America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor laws
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Kids need chores, responsibilities, struggles etc. Coddling kids until they are 18 and then throwing them into the world with 0 life experience is just setting them up for failure. I had a paper route for a couple years when I was 12 and got a job at McDonalds when I was 14.
A lot of this can be learned in extracurricular sports as well, but that's obviously not for everyone. Two a day football practices in summer were harder than any job I've ever had but no one says sports are bad for kids. I don't really see the difference, plus, you don't get paid for sports.
Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines, but I don't see anything wrong with summer or weekend jobs, working on the family farm, etc. It's good for them and a part of learning how to be an independent adult. Kids shouldn't be infantalized and sheltered through college.
That said, lets not lose sight of what's going on here, the DoL has been trying to crack down on 13yo kids in meat packing plants. If this is the line that we're trying to push the overton window past, I want no part of it.
> Dreier estimates that some 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and that the majority of them wind up working full-time jobs.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-la...
> Republicans seek to weaken laws against child labor
> Republicans continue crusade against childhood innocence
There's a lot of bias there. And if those claims were true (spoiler: they aren't, for counterexample, according to the article, Republican legislatures in Texas and Montana have strengthened laws, the Democrat legislature in New Jersey weakened them, and the Virginia state legislature unanimously approved increasing penalties), they'd imply Democrats don't want these unaccompanied minors to work.
Even though this is not, in fact, a partisan issue, one thing is clear. There are many leftists in this discussion who don't want these unaccompanied minors to work. So how do you all expect them to survive?
Flipping burgers has always been legal, and remains legal.
> Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines
From the article, Iowa now allows minors to work in "industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, and roofing". Roofing consistently ranks among the top 10 most dangerous professions in the US, according to the BLS. Industrial laundries deal with heavy machinery and nasty chemicals.
To outside observers, I was a fairly spoiled kid. I didn't have any jobs in high school, and I had a light load of chores. It's not that my parents were particularly wealthy, but I pushed back hard and was generally difficult with them, for the sake of preserving my study time, my free time, and getting a good night's sleep.
But it paid off. I got a scholarship, and went to a state university. Classes started a few days after I turned eighteen. I went out and got a part-time job immediately to pay for living expenses. I worked hard and did my job well, graduated, and landed a job that paid better than my parents.
From the get-go, I was a serious worker who put everything I had into the job while I was on the clock. I'm still that way today, and I find that people are either like that or they aren't. I find there's no correlation between the people who had jobs as teens and how serious, responsible, and industrious they are.
This is all very hand wavey but I'm worried about this new digital generation. I'm now the person I never thought I'd be saying this, but these kids are soft.
"Soft" is not how I'd describe that experience.
Soft is a perfectly fine way to describe them.
Funny you should mention, measles is back, and worldwide fatalities is on the rise. And are you suggesting that US healthcare has improved in the last couple decades? Antivax efforts have made the possibility of a return of endemic polio possible since folks travel, and it's not extinct. Measles was on its way to extinction in the 1990s, but after Wakefield's fraudulent study and the partisan politicization of disease, a host of diseases we never had to worry about anymore are popping back up again. As child vaccination rates continue to drop, we will see it all again.
The adults by and large have all been vaccinated. The kids however are being treated like guinea pigs in an ideological experiment where the losers are the kids themselves.
And as a child of the 70s and 80s, yes, I personally remember the ever-present threat of nuclear war growing up. I also remember the teen suicide rate being abnormally high due to it. Kinda like the rise we see today. It takes its toll, and doesn't at all mean they're "soft".
Necessarily.
If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you likely lived during an era where your parents paid little to no attention to what you were doing on a daily basis. People had children after a childhood of benign neglect and decided that they were going to be their kids' friends and began to hover. They bought into every stupid little bit of propaganda and couldn't let their kids out of earshot. So now they have a bunch of kids who only ever get away from their parental units when they're at school, and they are unsocialized as hell because most hoverparents will take their kids' word over that of their teachers.
They have no internal conflict resolution skills because their parents would jump in to handle the situation. They have little to no socialization skills. They need apps to find dates.
Generations are largely what their parents make them to be, and these kids are the absolute epitome of soft. And they're gonna be real big mad in another 30 years when they don't get anywhere with work because their entitlement continues to outweigh their performance.
If you want that, just watch Tik Tok or read the opinion columns.
But I actually applaud Washington Post for attempting to be somewhat neutral on this issue. If you actually read the article, the states are simply relaxing laws that were more strict than federal laws.
