Iowa recently enacted legislation that rolls back the clock on child labor laws. The Economic Policy Institute reports on the Republican-led effort to put young children to work in hazardous industries, which conflicts with federal law.
What a disgrace these laws are! Are the red states lowering the age of employment because they don’t have enough immigrants to take these jobs? Are they ready to sacrifice the well-being of their children to keep immigrants out? All of the jobs opening for children under 18 appear to be the kind that are usually filled by minimum-wage adult workers.
EPI writes:
Last Friday, this concerted attack on child labor safeguards further expanded. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed an expansive bill enacting numerous changes to the state’s child labor laws, including:
- allowing employers to hire teens as young as 14 for previously prohibited hazardous jobs in industrial laundries or as young as 15 in light assembly work;
- allowing state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations, including demolition, roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation;
- extending hours to allow teens as young as 14 to work six-hour nightly shifts during the school year;
- allowing restaurants to have teens as young as 16 serve alcohol; and
- limiting state agencies’ ability to impose penalties for future employer violations.
Multiple provisions in the new state law conflict with federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) prohibitions on “oppressive child labor”involving hazardous conditions or excessive hours that interfere with teens’ schooling or health and well-being.
In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Sanders signed a law in March that eliminated youth work permits. Under the law, 14- and 15-year-olds will no longer need an employment certificate from the state Division of Labor verifying proof of their age and parental consent to work.
At a moment when exploitative child labor is on the rise, such changes are dangerous, removing an important paper trail intended to provide “proof that the companies that hire children at least acknowledge—in writing—that they’re following the law.”
In intervening weeks, the U.S. Department of Labor has cited employers for hundreds more serious child labor violations, while additional state legislatures have advanced proposals to weaken child labor standards…
Iowa’s extreme new child labor law violates federal prohibitions on hazardous occupations and excessive work hours
Iowa labor unions and their allies organized significant opposition to weakening the state’s child labor laws, compelling lawmakers to remove some of the original bill’s most egregious proposals—including language allowing teens to work in some areas of meatpacking plants and granting employers blanket immunity from liability for deaths or injuries caused by negligence while employing teens in “work-based learning programs.”
Yet even after several amendments, the final bill(passed with only Republican support) remains one of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor protections in decades.
Many aspects of the newly enacted Iowa law contradict federal child labor law. In a May 10 letter to Iowa lawmakers, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda and Wage and Hour Division Principal Deputy Administrator Jessica Looman clarify that “the FLSA establishes federal standards with respect to child labor, and states cannot nullify federal requirements by enacting less protective standards.”
Because most employment situations are covered by the FLSA, employers who follow weaker new state rules in Iowa will be violating federal child labor law. Enforcing federal standards that the state no longer maintains will, however, now be solely up to the federal government.
In their letter, Nanda and Looman report that “the Department currently has over 600 child labor investigations underway nationwide, including in Iowa” and detail the ways in which Iowa’s proposed bill (most of which has now been enacted) contradicts prohibitions on hazardous work or excessive work hours considered “oppressive” forms of child labor under federal law.
Federal law generally prohibits the employment of children in hazardous occupations. The new Iowa law allows several forms of hazardous child labor that are expressly prohibited under DOL regulations on work permitted for 14–15-year-olds or are banned for all youth under 18 under “Hazardous Occupations Orders” (HOs). These are specific types of work the DOL prohibits based on National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health findings that certain jobs have proven particularly dangerous for teens.
The article lists the details of the Iowa law, showing the age at which children as young as 14 are allowed to work in previously forbidden jobs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Slavery is the original form of capitalism
and it always, everywhere reverts to type.
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Follow the money. What sorts of wages will these 14 and 25 year olds command? Benefits? Pension/ retirement credit? I’m guessing it’s cheap labor with zero deferred compensation thus making hiring actual adults who require fair compensation obsolete. Next, laws will be passed permitting kids to miss school so they can work. If they can’t control the schools, they can control the students. Follow the money.
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Correction—15 year olds, not 25 year olds. (I call it thumb-phone error.)
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To continue another post from this morning, here is another example of how we get it wrong with political rhetoric and actions. Cult-driven public policy favors immediate profit and exploitation of some, preferably the “others,” at the expense of the future. The answer to help business is costlier that this. Investing in children and the support they need to become functioning adults is not a public priority and won’t be as long as the cult can muck up public life or, secular god forbid, take complete control of all three federal branches and more than 60% of state legislatures.
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These red states are counting on the fact that the federal government often fails to enforce existing regulations. Children working in unsafe environments may have long lasting health problems from exposure to chemicals and environmental hazards like benzine or asbestos. As in most cases it will be the poorest children that will feel compelled to work to help out their families. My own father quit school in 7th grade to go to work to help out his struggling family, but this was in the early 1920s. It is sad we are regressing back to the mistakes of the past. As the AFT points out , we already have migrant children as young as eight working in fields rife with pesticides. https://www.aft.org/community/child-labor-united-states
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By failing to enforce them, the cause tends to be too much expected and too little provided to be able to do the job. And that conveniently supports the narrative that government is ineffective and it should be eliminated and/or privatized.
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These laws have more to do with allowing the human trafficking of migrant and immigrant children.
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So sad. Our free, public, required schooling goes way back–in Ohio to the beginning of statehood. When I taught history in Chillicothe, Ohio I used to show pictures of kids as young as seven working in coal mines in Appalachia. Many of us worked during school years, but only under fairly serious regulation as to times, hours, types of duties, etc.. I could cry.
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No surprise for me:
… “Poe, a former judge who co-founded the Congressional Victims’ Rights Caucus, said that Houston is a hub for sex trafficking and is often a starting point for victims to be taken to other areas of the country.
“The city’s proximity to the border and seaports make it a hub, according to Texas-based nonprofit Children at Risk, an advocacy and research organization that focuses on human trafficking in Texas. Robert Sanborn, president and CEO of the organization, said more must be done to end the demand that fuels trafficking.” …
https://www.texastribune.org/2014/04/29/houston-focal-point-fight-against-sex-trafficking/
Has Abbott or any other Red state governors talked about this issue and what they plan to do to combat it?
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Reblogged this on Filosofa's Word and commented:
There are a number of things that various states, primarily those states with a Republican majority commonly referred to as “red states”, are doing that I find abominable. One of the most abominable in my book is the rolling back of child labour laws, laws that are intended to prohibit the exploitation of our children. Diane Ravitch’s recent post tells us more about what is happening and the potential consequences …
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By allowing young children to work, these states are hoping to devalue education. By devaluing education they are creating a lifelong labour force that cannot rise above where it began. They will wlways earn minimum wages, without benefits, because that will be all they know. By the time they are 40 they will be worked out, with nothing to fall back on. WalMart will have more store-greeters than it can afford to hire!
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Children, younger than fifteen, should not be formally, hired, they’re still in school, that is, where they, SHOULD be, but, for whatever reasons (living in poverty-stricken means, needing to help out, bringing in the money to, keep a home going), these children are being deprived on the only thing that will, help them, get out of the, poverty-stricken life they’d been, born into, and, they poverty still, gets passed down from, one generation to the, next…and, even if, the child labor laws are, stricter, prople will still, find the, holes in the systems, to have the children work to, support the families, when that’s the, adults’, jobs, not the, children’s…
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In all we do, we must seek to protect the wellbeing of our children. And if hazardous engagements would be disastrous, it is better to amend party principles.
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