Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children | Hacker News Reader

Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

washingtonpost.com

47 pointsmirthlessend115 comments

As I was reading TFA, I tried not to let my cynicism dictate my theory on why these looser child labor restrictions are being pushed so hard lately. But then we get this gem:

Supporters, meanwhile, have cheered the legislation as a potential solution to workforce shortages and rising labor costs.

Yup, all that talk about "work ethic" is just bullshit. Plus their little hands make it easier to get the coal out.

Yeah. I was maintaining a similar level of neutrality until I hit this line.

> The measure — championed by conservative lobbying groups, the state restaurant association and the state industry group for home builders, among others

Iowan here, this is actually a long-running talking point. Prior to the pandemic, Iowa was experiencing "full employment" with a 2.5% unemployment rate, which was among the lowest in the country prior to the pandemic spike. Some amount of churn is actually desirable as it means that employers can grow their operations and employees are finding opportunities. However, businesses in the manufacturing, agricultural, and service sectors were getting throttled by headcount.

There was a lot of discussion about getting SAHMs to re-enter, and how to get incentivize hiring disabled people, and stuff like that.

In the post-pandemic era our news cycle got captured by pandemic entitlement discussion, but ultimately this and measures like it was always going to be what Iowa's "return to normal" would end up looking like.

Notably off the table is how to get kids to go to school here and stay here. Currently they are going to school out of state and leaving the state. It seems like we will do anything except make the state more desirable to live in.

& quite frankly the politics here were only tolerable because the state used to be reliably purple, and we are swinging in a direction I do not really care for. My employer has offices in minnesota and I have been thinking of trying to transfer northwards for awhile now.

so is this an issue Iowans are concerned about or is this a synthetic issue that corporations are astroturfing? I can't see it being a very high priority imo even though I am sympathetic to 14 yr olds who want money.

It is a real issue and not just repealing labor laws for funsies.

There are too many predators and not enough prey in the ecosystem. Either we need to accept that some of the businesses will starve or find a way to increase the labor force.

If a business is so terrible that it needs to hire children "to survive" it seems obvious to me it should be destroyed.

Maybe they should pay more. That's usually the way to attract workers.

I can't speak for Iowans but it looks very close to what has happened in my home state of Montana. That is, the Republican party has very successfully bonded a functional plurality to itself mostly via the culture war. In Montana this isn't just about your wedge issues like abortion. Particularly there's a long standing animice towards people who move there from California. This goes back to the 90s, long before it became an internet meme. Californians serve as an abstract outgroup that a pundits can pin any absurd or unpopular cultural issue on whilst creating a contrast to "real Montanans" whose character and interests conveniently align with all the pundit's favorite policies. For many of the voters in this plurality, what goes on on the business side is secondary to these culture war and identitarian issues.

This is compounded over time because as the empowered business interest of the party break down the social programs which were the product of a historic culture of community and combination, voters endure real deprivation and feel the pressure and anxiety from that deprivation. But instead of turning against the party and the business interests, they again find their antagonist in the culture. That is, everything has become so expensive and hostile and competitive not because of the growth of financialization and creeping capital but because of a decline in character.

These people are so saturated with culture issues that they cannot see how the very thing they are in bond with, business, is destroying the things they claim to care most about: families, communities and generosity. I am not being condescending when I say that they find themselves able to blaim skyrocketing medical costs on the fact that you cannot pay a doctor in eggs and butter anymore. (Something almost none of them ever did btw. Even in Montana that was a thing of the past by their time. But I have literally heard this argument and many of a similar for. on trips to my home state.)

> These people are so saturated with culture issues that they cannot see how the very thing they are in bond with, business, is destroying the things they claim to care most about: families, communities and generosity.

It's worth noting that's the whole point of these wars -- to keep people divided and riled up so they ignore other issues.

> Notably off the table is how to get kids to go to school here and stay here.

Ah, so the plan is to put the 16/17 year olds in the workplace because they're too young to live independently and leave the state.

Regarding schools you have both the university of Iowa and Iowa state. I feel like those are both good schools, I had a family member go to Iowa state's PHD program and it was one of their top choices(for their profession).

As for letting children(teenagers in this case) work earlier(and longer) I feel conflicted. In some sense the mantra that has been pushed on the past 2-3 generations has been everyone has to get a college degree or you will be considered a failure to society. That statement has been categorically wrong and has lead to a glut of people with college degrees and mountains of student loan debt from an imbalance in the workforce of too many college educated workers. The reality is the economy needs blue collar jobs and some do pay very well. Also some people are not cut out for college and pushing them into a institution they do not want to attend is bad for both the college and the individual. I feel like Germany has this problem figured out well with solid paths to high paying blue collar professions via apprenticeships and such. I wish the US had something similar and Obama's push for community colleges was a step in the right direction. Getting teenagers into blue collar apprenticeships gives them a head start in their careers and they still need parental approval for starting these jobs.