So the logic would be - if a state follows federal labor laws, are they "exploiting child labor"? Clearly the feds have set laws they feel are reasonble.
I mean, if a child labor law said "Kids can't work at all", then it was changed to "Kids can work up to 10 hours per week", that would be weaking child labor laws. Is that wrong?
> Clearly the feds have set laws they feel are reasonble
I did read the article. Iowa now allows minors to work in roofing and industrial laundries. If it's true they're aligning with federal laws (doubtful) I'm going to go ahead and say that federal laws about children working in roofing are not currently reasonable, and that Iowa should not have done this if they gave two shits about children.
> if a child labor law said "Kids can't work at all", then it was changed to "Kids can work up to 10 hours per week", that would be weaking child labor laws
Is that what happened though? Be honest. What does the article say?
I don't want that. I'm an adult. I don't want to know another adult's opinions, I'd like an objective report on the facts. I can make my own decision as to whether it's a problem and if it's is, who I believe is on the "good side" and who is on the "bad side".
But regardless, let's look at one of the issues you raise - Iowa allowing minors to work in roofing and industrial laundry. Annoying, the article doesn't link to the actual law, it rather links to another news article. Yuck.
So let's see what the actual law looks like[1] that the Governor signed:
- 92.8 Under eighteen — prohibited occupations:
- No person under eighteen years of age shall be employed or permitted to work with or without compensation at any of the following work activities or business establishments:
- 14. Roofing operations
- 92.5 Fourteen permitted work activities:
- 12. Laundering.
- 92.6 Fourteen and fifteen — occupations work activities not permitted [big list of prohibited activities involving hazards like machines or chemicals]
Now I'm super confused. The law (as I read it), seems to explicitly ban roofing by minors.
For laundry services, it adds laundry services, which I imagine would involved loading and unloading washers and dryers, which doesn't seems like an overly hazardous activity to me, especially with the section outlawing hazardous activities.
Note the law says "no one under 16 may perform work during school hours". So a fourteen year could be employed in laundry services after school or weekends, so to me that seems like a reasonably limitation. It also prohibits work before 7am and after 9pm and limits it to 28 hours per week for 14 year old (so 8 hours in addition to working Saturday and Sunday).
None of this seems outrageous. Delivering newspapers was a common job for minors. That involved riding or walking a bike early in the morning, which seems more hazardous to me than doing laundry.
[1]https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ga=90&ba=SF5...
If one side says it's raining and the other claims it's dry as a bone, "both sides" is irrelevant.
It is the responsibility of a journalist to go open a window and look outside. They don't have to call anyone a liar or an idiot. But they do have to call out which one comports with inarguable facts on the ground as much as possible.
There's the little detail of 14 year olds going to school, working a few hours per day, and… when do they get to take part in extracurriculars? When do they get to do homework? When do they get to study for quizzes and tests? When do they get to work on class projects?
When do they get to relax? Spend time with friends? Play games? Learn things outside the normal curriculum that piques their interest?
Or should they just be constantly on task unless they are asleep? Is this the life we really want for our kids?
That's a terrible example. Nobody is claiming that reporters should be report on undeniably false statements. I don't expect reporters to report on a lunar landing then include a bunch of stuff that the Apollo landing is fake.
But that's not what's happening here, is it?
What you have is reporters reporting on one side of an opinion. Opinions are not facts, they are a subjective judgement of facts. What many reporters do is start with an opinion, then write an article with selective inclusion of facts to support that opinion.
That's garbage reporting. It's not news it's writing an opinion column.
> There's the little detail of 14 year olds going to school, working a few hours per day, and… when do they get to take part in extracurriculars? When do they get to do homework? When do they get to study for quizzes and tests? When do they get to work on class projects?
You realize that work is voluntary right? This law doesn't force minors to work? And usually when you work you "pick up shifts"? They do all those things when they aren't in school and aren't working.
And you're looking at this with a very upper middle class perspective. Extracurricular activities? Play games? Free time? Some families don't have that luxury. Kids work because the family needs the income. I'm not sure banning work so that families have less income is really helping the poor.
And you know what? Some kid want to work. If given the choice between surfing Tik Tok, or playing on the soccer team, they choose work. They like having extra money. They like working in an industry they plan to enter full time for the experience.
It's not the 1920's. We aren't sending 10 year olds down in coal mines.
