affect the bottom line of many multinational corporations that depend on cheap labor with no benefits.
The population would not stand for it regardless of laws. What these laws in fact do is keep a responsible 13 year old kid from getting an after school or summer job down at the feed store or the like.
Around here, any kid who wants to work, can work. It's hay season and everybody is shorthanded. Agricultural is a different deal.
No wonder a lot of kids have nothing to do these days and have seem to have not much of a sense of responsibility.
Hot damn, we've found common ground! I think the fellow who invented handheld video games oughta be drawn and quartered and his head hung on a pike at the city gates. Damn, but I hate them things! One of my grandurchins brought one to our place; alas, the game is no longer functional.
As for government action for the good of the public. Give them an inch they will take you and your neighbors land and give it to a hotel. Just ask those in New London CT.
I don't need to go up Nawth to find an example of that particular kind of robbery, the city fathers in Freeport, Texas are trying to use eminent domain to condemn private waterfront property (a cannery) in order to sell it for development (condos), thereby increasing the city's tax base. However, I had in mind the kinds of laws that protect the citizenry from businesses who want to dump their toxic waste upstream from the water supply and similar corporate sins - I can think of quite a few well-publicized examples here in Texas - the lack of fail safe procedures that led to the explosion at the BP plant in Pasadena, the only underwater Superfund site, a gift from the folks at Formosa Plastics, the many Superfund sites that exist in and around Houston, courtesy the oil bidness, etc.
Multinational corporations have been kinda hard on America, especially here in Texas.