That being said there is also a trap that having a 14-16 year make pretty good money in high school (via trades or apprenticeships) can dissuade them from ever getting into college, which they may excel at but never go that route due to financial loss of lost wages by attending college(and not working). Unsure what the solution is here but could see this change of law being abused by some and helpful for others(those who are headed for a blue collar profession).

> a trap that having a 14-16 year make pretty good money in high school (via trades or apprenticeships) can dissuade them from ever getting into college

Or have their parents dissuade them from ever getting into college. I think you could make a strong argument that the minimum full-time work age should be no lower than the age of being legally independent of the family.

The hybrid solution, which is very rarely seen, is a proper apprenticeship system where people are (a) doing real work and (b) continuing to learn during the process, but that is hard to organize.

I would also like to mention the UK briefly had the Education Mainenance Allowance, which was paid to kids 16-18 to give them an immediate economic incentive to stay in school.

Working a crappy service job as a teenager is actually more motivation for going to college than not. And some of our parents didn’t give us much after 15, you need to do something to get out of that single wide trailer as soon as possible.

16- and 17-year-olds can work and allows them to serve alcohol

Teens don't really have smaller hands than adults. This bill is sane. Allowing kids to work for construction is going to improve lives more than blindly pushing everyone regardless of desire or aptitude in college and graduating them with a worthless degree and a half mil in debt. Let teens work in roofing and get some skills that the world actually needs.

Give me a rational argument please, not just an appeal to emotion.

16 and 17 year olds have even less of a risk assessment capacity than 18 year olds (worth noting that this faculty fully matures by around 25), but jobs where bad decisions have more impact aren't the place for people new to the workforce to cut their teeth; there's too much risk not just to themselves (which we're disregarding here; people should be fine making whatever stupid decision they want) but to the people around them.

Start them off doing jobs that have responsibility but less consequence. Then progressively ramp up the responsibility and accountability as they grasp it.

That's your rational argument.

> which we're disregarding here; people should be fine making whatever stupid decision they want

The entire reason the concept of “minors” exists is a social judgement that this rule has only limited applicability to people below a certain age.

A country that allows kids to climb on roofs five years before they're considered mature enough to drink alcohol needs to have another look at how it does risk assessment.

Well they certainly shouldn't be climbing on roofs drunk.

The bill bans children from working on roofs, it just allows them to work for roofing capacities.

I do not believe any rational argument will appease. Risk can be objectively measured but people vote their feelings. This bill is being used to avoid raising wages to draw adult labor into the state's marketplace for manufacturing, agriculture, and other objectively higher risk industries. These young workers will be harmed, and they will have no recourse (as typically happens in America).

> Risk can be objectively measured but people vote their feelings

Having done cybersecurtity at a few F500s, I can tell you that risk is often just as "feelings" based as anything else.

In most cases risk is a WAG based on whatever model you feel like flogging this week.

Here's a rational argument. Roofing in particular is one of the most dangerous, demanding and environmentally harsh trades in the construction industry. Just as there is an age below which most children's bodies are not ready to begin heavy weight lifting, there is an age below which most children's bodies are not prepared to handle roofing.

The bill blocks all children from working on roofs, it just allows 17 and 18 year olds to work for roofing companies in other capacities. Prior to this amendment, roofing companies could do no hiring in any capacity. Does the bill seem more reasonable now?

As soon as you realize this will "allow" many parents to force their children to work at 14 years old, no it doesn't seem reasonable.

That aspect does. Yes.

Odds are really good that they'll be pressured to work on roofs and the employer will say "Well, they volunteered. I don't how old they are. Am I supposed to card all my employees?"

Since teens are not necessarily fully developed mentally etc. will there be a way to categorize different construction businesses to keep the more dangerous types of work from being open to people who might not think things through.

Just thinking about the places I've worked where people died from dumb decisions, but that's probably overly emotional.

> parent has granted permission for the work

The bill itself touches lightly on the problem: parents. One massive example of a potential problem: does the bill protect education at all? The kids learning skills that can make them money is really a fringe benefit when you consider how much money their parents can make. Win, win, for all!

does the bill protect education at all?

Of course it does. The vilification of the bill entirely based on the worse case assumptions is really unfortunate.

---

No person under fourteen years of age shall be employed or permitted to work with or without compensation in any work activity.

No person under sixteen years of age shall be employed or permitted to work with or without compensation in any work activity during regular school hours, except the following work activities:

1. Those persons legally out of school, if such status is verified by the submission of written proof to the director.

2. Those persons working in a supervised school-work program.

3. Those persons between the ages of fourteen and sixteen enrolled in school on a part-time basis and who are required to work as a part of their school training.

