Bricks in the wall

How to keep people out of work

DEPENDING on how you measure things, Arkansas law is either choking job opportunities with licensing requirements, or really choking job opportunities with licensing requirements. Call it a license to kill—opportunity.

A national outfit called the Institute for Justice has helped with the latter by putting together a report on state job licenses. And their requirements for same. Turns out that Arkansas is giving states like California and Nevada a run for their money on suppressing job growth. The researchers cobbled together their findings—when they could—and found that Arkansas has the second most “burdensome” licensing laws, and is the fifth-most “extensively” licensed state.

In Arkansas, you have to have a license for 52 of the 102 jobs that the institute studied. Researchers said that has a lot to do with the requirements of construction—or construction workers—in this state. But there are other reasons:

“Arkansas licenses a number of occupations that few other states do, such as funeral attendants, psychiatric technicians and residential dry wall installers. Moreover, many occupations are subject to entry restrictions that exceed national averages. Opticians in Arkansas, for instance, must train for more than three years, about a year more than the national average. Fire alarm installers lose 1,095 days to education and experience requirements versus a national average of 486 days.”

And the details of the research are remarkable. So let us remark:

In order to be a school bus driver in this state, you’d need four days’ experience. To be a licensed manicurist, you need 140.

To be a child care worker, you need to show you have a couple days’ under your belt. To be a barber, you need 350.

You need to pay a licensing fee, but you don’t need on-the-job experience to be a pest control worker. That is, to put out poison and kill critters. But to be a door repair contractor, you need 1,825 days of education and experience. Matter of fact, that number, 1,825, comes up over and over again in this document. Maybe because it’s easily divisible by 365. (Please see Arkansas’ portion of the report at http://ij.org/ report/license-to-work/ltw-statedata/?state=ar)

So you’d need five years’ education and/or experience to be a painting contractor, or a floor sander contractor, or a contractor for any number of jobs, including door repair, insulation, drywall installation, cement finishing, pipelaying, on and on.

Sure, some would argue, but doesn’t all this protect the public?

Answer: From what? What sense does it make that a painter must undergo five years of training but not a midwife? Does a barber really need that much more training than a school bus driver? If he messes up your hair, don’t go back to him. Besides, hair grows back.

It seems that a larger part of this is just a way for certain industries to keep the competition scarce, and prices for their services high.

A bigger question might be: Why is Arkansas licensing “makeup artists” and massage therapists, bill collectors and landscape workers? The government, it turns out, is deciding who gets to make a living, and who gets to . . . not.

We’re not Libertarians. Some licenses make sense. Yes, let’s continue to make sure preschool teachers, school bus drivers and pharmacy technicians have certain skills and experience.

But why does the state require a manicurist to pay a fee, get dozens of hours of on-the-job training, take two exams and be a certain age before granting her permission to work?

In the main, all this red tape hurts those trying to earn a living with their hands—and those livings are sometimes low-income. Many of these licenses might only be burdensome, and purposely burdensome at that. Call them bricks in the wall. Except the brick layer might need $300 for the licenses fee and five years experience first.