Child labor: Making it easier for teens to work
“Are we actually arguing about whether 14-yearolds should work in meatpacking plants?” asked Terri Gerstein in The New York Times. Last month, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill eliminating a requirement for 14and 15-year-olds to have a state work permit to get a job. The move is part of a broader push to loosen child labor laws by conservative state legislatures. The Iowa legislature is considering a bill that would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers and 15-yearolds to work on assembly lines moving items that weigh up to 50 pounds. In Ohio, there’s a push to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. during the school year—in violation of federal law—while the Minnesota legislature is debating letting the construction industry recruit 16- and 17-year-olds. We’re not talking about teenagers babysitting or folding sweaters at the mall. We’re talking about them working in dangerous plants and factories, like in the 19th century. “It’s outrageous that we are even discussing it.”
Liberals are “freaking out,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, but Arkansas should actually “be a model for national child labor policy.” Sanders is just making it easier for teens to work and earn money. Many teens could benefit from, say, working a part-time job at Walmart for $14 an hour, especially if they’re saving for college, and “parents know better than bureaucrats what is best for their children.” With the current labor shortage, employers can benefit, too. Besides, kids “spend too much time on social media and too little growing up,” so “anything reasonable that a state can do to make it easier for them to work is welcome.”
If employers need more workers, said Helaine Olen in The Washington Post, they need to raise wages, and our country should allow more legal immigration. Instead, unbelievably, “American child labor is making a comeback.” Children will pay a stiff price for this policy, said Steven Greenhouse in Los Angeles Times. During the pandemic, many kids fell behind academically, and research shows that working 20 hours a week or more makes high school students more likely to drop out. So in the long run, enabling teens to hold jobs makes it more likely they will quit school and “ultimately become lower-paid, less-productive workers.” This cruel, exploitive idea will only “hurt America’s overall economy in the long run.”
A culture war battle over public school curricula “took center stage” on Capitol Hill last week, said Lauren Gambino in The Guardian, as the GOP-led House passed the Parents Bill of Rights Act on a near party-line vote. The bill serves as a national “rallying cry” for Republicans amid an impassioned political struggle over what is taught in the nation’s schools. For two years, redstate legislatures have enacted or considered “a dizzying array of new proposals” restricting what public school teachers can say and what books students can read about sex, gender, and America’s racial history. The federal bill would require public schools to post online their class curricula, reading lists, and the books in their libraries, and to notify parents if their children change their pronouns. Republicans said the bill would curtail indoctrination of kids with “left-wing ideology,” while Democrats argued that it would promote “extreme MAGA Republican ideology.”
With no chance of the act passing the Democraticcontrolled Senate, “critics will dismiss it as a messaging bill,” said National Review in an editorial. So let’s consider the “unsettling” message sent by its Democratic opponents. At a time of legitimate debate over “sexually explicit material for young readers” and the teaching of “critical race theory,” they want to “treat normal parental oversight and curiosity” as intrusive, unnecessary, and even “dangerous for children.” Progressives need to be reminded of an essential truth: “Parents are the primary educators of their children,” and schools should not dictate how kids are raised.
It’s conservatives who want to dictate what kids are allowed to learn, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. What “parents’ rights” really means is giving “a conservative and reactionary minority” the authority to remove books or “shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel.” What about the rights of parents who want schools to accept gender-nonconforming students and teach about “the darker parts of American history?” Republicans, however, strongly believe parental rights is a winning issue for them, said Declan Garvey in The Dispatch. GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis “has led the way on education battles” as Florida’s governor, and his 2024 rival Donald Trump “has taken the hint,” proposing measures such letting parents vote to choose school principals. All he has to do is bring up schools and parents’ rights, Trump noted at a recent rally, “and the place goes crazy.”