---

Knowing that there are educational protections, does that make you feel better about the bill?

You probably don't want to use roofing as an example, it's one of the most dangerous jobs out there. I think not wanting to build an economy on piles of shattered 16-17 year old bodies.

The "allowing" someone to work is not a problem, when that choice is made in a free and voluntary manner. Rather the fundamental problem is the economic feedback loop that gradually turns "allowed" into "required". Women entering the workforce was most certainly an advancement for freedom and equality. But as the labor and economic laws weren't adjusted to compensate, it did have the effect of making the standard of full time household employment jump from 40 hours a week to 80.

Also there is a huge difference between a kid working with their family providing age-appropriate supervision (which can be done under the table regardless of this bill), and being left to the care of a stranger that's just following economic incentives. I could use most woodworking tools by age 12 under loose supervision, but that doesn't mean it would have been appropriate for me to work in a furniture shop.

And I don't know if you could have picked a worse example than roofing. There's just a basic level of competence one needs to maintain on heights and slopes. And it's basically a recipe for chest-thumping foremen rejecting fall protection and shaming the underlings into doing the same. At least silicosis doesn't show up for decades, unlike a fall from height.

I mean, I would argue you're not making a rational argument here.

> Allowing kids to work for construction is going to improve lives more than blindly pushing everyone regardless of desire or aptitude in college and graduating them with a worthless degree and a half mil in debt.

That's pretty vivid imagery for someone who doesn't want an appeal to emotion. It even has "won't someone think of the children" vibes.

The arguments against this are that we've litigated it in the 1920s and discovered that child labor = exploited labor. Children have less volition than adults and so we're putting them into a vulnerable position by including them in an adversarial relationship of negotiating for pay/work. I'm not saying kids have to go to college to make a living (at the moment that seems clearly unnecessary). But why shouldn't kids go to a trade school to learn in a safer environment, instead of being at risk in on-the-job learning in dangerous environments?

Also there are other pieces of school that are more fundamental to day-to-day life than college. I learned a significant portion of my communication skills in high school. Are you okay with kids missing out on high school in order to take a job? That feels like it is likely to severely limit their ability to get other work later in life if they should ever lose that one skill they learned. "Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one." The whole point of school is to get a broad base of skills that you can apply to multiple situations. Any work kids would do in their formative years has the potential to undermine this by competing for their time.

A lot of 14-17 year olds would find what you are saying about them very patronizing. It’s like you expect them to go from kids to adults the night the minute 18? I learned how to use a band saw in shop class when I was in 8th grade. Now we don’t even let kids ride the bus alone until they turn 18.

Not all kids are challenged by high school. I was working full time my junior and senior years while taking physics 1 and 2 as well as pre calc and calculus. Really, it didn’t have much to offer me, I would have been really bored if not allowed to work. It’s weird because I had to cut back after 18, turns out college isn’t as easy as high school even though there is a lot less class time.

We don't need to wait around for robots if kids can do all that.

I was almost 18 when Washington state passed stricter labor laws for 16-17 year olds, and I was actually really pissed for those couple of months that I had to deal with it. You know, I was almost an adult at that point, I was doing great in school, on my way to university, and…I have to cut back on work because some Karen thought they knew what was better for me?!

Anyways, seeing it from the perspective of being that teenager once, I can sympathize with these roll backs. And I don’t want to become a new Karen to today’s teenagers.

In 18th century London children were disposable labor: like cheaper, less durable horses. Children as young as 5 would work in match factories, dipping matchsticks into boiling sulfur by hand. Their lungs dissolved after a while, but then the factory owner didn’t pay their parents much for them anyway.

Young children were the best chimney sweeps, too. London chimneys were a fucking mess, of course, built up rapidly and with no building codes. Little children could crawl around inside them more easily to clean them. Sometimes a child would get irretrievably stuck, but them it was easy enough to light the furnace to burn them out.

Western culture decide a long fucking time ago that the job of children is to educate themselves so they can be productive members of society. As our society gets more technological, the base level of education required to participate grows higher. This type of bullshit is going _the wrong direction_.

And let’s be clear — this is purely a play for corporate profits. There is no other motivation; everything else people say about it is bullshit.

Let's admit it: The real issue, here, is that after fighting so hard to push out migrant labour, there's now a cheap labour shortage, and instead of fixing the migrant labour system to be fair, equitable, transparent, and sustainable, they're opting for child labour instead because, hey, at least they're good, red-blooded American child labourers.

The primary defensible part of the narrative for cracking down on migrant labor was that it was lowering wages across the board. So wages going up should be celebrated as a good thing, and the same people pushing for immigration reform should be fighting these changes. Alas.

