Republicans in statehouses nationwide are racing to make it easier for companies to hire youngsters.... In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed legislation doing away with regulations demanding 14- and 15-year-old teens receive a work permit before taking on paid employment. A bill in Ohio seeks to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. during the school year, in defiance of federal law. In Minnesota, a Republican legislator introduced legislation to let the construction industry recruit 16- and 17-year-old workers. In Iowa, a bill in the state’s House of Representatives would make it easier to employ 14-year-olds in the meatpacking industry. Unfortunately, yes. A bill co-sponsored by Sens. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Angus King (I-Maine) and Maine House Democrats Jared Golden and Chellie Pingree would allow parents who own logging operations to employ their 16- and 17-year-old children to operate mechanized equipment — under supervision....
Let’s be clear: We’re not talking about kids babysitting, getting a summer job, or working at the mall for a few hours after school, all of which are perfectly legal. We’re talking about teenagers working long and late hours year-round in often dangerous occupations, endangering their health, rest, safety and future....
If there are concerns about a labor shortage, expand the number of legal immigrants, help teens get work permits to do safe after-school jobs — or simply raise wages. What doesn’t make sense is for one party to be more concerned about the imaginary threat of drag queen story hours than about jobs for children that could cause irreversible harm to their life prospects.
Oh! I was not expecting drag queens to make a late-breaking appearance in this column. There's always some issue that's more important than some other issue and you can always call out your antagonists with a charge that they're more interested in one thing than another. And we can argue forever about where all the various threats appear on the continuum of real to imaginary.
What's at issue here is teenagers working — 14 to 17 year olds. How much do we want to protect them from work? We're not talking about the government requiring them to work. The government does require them to attend school — at least until they reach the "dropout age." But what jobs are available to them if they choose to work? Why does this break down into a partisan issue? The WaPo columnist would have us believe it's that old problem of Republicans lacking what Democrats brim with: empathy.
ADDED: You know what is "dangerous... mechanized equipment"? A car. Why do we let 15 and 16 year olds drive? They could kill themselves and others and often do! And what about a power lawnmower? Google the question and you'll see it's generally accepted that 12 is old enough. And of course, we let teens join the military and use the most dangerous equipment in the most dangerous contexts when they are 18.
Nothing suddenly changes at 18, so if you're a year or 2 younger than that, and you can drive a car and use a lawmower (and a snowblower), what workplace machinery is too dangerous for you? I suspect that some of this is about depriving young people of options that might reduce the number of seats filled in the high schools of America.
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When I was 13 — a full 60 years ago! — I was earning money mowing a neighbor’s lawn once a week. Nothing wrong with that, then or now.
Please, won't anyone think of the children?
A conservative writing an analogous piece would probably highlight Democrats wanting to make it easier to "groom" children, to help children get "gender affirming" social and medical treatment without parental knowledge, and to relax rules about drug use and crime that make it easier for children to break the law.
Given the paucity of details in the WaPo's opinion piece, I have a strong suspicion which of those stories would resonate more with the public.
Child abuse was discovered in the 60s as a "public problem," specifically sexual child abuse in the 70s. The latter really took off owing to its discovered ratings, which have not fallen.
"Public problems" e.g. drunk driving, when discovered, were formerly personal moral failings. It's a political power trick to discover a new public problem and take ownership of it. Sociologist Joseph Gusfield, _Contested Meanings_
Psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, wondering about child sexual abuse hysteria, thought it was a partial archetype. The child as purely innocent grammatically leads to a threat purely evil, so that's the form it takes. He says this is harmful to children. Just at the age where they're learning to take responsibility for what happens to them, they're taught they have no responsibility. This leaves them in a world in which they feel that have no control, instead of discovering that they influence things.
So it's about protecting children. At 14 I was working as a lab assistant to earn money for flying lessons ($14 an hour, 17 hours work). That seemed like a high point to me at the time.
Why do the Mainers want late-teens whose parents own logging businesses to operate machinery? I'm quite interested to know. Aren't these "children" in training for the family industry? Also, King and Pingree are as left-wing squishy as they come. It's a farce to make this an evil GOP issue.
Our partisan knee-jerk reporting makes a potentially complex issue into a stoopid fest.
I live in farm country. Last fall watched a 13 yr old operate a $300,000 combine. Tell me kids aren't capable.
This is an article by and for people in a bubble. The author loses all credibility with the gratuitous final sentence, so the work concern is not worth serious consideration.
Once again a general topic with broad support becomes partisan propaganda. Child labor was a huge and broad issue back in the Industrial Age. They put children in mines to crawl down tiny cracks, and used children with small hands to do hand-destroying jobs in fabric mills. Still, a huge percentage of children follow parental careers. Working is more productive and often safer for children than school sports...and surely safer than school transgender surgery guidance...
I believe that the juice ain't worth the squeeze unless every teenager is planning to go to college with student loans that will be forgiven
Wish my grandkids were growing up on a working farm.
It’s a great life. Having jobs to do is a blessing.
Kids, if raised in this fashion, don’t look on the work as dangerous or abusive. They enjoy it.
But what jobs are available to them if they choose to work?
