San Antonio labor leader Emma Tenayuca’s efforts helped usher in U.S. child labor rules. We should honor her by fighting to keep them in place.Earlier this year, San Antonio's newly elected and proudly middle-of-the-road Mayor Ron Nirenberg dedicated a street to a card-carrying communist.
"The Tenayuca woman is a paid agitator sent here to stir up trouble," Police Chief Owen Kilday testified at her trial., Cevallos Street from Interstate 35 to Probandt Street is now designated Emma Tenayuca Memorial Way. This for a blacklisted radical who ran on the Communist Party ticket for the U.S. House and won 76 votes of the 56,000 cast.
In contrast to her run for office, Tenayuca's strike was a success, and a year later, it proved instrumental in Congress' passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which, at long last, banned child labor in the United States.
Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have arrived on our country's doorstep unaccompanied and, as the, thousands have been exploited in grueling jobs, from working overnight cleaning animal guts off the floors of abattoirs to replacing roofs under the sweltering sun to operating heavy machinery. All in flagrant violation of the child labor laws we thought settled.