Most of the people pushing hardest for immigration reform aren't doing it because they believe it lowers wages...

It's 2023, people, and I can't believe we're even having this debate. Seriously? Farmers working with their kids and teenagers learning trades is a clear violation of child labor laws. Kids need to be playing Fortnite and learning about baby sharks. And teenagers need to learn to spend their entire waking life indoors studying compliance with authority and status games, so corporations can have a steady supply of standardized and malleable human resources to draw from.

This isn't up for discussion. Period. Let that sink in: our society is allowing this local exploitation to continue, when that's the international market's job.

It's about time we take a stand against this blatant disregard for the law. I mean, it's plain and simple: we need to protect our children from being forced into labor by their families and local community members so that corporations can do it several years later, no questions asked. Do better, farmers and tradesmen – it's your responsibility to ensure your kids have a safe and happy childhood, locked inside public schools during business hours, not one filled with hands-on labor and universally in-demand skills.

No contest. When you involve your kids in farm or trade work, you're robbing them of their opportunity to be exploited down the line by Fortune 500 companies, and that's just unacceptable.

Hands down, we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen in our own backyards. Full stop. It's high time we demand change, and make sure our children's rights are protected, no ifs, ands, or buts. They deserve the right to have a futile white-collar unionization fight with megafirms so that they can truly be a part of our global economy. To do anything else is retrograde barbarism. Period.

There was that famous Unicef report about the child labor sweatshop in Bangladesh that closed down and most of the children went to work in the sex trade.

Regardless of how common that actually is, it seems pretty logical to me that if people are desperate enough for work, it's only because all of their other options were worse.

So while I think laws played an important part in ending chimney sweeps and the like, they only worked because enough middle class people started having fewer kids and enough resources to provide them education.

To put it another way, the need for chimney sweeping didn't magically disappear. First we had to build better chimneys.

Something I have heard said:

Even before Westerners hear of the deplorable conditions in the third world sweatshop and demand the international corporation do better, locals are lined up down the street and around the corner hoping for a job because they beat you half as much and pay you twice as much as local employers.

Here's another take:

> The Iowa bill would expand the number of hours that children under 16 can work from four to six a day, allow minors to work in previously prohibited industries if they are part of a training program, and allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol with a parent’s permission.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/iowa-senate-...

This doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as the Washington Post is making it out to be.

Does anyone have a link to the actual bill? I only found articles talking about it and nothing on what it actually says.

The more you read the washington post the more you will know things that aren't true.

Here is the bill the Senate passed on April 18: https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ga=90&ba=sf5...

It contains a lot of stuff that allows (relatively young) children to work in factories, industrial laundries and meat-packing plants. It also has some stuff that isn't really a big deal, which you've picked out. If I give you a sandwich that contains nails, but also some wonderful organic cheese and bread... is that a good sandwich? That's sort of the impression I get from this bill.

The old law said, no one under 18 can work in a meat packing plant, the new law says no one under 18 can be a meat packer. It doesn't put teens to work at dangerous jobs, but allows them opportunity to work in those businesses.

> opportunity

What an odd choice of wording - as if meat packing is some highly desirable industry that children are clamoring to get experience in (even as adults avoid it when they can).

To not consider work opportunity shows a highly elitist attitude. It is an opportunity to have money, to buy food, to help support family, to build a resume, to have peers. You might be too good for blue collar jobs, but they are in fact in demand by adults. 6 million adult have risked their lives and climbed over border fences for these jobs. Not everyone gets to go to Stanford a code for google, but honestly, if more bay area elite tech industry folks had a tough job in high school, they'd be better for it.

and allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol with a parent’s permission

Helloplease? If stuff like that is written into a bill, it's because of a lobbyist - evidently there's a shortage of workers in the hospitality field. How about improving working conditions instead? It's a market, if the offer is good, they'll come!

This is likely the bill, passed two days ago:

https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/LGR/90/SF542.pd...

It is an amended form of a previous bill passed in April (linked by another comment). I noticed that it now clarifies that children under 14 are not permitted to work (previously it was allowed under certain conditions). So, that’s good. 14 and up are allowed to work.

> allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol

But not drink or purchase it? That's the dead giveaway that this isn't for _their_ benefit.

Serving alcohol... ugh. Bartenders already get enough guff from patrons. Imagine a 16yo having to deal with trying to cut somebody off.

Imagine some drunk asshole trying to hit on and harass the 16 year old bartender. I’ve seen it plenty of times minus the 16 year old part.

Whelp. With that visualization I'm done with the internet today.

And you're wholly correct. Just depressing.

you mean welp!

"whelp" means to birth a litter of puppies!

16 year olds can't be bartenders. In most states the person pouring, or opening, the alcoholic beverage has to be a bartender and has to be 18, or in some cases, 21.

