Both sides journalism prevents the headline from being “Republicans seek to weaken laws against child labor”
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"?