In seven states, you must be 18 to get married. In the rest, it isn't that minors are rushing to head down the aisle. In 1959, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which defines children's rights to protection, education, health care, shelter, and good nutrition.
The ONLY country that refuses to ratify it is the US. Why? Many states reserve the right to exercise the death penalty on minors and still allow child brides, where several states have no minimum age at all to which parents can choose their minor's spouse—commonly a much-older male adult. We have states willing to send 10 year olds down the aisle today in the name of "religious freedom".
As for "we aren't sending 10 year olds down in coal mines," that's only because we aren't sending anyone down into coal mines much anymore. It is an industry well into decline with scarce jobs for adults. As a nation, more and more kids are ending up in jobs that violate the law for their hazardous nature, like meat packing and roofing.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/child-labor-laws-migrants-i...
And while these particular jobs are still illegal for kids to have, there are both a lot of adults trying to get more kids working these and other jobs as well as legislators (overwhelmingly if not exclusively from just one side of the political aisle) trying to tear down what relatively few job prohibitions exist for children.
I think it's more than fair to call out efforts to expand the number of jobs that kids can be pushed into at a young age as a trend rather than a one-off.
In Arkansas, a bill signed by Governor Sanders removes the requirements for kids under 16 to prove their age and provide parental consent to get jobs.
The Governor of Iowa recently signed into law a bill that loosens protections for kids in employment. It extends the hours in which they are allowed to be on the clock, it opens up more potential options for where kids can work, and it even allows kids as young as 16 to serve alcohol in restaurants. Hilariously, the 16-year-old teenagers would be required to have training on "prevention and response to sexual harassment" when serving alcohol to adult strangers. (Might as well remove seat belt laws as long as we teach folks about the dangers of car accidents.)
Some kids want to work. Some kids would want to race Formula 1 too. When did we decide as a nation to have kids do whatever they want regardless of the risks posed to them? No, this trend isn't about the kids. It's the adults who are falling down on their jobs.
Middle school? So under 8th grade or 13 years of age? That employment is already illegal. We're talking about about 15-18 year olds (high school).
Can you share the data you have that "the vast majority of minors employed, aren't employed voluntarily"? That's a bold claim. According to the BOL, 1 out of 5 minor between 16-18 were employed outside of school hours. Are you suggesting a large portion of those are working involuntarily?
> In seven states, you must be 18 to get married.
You're changing the subject. We're talking about minors working.
> As a nation, more and more kids are ending up in jobs that violate the law for their hazardous nature, like meat packing and roofing.
As you admit, and the article states - those minors are illegally employed. Thus the law already bans it.
> In Arkansas, a bill signed by Governor Sanders removes the requirements for kids under 16 to prove their age and provide parental consent to get jobs.
All that law does is eliminate a permitting system. California doesn't require such permits if the child isn't in school. Vermont or Colorado doesn't require them if they work outside school hours.
It doesn't sounds like Arkansas is really standing out as doing something out of the ordinary.
> The Governor of Iowa recently signed into law a bill that loosens protections for kids in employment
Maybe you missed my analysis above. I looked up the law and read it. Did you? None of it seems all that weird. It provides protection against hazardous jobs, it limits hours, preventing it from interfering with school.
> When did we decide as a nation to have kids do whatever they want regardless of the risks posed to them?
Are you suggesting that these laws "allow kids to do whatever they want"?
> The situation in the US now is very different from the dawn of the industrial age.
Different for many, and different for you, but not for all.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children...
Genuine question: why do you think they wouldn't?
These days of course they are called Amazon warehouses or non-union car factories or industrial slaughterhouses but the point is still the same.
If mines and factories were what we recognize (from today's perspective) as abuse in that industrial economy, what do you suspect are the current places that might need protection in the today's economy?
“All those kids had to go to work” - 5 families have more wealth than 50% of Americans combined, but somebody’s kid needs to work in a meat packing plant? The system doesn’t need to work like this.
US Laws have explicit carve outs for agricultural work, in the fields and in the slaugtherhouses.
Even so, children still work illegaly, without the appropriate permissions:
In February [ 2023 ], the Labor Department announced that it had found more than a hundred children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses, in eight states, for Packers Sanitation Services, one of the nation’s largest food-sanitation companies.
The facilities themselves are owned by major corporations, including Tyson Foods and JBS. (All three companies denied that they had engaged in any wrongdoing.)
The children worked overnight shifts at such jobs as cleaning bone saws and head splitters with hazardous chemicals. At least three were injured. Packers, which is owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, paid a civil fine of a million and a half dollars.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-la...