They're a waiter, or someone standing at a counter.

Listen, this law sucks, but these points reek of "won't someone think of the children!". They're not working at a bar at 1am, they're waiting tables at the local pizza place and bringing a beer out with the pepsis.

> They're not working at a bar at 1am, they're waiting tables at the local pizza place and bringing a beer out with the pepsis.

That's what you assert, but that's not what the law says.

And I'd love to think that companies would be ethical enough to only ever surface the situation you bring up.

But I'm enough of a realist to know that's not the case.

“Do I want my 16-year-old operating a power saw as a job? No, I don’t“

- then don’t let them? Why do you need to make it illegal for everyone else?

Iowa is mostly a rural state, and growing up on a farm you learn to operate power tools when you’re 10, and there are plenty of 16 year olds in Iowa that are more than capable of running a power saw and working on roofs and are proud to do it. Better than sitting around and playing video games, getting in trouble, or even sports for that matter. IMO more likely to get injured in sports like football than operating a power saw.

Because it's dangerous and a lot of kids have economic pressures that force them to do dangerous jobs they don't choose to do. Sometimes those kids don't have engaged parents or guardians present (many are recent immigrants or migrants) and sometimes their parents/guardians are economically desperate. These laws were created to stop terrible abuse of child labor that took place in this country, seeing them repealed even slightly is very concerning.

>Why do you need to make it illegal for everyone else?

Because 16 and 17 year olds aren't adults and in a position to make that call? Just because a parent might be ok with them operating a saw / take the risks doesn't mean the child should take that risk.

Child labor historically speaking involved parents sending their kids to work.

> then don’t let them? Why do you need to make it illegal for everyone else?

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the history of child labour.

There's an old saying: regulations are written in blood. Unfortunately, it seems some folks have forgotten the history and lessons that brought us to modern labour laws...

This is gonna play out the same way women entering the workforce did. It'll depress wages and the end result will be that a lot of families will need to send their kids off to work as soon as they're old enough just to make ends meet.

I'm fine with kids working, in the context of apprenticeships and other places where they're subject to gentler conditions and reduced workload with an emphasis on skill building. Learn to frame, plumb or wire? Sure. Pouring drinks, cleaning/yardwork/etc, no.

>- then don’t let them? Why do you need to make it illegal for everyone else?

I'm sure my abusive step dad would have liked to make me go get a better paying job then the one he forced me to take at the bar where he gambled illegally so he could steal the money I earned and gamble some more when his ran out. I mean that bar wasn't even full time and it paid hardly anything, if I was operating power tools whooaah. Hell he could have probably had me go work for my uncle with him learning to weld! yay.

>Better than sitting around and playing video games,

and gosh darn it much better than reading books which I did all the time to piss him off.

>IMO more likely to get injured in sports like football than operating a power saw.

Or getting shit thrown at you for reading. Probably better to let those kids go out and get a good paying worker job to help support their struggling families that can barely afford beer and drugs!

> Iowa is mostly a rural state

Iowa isn't mostly a rural state (though I'm sure plenty of Iowans think that way). It's approaching 65-70% urban - not even close to being in the top 10 most rural states in the US.

What is really surprising it that the small towns all over Iowa have excellent urban form. Suburban sprawl is mostly limited to Des Moines, with a little bit in Council Bluffs (part of the Omaha metro area).

Check out the US Census urban area map and notice how many urban areas there are in Iowa (If a city is represented with a dot, it is an urban area of fewer than 10,000 people):

https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/UA20/UA_2020_WallMap...

Iowa is the 12th most rural state according to 2020 US census [1][2]. It is 63.2%, urban, so true it’s not mostly rural in terms of total population, but it’s pretty rural.

[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/State_Urban_Ru...

The 2020 Census was messed up, partly because of Covid and partly due to "politics".

I stand by my assertion that Iowa is the area of 65-70% urban and within a group of states that are in that range. It could just as easily be the 20th most rural state as the 12th. But go back and look at that list - this group of states are significantly more urban than the ~10 most rural states.

Iowa doesn't have a lot of small landholdings outside of the towns/cities. Basically you are either living on a city-sized lot or a 100+ acre farm, with very little in between. So there is definitely the rural identity associated with Iowa, but the population facts paint a very different picture.

You really should take a trip out there and visit some smaller towns. The urbanity will surprise you.

Many people on this site seem in favor of these age-based government restrictions on working. But at the same time, it seems they also opposed age-based government restrictions in many other areas like access to particular kinds of online content. These positions seem like a contradiction to me. Why do they think that it is reasonable for the state to restrict a child's ability to work but not their access to online content?

Because you can’t actually restrict access to online content. Also, “restricting a child’s ability to work” is a funny way of framing a policy goal of keeping children engaged in education instead of being exploited as cheap labor.

