'Job Creator' Republicans Think It's Time Those Lazy Kids Go Back to Work
Where is 2023's equivalent to Charles Dickens when we need one?
The republican party cares so much about working people, it has decided to do something truly meaningful: create more working people.
But not through supporting policies that create more jobs, increase the minimum wage, or promote unionization.
No, the republican party’s idea of “job creation” entails rolling back almost a century of child-labor regulations.
It wants to increase the work force by suffusing it with children.
According to a July 2022 Labor Department press release, child labor violations and investigations have increased over the past seven years.
Fiscal year 2022 saw a 37% increase involving 688 children working in hazardous conditions.
Alabama Hyundai and Kia factories, Nebraska and Minnesota JBS meatpacking plants, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, and Chipotle have all been subjected to high-profile investigations.
Last month, the Biden administration fined Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. for hiring over a hundred children to perform one of the most dangerous jobs — cleaning meatpacking plants.
According to The Lever:
That company…has been repeatedly bought and sold by private equity funds that manage retirement money for state and local public employees...
In other words, public officials have been using the retirement savings of unionized teachers, firefighters, and police officers to capitalize — and help Wall Street executives profit from — an outsourcing business that has used low-paid immigrants and even children for hazardous work in slaughterhouses.
One might assume this would be an issue on which republicans and Democrats could “reach across the aisle” to rectify.
Instead, several state governments are doubling down.
Iowa republican legislators introduced a bill in January to expand duties for 14 and 15 year olds under the auspices of “approved training programs” that would lengthen allowable work hours and hold employers blameless from liability if their young workers fall ill, get injured, or are killed.
Ohio legislators think the same age group should be able to work longer if their parents approve, and have reintroduced a bipartisan bill earlier this year to extend working hours. They urged Congress to take their cue at the federal level, and at least one republican has. Last year, republican congressman Dave Joyce drafted a bill to extend working hours during the school year.
Minnesota also feels 14 and 15 year olds should work longer, even in construction jobs.
Ditto Wisconsin.
Not to be outdone, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last week signed a bill rolling back several child labor protections, including one that required employers to guarantee working papers for children under age 16, calling it “obsolete.”
Before we go assuming this is just states’ responses to inflation and unemployment, let’s try to consider it like a republican strategist.
According to the recent jobs report, the current administration created 12 million jobs since President Biden took office two years ago — greater job growth in two years than any president’s first term since World War II.
Last month, the administration announced plans to crackdown on migrant children labor exploitation.
Erasing the certification requirements for 15 and 16 year olds eliminates protection for vulnerable youth, especially immigrants, who may not always obtain a parent or guardian’s approval to work, thereby being vulnerable to exploitation.
Labor Dept. solicitor of labor, Seema Nanda, explained:
Federal and state entities should be working together to increase accountability and ramp up enforcement — not make it easier to illegally hire children to do what are often dangerous jobs. No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop. The FLSA and its child labor protections apply in all states and no state has the ability to limit these provisions. The Department has and will continue to vigorously enforce child labor protections across the nation.
The New York Times recently reported on young migrant workers toiling in a Hearthside Food Solutions factory owned by a private equity fund managing public employees’ retirement savings.
It is also a direct assault on organized labor, something else republicans pretend to support.
Wisconsin state Sen. Chris Larson told WISN-TV last month:
I think in reality if those employers are looking for workers, what frankly the market should dictate is they should be raising wages, offering additional benefits.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated in an Instagram the fact that America isn’t suffering a labor shortage; it’s suffering a “dignified job shortage.”
According to BuzzFeed News:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, companies across the nation have reported having trouble finding employees and some have started hiring children to fill the shortage. A pizza shop in Pennsylvania had a 14-year-old employee in 2021 who was making $9.50 per hour. A pumpkin patch in Missouri lowered the employment age to 14 in 2021, and a Burger King in Ohio offered to hire 14- and 15-year-olds. The idea that nobody wants to work anymore is decades old, but Republicans have clung to it over the last few years.
At its core, the issue is wages.
If we paid people what they are worth for the work they are expected to do, and we practiced a taxation system wherein the economic royalists were actually required to pay taxes commensurate to their wealth, we wouldn’t be in this situation, or it at least wouldn’t be as bad.
Labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, Sylvia Allegretto, explained:
A lot of families are in such dire economic conditions that they might agree to send their kids to work because of necessity. But that’s the problem. If you get up and go to work every day, you shouldn’t be living in poverty, you shouldn’t be living in such dire situations.
Where is 2023’s equivalent to Charles Dickens when we need one?