Child labor at the Bee

It’s many kids’ first job, and an all- American scene: the paperboy picks up a newspaper from the wire basket at the front of his bicycle. Smiling, he chucks a paper at Mr. Wilson’s doorstep, knocking a coffee cup out of the man’s hand as he continues on his journey without noticing.

But peering through her bedroom window at 5 in the morning, a Sacramento Bee subscriber (who chooses to remain anonymous for personal reasons) doesn’t see Dennis the Menace; she sees a Hmong family, a mother and her four small children who appear to be between the ages of 4 and 7.

It’s illegal for children that young to work, even with their parents’ permission. The minimum legal age for delivering newspapers is 12 years old, according to California Labor Code Section 1298, which governs those minors working in connection with selling or distributing newspapers, magazines, periodicals or circulars.

“I couldn’t believe the children were that young,” the subscriber said.

These carriers on McDonald Street are even younger than permitted by the already permissive laws protecting child carriers. While 14 years old is the minimum age for employment outside of school hours, children under 14 are allowed to perform “independent contractor” services including newspaper delivery, household cleaning, babysitting, snow shoveling and yard work.

The Bee subscriber called her concerns to Connie Coan, the Bee’s circulation manager for that district. With three repeated telephone complaints to Coan, the Bee subscriber said she received varying responses.

Coan’s first explanation was the unavailability of babysitters during the early morning hours. After a second complaint, Coan explained that the children were members of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet. While California laws may prohibit the children from working, their family did not have the luxury of following them. With the third phone call, Coan reportedly justified the children’s labor by saying that the children enjoyed the work.

Yet whatever the reason was for skirting child labor laws, Coan made it clear that it isn’t the Bee’s problem. She explained that the Bee’s carriers were not employees of the paper, but rather self-employed businessmen and women. The Bee’s contractors are 18 or older, unless they have signed parental consent. Hence the independent contractors hire the child labor, and not the Bee.

“There’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it,” Coan said. “If you give your papers to an independent contractor, you’re done with it. You have no idea who’s delivering those papers.”

Yet the Bee can’t absolve itself of responsibility quite so easily, particularly after being made aware of these underaged subcontractors. Labor Code Section 1299 requires any person who is either a direct or indirect employer of a minor to keep a copy of his or her work permit on file.

“Clearly, if the accusations against the Bee are true, what they’re doing is not legal,” said Susan Gard, the spokeswoman for the California Department of Industrial Relations. “The Bee is supposed to have their work permits on file.”

But carriers are given wide latitude in carrying out their business, making it difficult to enforce the labor code. Because the Bee cannot follow each of its carriers through their paper routes, the newspaper cannot be sure of how their contractors conduct their work. Although the Bee expects them to comply with all applicable laws, they cannot be aware of every case in which someone is violating those laws. Yet when Coan received a phone call from the disturbed Bee subscriber, she was not surprised to hear the complaint concerning the four child carriers.

“Why would I be surprised?” Coan told SN&R. “But I don’t think they’re as young as she [the Bee subscriber] says. They’re just really small.”

Ultimately, the McDonald Street subscriber’s complaints did apparently result in the family being removed from the route, at least temporarily. Bee circulation director Scott Nielsen confirmed that the complaints prompted him to talk to the family about labor laws, and the subscriber said there’s now a new delivery person.

Yet the change appears to be sparked more by public relations concerns than those involving legal liability, because officials with both the Bee and the state say the “independent contractor” status of the carriers allows the paper to essentially absolve itself of responsibility for who ultimately tosses the paper onto people’s doorsteps.

“If it’s a subcontractor, the Sacramento Bee probably would not be held responsible in a legal proceeding,” Gard said, “aside from the ethical and moral issues that a reputable news organization like the Sacramento Bee would allow young children to work for them. That’s more of a public relations issue, although clearly they are required to have the children’s permits on file.”

But what happens if one of these kids gets into an accident?

“They’re running through the street where they could get hit,” the Bee subscriber said.

California has very high workers’ compensation premium rates for newspaper carriers, which suggests that there have been many injuries, said Marc Linder, who teaches labor law at the University of Iowa and has written scholarly articles on child labor in newspaper delivery.

According to Linder’s research, injury rates among the nation’s newspaper carriers aren’t tracked, but incomplete data reveal that from 1992 to 1997, 99 news vendors were killed on the job, 11 of them younger than 18. People must be at least 18 years old before they can work in hazardous occupations. Despite Linder’s statistics, newspaper delivery is not considered one of them.

Historically, newspapers have not been held liable in legal proceedings for work-related accidents suffered by their news carriers. While the case doesn’t set a legal precedent for California, in 1993, 13-year-old Stephen Johnson was seriously injured by a truck while delivering the Dubois Courier. Pennsylvania appellate judges ruled in Johnson v. Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board that as an independent contractor, Johnson was not protected by workers’ compensation even though the newspaper paid him for every paper he delivered, while subscribers paid the Courier.

Linder finds the implications of such a ruling disturbing: “The assertion that newspapers are delivered by ‘independent contractors’ should be, as a matter of law and social policy, erroneous. They are employees of the newspaper companies.”

The Bee has faced conflict with its readership over the issue of child labor. Since the anonymous Bee subscriber discovered children delivering papers to her house, she has discontinued her subscription to the Bee.

“We told them that we can’t in good conscience support what they do,” she said. “It’s just too bad they’re the only game in town.”

Since the Bee subscriber placed her complaints, the newspaper has gone into the process of reviewing its current policy to address the issue of child labor, said Steven Weiss, the Bee’s director of marketing and public affairs. He said the paper has taken appropriate action to resolve the matter.

“It has always been our intent that young children not assist in the delivery of our newspaper,” Weiss said.

Two days after the anonymous Bee subscriber received a telephone call from Nielsen informing her about the Bee’s move to end its contractors’ use of child labor, a new carrier appeared in her neighborhood.

Although the Bee replaced its carriers on McDonald Street to appease its subscriber, the newspaper has yet to address the issue on a wider scale. The underage carriers’ work is not just the delivery of papers. It begins before that when the child workers accompany their parents to the Bee’s distribution centers where the newspaper’s contractors fold and load papers into their cars at times when most children are sleeping.

“I see little children at the distribution office all the time,” said Inna Gontsa, a Bee carrier. “But maybe they’re just helping their parents.”

On Sunday, June 30, at the Bee’s Fair Oaks Distribution Center at 4:30 in the morning, a younger version of Dennis the Menace wheels a cart of newspapers to his mother’s car. He loads the back seat until all that is visible in the back windows are rows of black and white print. His mother sits in their white van and sends the blond boy’s brother, even younger than he is, to wheel the cart back into the distribution office while the young Dennis the Menace jumps into the car, ready to begin his paper route.