This is a strange comparison.

Learning things is good and working is bad. Hope this helps!

I'll just take the other side of the argument.

My family didn't have much money when I was growing up, so the only hope I had for things like a car or a computer or video games was a job. Despite wanting a job desperately, I couldn't get one in our state until I was 16. And even then, I was one of only a handful of teenagers at my school who were able to get one.

And on the job I was a second class citizen. This was your standard burger-flipping fast food restaurant. Yet it was kind of ridiculous the kind of rules and restrictions me and the employer had to follow for me to work there. I was allowed to operate a motor vehicle to drive to work, but once I was there I wasn't allowed to use things like scissors.

More punishing was that there were all sort of hour restrictions on when and how often I could work. So I was denied enough hours to be eligible for health insurance (something I didn't have at the time).

Working as a teenager was entirely and without exception a positive experience for me. It had almost no impact on my schooling (if anything, menial labor made me take school more seriously), it gave me a ton of experience, and it was a huge cash infusion that let me afford a car, save for college, and even have spending money to keep up with my richer peers.

So while I totally understand that we don't want children ripped from classes and forced to defuse landmines at 5c an hour, the comments in this thread are really disheartening to me. A lot of these restrictions were arbitrary BS. I am absolutely in favor of giving kids more responsibility if they want it. Taking away the options for the sake of "their own good" is moralistic pantomime coming from privilege.

> A lot of these restrictions were arbitrary BS.

You say that, now, in a world of modern labour laws that have largely prevented large scale exploitation. In fact, today, the labourers most likely to be exploited are those that fall through the regulatory cracks because, for example, they are illegally in the US.

So it's very easy for you to tell this heartwarming story about your teen years, and claim these regulations are "arbitrary BS" now because, in general, the labour market is safe, fair, and equitable, specifically because those rules exist.

Your position is very much akin to anti-vaxxers saying "why do I need vaccines, diseases aren't a problem!" because they've never lived in a world where communicable diseases regularly killed people.

Edit: And as an aside, the fact that you didn't have health insurance as a teenager, and you conclude that's because you weren't allowed to work enough, as opposed to attributing the issue to a broken system that requires teen labour to ensure one has access to medical coverage, is truly insane to me...

Well, even in your analogy, there would be no point in giving vaccines if the diseases had been eradicated. I haven't had to take a polio vaccine, have you?

I agree with you that we get to live in a society where we are prosperous enough to enjoy safer working environments - I guess I see labor laws as the cart being pulled by the horse here. The fact that working environments are so much better regulated and safe means I think we don't need to pearl clutch so much anymore about younger people wanting to engage with them.

But I don't want to leave this point - the rules were arbitrary. Why is 18 a magical year where you are allowed to train on a forklift? And there is an entire category of work almost none of these laws apply to in the US - agricultural work. I was allowed to drive a tractor on a farm at age 12, but was not allowed to use turn on a deep fryer at 17. These are not very equitable rules - these are rules of convenience.

In an era when we are (supposedly) supposed to be pushing kids back into trades and apprentices, why so much hullabaloo about them not doing enough college prep?

> Well, even in your analogy, there would be no point in giving vaccines if the diseases had been eradicated. I haven't had to take a polio vaccine, have you?

You picked an ironic example given that the polio vaccine is still administered in many parts of the world since, up until about 10 years ago, it was still very much a part of people's lives in some places.

> But I don't want to leave this point - the rules were arbitrary

All laws appear "arbitrary" if you don't know why they were written in the first place.

I invite you to learn about Chesterton's Fence.

> I agree with you that we get to live in a society where we are prosperous enough to enjoy safer working environment

You've got your causation backwards, there.

> The fact that working environments are so much better regulated and safe means I think we don't need to pearl clutch so much anymore about younger people wanting to engage with them.

The entire damn point is there's people tearing down those rules.

> Why is 18 a magical year where you are allowed to train on a forklift? And there is an entire category of work almost none of these laws apply to in the US - agricultural work. I was allowed to drive a tractor on a farm at age 12, but was not allowed to use turn on a deep fryer at 17. These are not very equitable rules - these are rules of convenience.

Sure, because there was a very strong political lobby that worked to ensure labour protections didn't apply to children working on family farms because they wanted cheap labour.

Sound familiar?

In 2019, 14.4 percent of kids in this country, 10.46 million children, were living in poverty as measured by the official U.S poverty rate. This is higher than the share of adults age 18 to 64 (9.4%) and higher than the share of those 65 and over (8.9%) who live in poverty (see chart).

https://econofact.org/child-poverty-in-the-u-s#:~:text=In%20....

For children in poor families, the opportunity to work is the opportunity to have a better life in the present and lay the foundation for a better future.