The context here is whether child labour occurs in the US.
And those are mostly unaccompanied minors, with no other way to support themselves, so it's not so simple as saying they shouldn't be working.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-lab...
We're trying to make the education system somehow worse than the dumpster fire it was when I was little, we have people campaigning on making sure kids don't get free lunches for...reasons?... and now we have people trying to ensure they can be exploited so the 0.1% class can make an extra 0.1% this year.
Screech about bootstraps all you want, it's awfully hard to pull yourself up by them if you don't have shoes at all. This isn't politics, this is thunder-dome-ism.
If I need someone for an 8 hour shift and laws only allow me to hire you for 6, then I'm going to hire someone else instead of you.
Don’t kid yourself, they’ll be lucky if they work in sweatshops and not in abattoirs.
> Despite such findings, a new Iowa law signed last year by Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) allows minors in that state to work in jobs previously deemed too hazardous, including in industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, roofing and excavation but not slaughterhouses. Separately, West Virginia enacted a new law this month that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to work some roofing jobs as part of an apprenticeship program.
> Six more states are also evaluating bills to lift restrictions preventing minors from working jobs considered dangerous. A Georgia bill would allow 14-year-olds to work in landscaping on factory grounds and other prohibited work sites. Florida’s legislature has passed a law, drafted by the state’s construction industry association, that would allow teens to work certain jobs in residential construction. It’s awaiting approval from DeSantis.
This helped me to avoid homelessness and complete high school.
Systems are complex things, if you look at individual pieces in isolation you end up with suboptimal outcomes.
Sure you know more about my own lived experience than I do...
Paying highschool students is one example of a possible solution that eliminates requiring underage employment for graduation.
Especially with a crazy parent saying when you're 14 "work and contribute money to the rent or get the fuck out".
So I worked.
Still got kicked out with no meaningful money and nowhere to go at 18, by the way. Then I worked three jobs and lived off of the free coffee at work and couldn't afford to buy my own food for a few years.
And, at least back then when you had to apply in person, when you're young and white and male and walk into the office trying to apply for EBT in NY literally no one wants to help you and some will actively prevent you trying to get the benefits you're entitled to by trying to give you the runaround.
No, I didn’t say that but it turns out:
> Especially with a crazy parent saying when you're 14 "work and contribute money to the rent or get the fuck out".
Talking with social services would have been an option to avoid homelessness for yourself. Some people in similar situations are trying to help their families which is a complex topic.
Lol, not that easy and especially then when you couldn't do any of that shit online, as previously stated.
You have no idea how many institutional barriers there were to most people getting benefits before basically 2008. People would literally lie to you to try and derail you through the system.
NY wasn't exactly tripping over itself to give out money back then unless you were a model poor person (single mother, etc). Applying for these services in person meant you relied on the sympathy and personal investment in your situation of the case workers in the city offices.
Growing up my mom always made sure whenever we had to appear at city offices or go to free clinics that we looked extra poor, extra grubby and extra dirty. That was the reality but you really did have to look the part and leave your dignity at home.
Bleeding-heart people know absolutely fucking nothing about the reality of poverty and will also tell other people what their idea of it is like assuming they also have no real experience with it.
Parents threaten to or actually kick their kids out on a depressingly regular basis there’s various procedures for dealing with it. I don’t think talking through the specifics of your situation would be appropriate on a public forum like this, but you can look them up.
I don’t know how much of that 75-95 period where alive for, but it was still one hell of a city even through the worst of it.
"Federal law forbids all minors from working in jobs deemed hazardous, including those in manufacturing, roofing, meatpacking and demolition." "although there is an effort underway led by Republican lawmakers, to undo those restrictions,"
- Michel Foucault
11.6 million kids in poverty in the us. The naive approach: just give each kid 1k/mo would cost 12B/mo or 144B/yr, so 3.2% of the 2023 4.5T annual budget. That's entirely doable given the political will.
What made them so poor? Was it bad governance?
Social welfare exists to protect ppl from the exact sort of thing you are arguing permission to indulge.
There's no lack of wealth in this country, it's just been captured and is distributed massively unequally in fucked up ways.
If I have a retail business I likely can't be there every single minute that it's open. There's no incentives for me to hire someone who I can get massively fined for if I don't make sure they clock out when they're supposed to and go home on time. It's literally just not worth the hassle to worry about.
