Florida to consider relaxing child labour laws to fill vacant jobs | Hacker News Reader

Florida to consider relaxing child labour laws to fill vacant jobs

euronews.com

25 pointsmartin_a12 comments

Bit of a wild model here. The US, broadly speaking, is going through a labor shortage that will only get worse in the future (structural demographics). Immigration was filling the gap for the last half decade or so, but with anti immigration sentiment rising, this will exacerbate the situation. So, some political parties have decided to employ children as young as 14 in potentially dangerous occupations. It's not great, and as it's politics, there aren't any solutions besides "vote better," which the electorate appears to be not so interested in.

Probably an opportunity for a ProPublica series to track the harm and death toll that will eventually result.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/despite-hazardous-working-conditio...

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/immigration-economy-jobs-gr...

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2...

https://assets-global.website-files.com/5cd5801dfdf7e5927800...

I feel structural demographic is getting older because salaries and job safety are shrinking due to immigration

In what way is immigration causing shrinking salaries and less job safety?

If companies can't rely on immigrants to fill roles, they will have to jack salaries and spend more on job safety? But that will just increase prices...and eventually low end work simply becomes too costly to not automate anymore.

> and eventually low end work simply becomes too costly to not automate anymore.

Evidence from Japan (a looking glass into a declining demographic future) does not validate this thesis. Some work can be automated (kiosks for order taking, for example), but most lower wage work cannot (especially manual labor around child care and healthcare). Wages will rise, that is the unavoidable inflationary component of structural demographics and the participant rate decline. Supply vs demand.

In the US, there are already shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers), bus drivers, railroad workers, farm workers, construction workers, day care staff, correctional officers, enlisted military recruits, etc [1]. ~4M Boomers retire per year, ~11k per day. Older folks (55+) are what is holding up participation rate because they cannot afford to retire [2], but they age out at a rate of ~2M/year, and ~37M of them are in the labor force [3].

[1] HN Search: Labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] Are Older Workers Propping Up The U.S. Economy? - https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-older-work... - August 8th, 2022

[3] FRED: Labor Force Participation Rate - 55 Yrs. & over (LNS11324230) - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230

Japan is actually the anti-thesis of your argument. They move young Japanese kids to Thailand to work call service jobs (they can pay them less there). They went through a huge automation push in the 80s/early 90s because they could n't find enough people to work in their factories, and this only went away in the late 90s when China came online with cheaper labor. Heck, it is ironic that the automation that we associate with China today is exactly what we associated with Japan in until the 00s! Now Japan is kind of messed up: kids are not finding it easy to deal with jobs whose salaries aren't rising (or their company sends them to work in Thailand).

We are already there, heck, China knows they will be there soon. Japan is definitely having issues with kids not wanting to work for peanuts anymore (so offering them an adventure in Bangkok). With the US on its current Trump-inspired anti-intellectualism kick, it is very likely that we will be buying automation equipment from China 10 or so years from now to do deal with coming labor shortages (assuming we don't just try to fix it with immigration again).

The US Chamber of Commerce [...] named Florida as one of the states where the situation is severe, counting only 53 available workers for every 100 open jobs.

Here is the study: https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/the-states-suffering-mos...

Of course an industry trade group (US Chamber of Commerce isn't a USG organization [1]) is advocating for lower paid children to be employees.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...

It’s not like there is a huge pool of teenagers who would be out taking these jobs if the law allowed them to take them.

It makes very little sense at all, unless the next step after this is to make government assistance conditioned on family work seeking.

ok, Florida's rules are already pretty lax, it seems like the new law would just allow them to work after 11PM on a school night and they can start work before 6:30 AM. WTF!

I'm all for letting kids work, but that just seems ridiculous.

Growing up in Florida, my parents would not let me mow the lawn because they believed child labor laws meant they could potentially get in trouble for it. Regardless of the likelihood of legal action as a result of this, the fact is there was a perception among Floridians in the 1990s / 2000s that child labor laws may be overly strict.

Yes, they obviously prevent kids from working from 11PM to 6:30AM on a school night/day. But that is so so so so mellow compared to what we have up here in Washington state.

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