For people being all "won't you think of the children," most of the time people up on their high horse are all for taking away options from poor people without doing anything to actually address the underlying issues. It almost always amounts to making things worse, not better, for the target demographic.

I'm more of a big picture guy when it comes to this crap. What's the general policy direction here.

OK, I get it. Higher mortality, that's at least consistent with the worldview. I do hope someone's planning to pay ladies dump trucks full of cash to pump out these little workers, because there's some bad news about single income households.

That's even assuming said ladies can convince earners to rent wombs for the dubious honor of chucking genetics into this fantastic new future that's being created.

Anyway, single income households. Huh! An article from the 1980s saying they're ALL subsidized in one way or the other! Look at that old-fashioned typesetting. Not sure how that took everyone by surprise! Oh wait, it didn't take anyone by surprise WHO ISN'T A GODDAMN <1990s MODEM SOUNDS FOR TEN SECONDS>

I guess I found the one thing where our progressive Netherlands is actually more conservative.

I'm from a rural part. 12 year olds drive massive agricultural vehicles here. My friends' son is 14 and doing welding. I personally did side jobs in brick laying, car washing, mushroom plucking and meat processing at the age of 11.

Nobody forced me, I wanted to do it. I paid for my own education, driver's license, partying years and am debt-free.

The generation after me graduates around age 23 and hasn't worked a day in their lives yet want their debt forgiven and feel oppressed.

Yes I'm here to collect downvotes. All of you could use some blue collar energy.

I haven't been to Iowa since the late 1990s, but when I did visit Cedar Rapids I was struck by how nice everyone was. It was like going back to the 1960s: nobody swore, everyone was ridiculously polite, people seemed to have visible respect for engineers and other expert professionals. I'm struggling to reconcile all those nice people in Iowa with a state that is repealing basic child-labor protections.

ETA: sorry, I seem to have offended someone. Not sure if this is off-topic, also not sure what the "HN appropriate" discussion is on this story. It's just depressing.

Maybe because being nice is an important social lubricant but is vastly overrated as a measure of character?

This is just “ Minnesota nice”. Cultural expectations of politeness are not really correlated with any specific ethics. As to the downvotes, you are inadvertently opening a can of political worms around competing values of the coasts and the Midwest.

It is also possible that Iowa has changed; certainly the voting patterns of the state have. I'm not looking for a flame war: I am curious if people who know the state better have things to say about what's going on there, because that would be much more interesting than every other comment in this thread right now.

My honest opinion? Iowa was creepily lacking in any visible diversity. People were polite, but I was traveling through as a straight white married couple. Nebraska, on the other hand, felt outright hostile.

Edit to add, I also know someone who teaches at a university in Iowa and they love it because of the prairie biodiversity.

These aren't basic child labor protections though. These are complex child labor restrictions. we aren't talking about sending Timmy to the mines or the assembly line, we are talking about letting 14 year olds get regular, every day simple low risk jobs, letting 16 year olds be independent if they want.

Any demographers in here?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the baby boomer generation all hitting retirement around now, and the incoming cohort being smaller than the retiring cohort.

Could be that, could be restaurants and construction companies looking for a population that will settle for minimum wage.

A lot of is pandemic moms staying home to deal with kids and older folks that don't want to work public jobs anymore.

A non-trivial amount of folks have died from the pandemic or have some degree of long covid as well.

Meanwhile, large conglomerates use the supply chain scares to arbitrarily raise prices causing real inflation.

At some point, the BS required to do an entry-level / retail job isn't worth it (min wage doesn't pay enough these days), or you're simply incapable of doing what you could before.

Anecdataly, every small town diner I've been to since 2021 has very long waits for food and service and the kids working are family. And they all have that 1000 mile stare towards the cities. Even true for Iowa resort lakes in the summer. Before, HS/college kids fought for $10/hr jobs fueling/loading beer into boats. Now the boats are queued up waiting for the 80 year old proprietor to cart their beer down.

Nobody wants to work anymore. Also it's not like we could just... pay people more for the jobs people don't want to do. That would be too capitalistic for our society.

Haha ok washington post this is why you are dying.

Allow teenagers the option to work more? Oh no we are "rolling back labor protections for children"

Allow teenagers to get sex hormones that will damage them for life? "Trans teens benefit" !

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trans-teens-benefit-...

The washington post is a joke.

I worked in heavy construction and roofing from 14 until I went to college - helped paid for quite a bit of it - I don't see a problem here. Nobody is forced to work, and you need to parents permission.

Washington post thinks it is OK that 12 year olds, are old enough to consent to sex change operations, without their parents permission, but a 17 year old doing hard work with their parents permission is not OK?

> consent to sex change operations, without their parents permission

This doesn't happen and the news sources which say it does are lying to you.

