Don’t force kids into child labor in America

Is making little children work real jobs in the real work force in America Dickensian?

I don’t know from the muckraking British serial novelist’s books, so I couldn’t say.

I do know we in America have our own sordid tradition, one that continued not so very long ago, of forcing kids to work, and I’m against allowing that sorry situation to come back. Because we’re in real danger of allowing the backward slide to begin.

“Lawmakers in several states are embracing legislation to let children work in more hazardous occupations, longer hours on school nights and in expanded roles including serving alcohol in bars and restaurants as young as 14,” the Associated Press reported last week.

Mmm. Well, I do recall that in other civilized countries that latter rule is not in play, and I have seen it work unproblematically. In a hotel restaurant in the remote Scottish Highlands hamlet of Brora a few summers ago, I half-jokingly asked our young waitress, daughter of the owners, for advice on which whiskey to have with my fish and chips, knowing she couldn’t be of help.

“Oh, no sir, there you would be wrong,” she said. “It’s true that I am 16, and can’t drink the stuff meself. But my second job is as a tour guide up on the hill at the distillery, and I’m afraid I’m a font of information about all of the spirits on our list.” And she pointed me to the right one, after describing its attributes.

Precocious Scotch experts aside, those aren’t really the kinds of jobs lawmakers are asking that children be allowed to toil at. Claiming that relaxing child labor laws is necessary to confront the shortage of workers in some sectors of the economy, GOP electeds in Iowa wrote a bill that would have allowed those as young as 14 to work in mining, logging and meatpacking jobs. The state party later dropped those provisions in the face of howls of protest. “But it kept some provisions that the Labor Department says violate federal law, including allowing children as young as 14 to briefly work in freezers and meat coolers, and extending work hours in industrial laundries and assembly lines,” the AP reports.

Assembly lines? We want to put very young teens to work on assembly lines? In what way could you possibly say that they were making such decisions about how to spend their time on their own? Isn’t going to middle school hard enough without worrying about working the swing shift that night?

Of course unscrupulous employers are already up to these kinds of shenanigans, rules or no rules. The Department of Labor says that child labor law violations are up almost 70% since 2018: “It fined one of the nation’s largest meatpacking sanitation contractors $1.5 million in February after investigators found the company illegally employed more than 100 children at locations in eight states. The child workers cleaned bone saws and other dangerous equipment in meatpacking plants, often using hazardous chemicals.”

Trying to paint this as a nicely libertarian movement against undue red tape is a sickening tactic. “There’s no reason why anyone should have to get the government’s permission to get a job,” Republican Arkansas Rep. Rebecca Burkes, who sponsored the bill to eliminate child work permits, said on the House floor. “This is simply about eliminating the bureaucracy that is required and taking away the parent’s decision about whether their child can work.”

The parent’s decision? What about the child’s decision? Do we really think they are jonesing to clean the bone saws?

“The consequences are potentially disastrous,” says Reid Maki, director of the Child Labor Coalition. “You can’t balance a perceived labor shortage on the backs of teen workers.”

And we ought not to.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.