It's similar to why people in Texas with tree farms don't hire US citizens. It's not because they're trying to pay illegals less money -- in fact the ones that I know pay well but still hire illegals -- it's because every time they hire a US citizen two weeks into the job they "accidentally" cut the tip of their pinky finger off with a hedge trimmer and file a worker's compensation lawsuit. One nursery I know had this happen to them _dozens_ of times.
It's unfortunate that the world works this way but running a business is fraught with risk and most smart business owners want to avoid hassle and turnover (teenagers in jobs are fickle and do things like blow off work -- I sure did). You only hire the cheapest labor if you literally have no other choice.
I’d much prefer the kids who struggle with academics be given a comprehensive trade school education than having them act as a labor release valve for when businesses are unwilling to hire adults.
I’ve worked at sandwich shops and the idea that this is a good way to learn about business is not the experience I had.
It's long overdue!
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
On the other hand, the media is constantly driving this idea home that there are no jobs for young people, so it's kind of hard to know which side of their ass they're talking out of.
What I do know is if you look at the data we have since COVID, young men have been dropping out of high school and college in record numbers in order to work to support their families out of necessity. Inflation has crushed a lot of poor and middle class people.
If regulators and rich liberals really want to save the children, they should get a handle on supply chains and pricing of basic necessities so that young people don't have to choose between feeding themselves/their families and their education.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/our-w...
https://hbr.org/2022/11/the-global-population-is-aging-is-yo...
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
food has gotten more expensive but it's not that expensive. $25 entrees is unaffordable for most people, how are you getting to $100/head at reasonable restaurants? Does everyone order the ribeye?
To emphasize, there are obviously cheaper restaurants, and given how much it costs to live in Austin, I'm not bemoaning their prices. I'm just saying that pre-pandemic I would have thought of a $100+ meal in Austin as "very fancy, special occasion" place, and now it's easy to hit that at tons of places in Austin. I used to eat out a lot more at places like the above when it was ~$60 pre-pandemic, but it's not worth it to me at $100+.
The market gives you the opportunity to overpay if you want to, though. It's not a representative example.
It doesn’t ignore it, it welcomes it.
If the business requires underpaid or poverty level wage workers to survive, it is not a sustainable business. It is a transfer from the poor to the better off. Corporate profits can always come down if the business wants to attempt to survive, and failing that, it can close up shop.
We’ve been living on aggregate suffering of a underclass to deliver consumer excess, broadly speaking. Like I said, structural demographics is breaking capitalism. The total fertility rate will continue to decline, locking in further future working age labor participation compression.
Fast food is first, but it’ll work its way up the value chain as other low wage but high value jobs hit the wall (CNAs, home health aids, etc).
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/global-fertilit...
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/27/labor-shortages-air-traffic...
I have no idea what you're talking about. Where I live I constantly see articles about worker shortages in low wage roles like restaurant workers and retail that have typically been the main jobs for teenagers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/06/why-so-few-teenagers-have-jo...
https://www.epi.org/publication/young-workers-covid-recessio...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/24/wearying-and...
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-young-people-not-find-work
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adulting/comments/18k394x/the_econo...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/good-jobs-are-out-of-reac...
https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/abc-2024-constr...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/11/06/worker-short...
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/t...
I don't vouch for any of these articles, am just saying labor shortage has been a persistent narrative, so not sure what your point is?
That and/or their workplace activities take place during hours when kids are in school.
What teenagers are going to be hired into Financial Services, IT, Government, Construction, Professional/Business Services and Healthcare jobs!? You're out of your mind.
1. First 2 articles are from 2019 and 2020. Obviously pre and early pandemic economy was totally different.
2. Third article is about a totally different topic, but even goes against your point. It's about people the government says should be working, but can't because of illness.
3. You think a Quora link of a random person asking "Why do young people not find work?" is proof of anything?
4. Again, a random reddit post is not evidence of anything
5. Your last link, again, is about a totally different topic: "Good jobs are out of reach for many 20-somethings in the U.S." This whole article is about children working.
But please, tell me how to Google again...
It's not even basic necessities (food, healthcare, misc bills), it's that the median person is spending an overwhelming fraction of their take home income on housing.
Supply chains will bounce around and settle (though there's work to do there), but we've created so much bad regulation around just building places to live that they're a goddamn investment vehicle instead of a human right.
If we cut housing costs in half they'd still be absurd but suddenly everyone would have an insane amount of financial flexibility relative to where they are.
Seems like the most basic, to me.