Oregon House Bill 2002 B hasn't passed yet, and sets the age limit at 15 instead of 12, but the rest is accurate - it's not only without their parents' consent, it includes hiding it from the parents. I wouldn't be surprised if there is one that fits their whole description.

You keep telling yourself that, maybe if you pretend its not happening you will sleep better.

https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/liias/2023/05/09/legislation-...

Is this news source lying to me?

I am honestly glad that worked out for you, as many others have mentioned though parents have/can/will force their children to work to the parent’s short term benefit instead of doing more long term productive things that benefit the child, ie school/homework.

Instead of creating opportunities to coerce children to work to keep the family alive maybe just directly help the family stay afloat…

I wonder if those who oppose letting 15 year olds choose to work also oppose letting 15 year olds undergo certain cosmetic medical procedures, or letting 15 year olds vote. Typical “adult when it’s convenient” hypocrisy.

Fair criticism. But note that it's equally "adult when it's convenient" hypocrisy from the other side.

My side? Not really. You’re an adult or you aren’t, I don’t pick and choose.

"The other side" didn't mean your side, it meant the other side of the political divide.

The blue side: 15-year-olds can choose to change their genders, but they can't work.

The red side: 15-year-olds can work (and own guns), but they can't decide to change their genders.

Your side may not match either of those, and that's fine. I wasn't trying to speak for you. All I was saying is, both sides of the red/blue divide have this particular hypocrisy.

> 15 year olds undergo certain cosmetic medical procedures

Such as cleft palate surgery for example? Those are often performed at around 1 year old. I am for those surgeries.

Laws that were intended to prevent children from working in dangerous factories should not apply to jobs in air conditioned offices.

> The measure would permit children as young as 14 to work in roofing, construction and demolition,

Those are comfy air conditioned office jobs.

Don't forget cleaning meat packing plants. Fucking cush jobs, amirite?

The bill explicitly states packing plants are not allowed.

More precisely from what someone said above, meat packing plants are now allowed, but as a meat packer is not allowed. So they could have something like an office job at a plant (manager's assistant..? I don't really know how they're organized).

Let children be children.

It's not that simple though. For example, my son is 11 and wants to work. He wants to earn more money than I can find house chores to pay him for. He could absolutely help in an office or retail situation. Neither my wife nor myself have encouraged this. He came up with it all on his own.

I went to school with several kids who were gifted mechanically. They suffered in school. It wasn't just not beneficial. School was directly harmful. Had they been able to spend less time in school and more time working, they would've been much happier. Instead, school became a kind of purgatory they had to endure.

There are also situations in which kids are in a bad home environment but are essentially bonded to their parents by the fact that they cannot work. To be 100% clear, this bill sucks. I'm completly against it. But there is a form a child work reform that should happen IMO.

I'm not against children taking responsibilities, helping and working a little bit here and there to earn themselves some money and develop themselves in many ways, but just throwing them into the labour market is going back in time a couple centuries.

"My son is 11 and wants to work"

"He wants to earn more money than I [want] to pay him"

Well which is it. Would he work for free? No? Then he doesn't want to work, he wants money.

Why didn't I think of this? I should be making up things which I pay him unrealistic amounts of money for in order to teach him that work is about being an extractionist sponge rather than trying to find a way to make a meaningful contribution in exchange for a social/economic reward.

He both wants to work and wants money, like most humans.

What does that mean? Let them play with plastic toys, then as teenagers smoke weed and fuck each other?

How about we let children and teenagers be people. They want to help their dads in their day to day lives, family and work are closely connected. Teenagers want their autonomy and their own money, they want to learn skills that they can use as adults. Instead we send dad somewhere away from his family to earn money and isolate teenagers from the real world and expect them to just get it at 18. Preventing children and teenagers from doing any actual growing up, infantilizing capable people with ambitions and a restless desire to learn and grow in the world, that is dysfunctional, not letting them hammer some nails or pick some apples or whatever.

how about sweeping that nice, air-conditioned chimney?

If you took the time to read it, you would know that's not at all what this legislation is about. These regulations existed because children were exploited and taken advantage of in the past. [1] Would you care to inform us of the specific changes in Iowa that have now made "children working in dangerous conditions" no longer a concern?

I'll provide a counterpoint now, you can just reply "sorry I was wrong". [2] just a few months ago a US based organization "Packers Sanitation Services, Inc." was found illegally employing minors across eight states, with children as young as 13 cleaning their meat processing plants with hazardous chemicals during night shifts.

14 year olds don't need to log more hours at the office or cleaning industrial bone saws. They need to log more hours in their education and playing with their friends.

If you took time to read it you would find that meat packing and hazardous chemicals are still illegal under the new bill.

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