Not part-time retail jobs. The malls are dead, and small businesses were killed off by the lockdowns. Fast-food jobs are going away as well, thanks to minimum wage increases and automation. Construction? Agriculture? Have fun competing against illegal labor.
Why does this break down into a partisan issue?
The left believes in "everything inside the state, nothing outside the state." Teenagers who work real jobs, earn real money, and can help support their families or earn enough to start preparing for adulthood are a threat to that idea. Self-reliance, personal responsibility, private institutions (such as jobs, rather than a gov handout) all take away from the need for a massive government, with armies of bureaucrats.
The WaPo columnist would have us believe it's that old problem of Republicans lacking what Democrats brim with: empathy.
Too much empathy is destructive. At some point, telling someone to "suck it up" and go to work is the far kinder response, rather than enabling bad behavior.
We’re not talking about kids babysitting, getting a summer job, or working at the mall for a few hours after school
Actually, we are. Those jobs currently barely exist. My daughter is almost 15 and she has been desperate for years to get a job, get her own source of money, get some independence. But there's so little out there for kids her age that she can't get any employer to give her a serious look. So yes, we are talking about the mall, we are talking about summer jobs. And when every teenage girl is dependent on babysitting, there aren't nearly babies enough to go around.
If there are concerns about a labor shortage, expand the number of legal immigrants, help teens get work permits to do safe after-school jobs — or simply raise wages.
I can't help notice what's not in that list--changing the opportunity cost of employment so that having a low-paying job is better than having no job. I was laid off when my daughter was a baby (the 2008 recession). The benefits of having a stay at home parent amounted to about $25/hr. That is, if someone offered me a job that paid less than $25/hr, I would lose money by accepting it.
While we're on the subject, rising minimum wages is one of the things destroying teen employment opportunities. The sort of low-value jobs kids can do are simply being phased out by the rising cost.
There's always some issue that's more important than some other issue and you can always call out your antagonists with a charge that they're more interested in one thing than another
It's a dirty rhetorical trick. Nobody believes you can only care about one thing at a time. Nobody believes you can't deal with some issue until every more important issue is fully dealt with. Lots of people make that argument, but nobody believes it. Nobody.
So let me see if I understand the left’s position on the youth: 15 year olds are old enough to unilaterally choose to cut off their breasts or their genitals, but they’re not old enough to operate a backhoe or to cut meat? Is that the assertion?
Democrats are fine with child labor as long as the children are exploitable illegal immigrants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html
On that note, this was a much more blog worthy article from the NYTimes than most of what's published. Probably why it disappeared without a peep.
They can work in a store, stocking shelves or something like that. Better than letting them run wild in the streets...
In San Francisco, the radicals pushing reparations say that if we give them money, they won't rob stores. Get a freaking job. Make your OWN money. I worked from the time I was 12 or 13. Started babysitting. Worked as a maid, a dishwasher, on tobacco...whatever it took to make my own money.
I find it fascinating that several generations ago people worked furiously to free children from working in coal mines and factory processing plants, only to have children in the digital age flock to games like Minecraft, or mining gold for their strategy game, etc.
What can we infer from this? What does the modern obsession with Minecraft tell us?
The children long for the mines. They crave for the opportunity to dig for coal. We should, nay must, send them back into the earth for its treasures.
The youth demand it.
"Well, he hands you a nickel
He hands you a dime
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door"
If a 14-year-old can decide to get an abortion or take life-altering drugs to permanently sterilize themselves, then certainly they have the mental capacity to decide if they can handle a potentially dangerous job. Either they are capable of making adult decisions, or they aren't. Personally, I don't think they are, but let's at least be consistent.
Why would we need more legal immigration to fill these jobs. What are the millions of illegals Joe has let in doing all day?
When I was 12 I had a paper route. I was an independent contractor to the company that published the paper and I made maybe $5 a week. My work took me out at 7-8 PM .in all weather. I loved it: it was “mine.”
When I was 13 or 14 I got an inside job at the paper for after school, making a bit more. Then a bigger job at a supermarket across town to which I rode my bike. It was fun, profitable and instructive: it taught me that I didn’t want to work minimum wage my whole life, and maybe college was not such a dumb idea.
All this before I turned 16. My friends did the same. No government intervention was required at any point.
The Left is all in favor of protecting kids from dangerous work, but doesn’t want to protect kids from puberty blockers and surgery.
In Nebraska yesterday, a female Democrat state Senator told the world that her 12-year-old daughter had known “for a long time” that she is male. A trans son at age 10 or 11.
This same state Senator has promised to filibuster every single bill if a bill protecting minors from sex change surgery passes.
This is the exact reason for this WaPo story: Dems care about kids; Republicans don’t.
The government can require kids to go to school. And the school can require teenagers to transit and attend 7am-4pm (Ie buses and early arrival; those hours aren’t outliers). And then have hours of homework each night. All of which is celebrated and normal with no promised outcomes besides vague statements of the value of education.
But if a 15 year old is in a cash strapped family and wants to earn money and maybe some experience working a few hours each evening in a blue collar trade that should be regulated. Or prevented.
Because the State knows best.
Republicans just need to respond that teenagers will commit mass suicide if they can't work jobs like adults? Is that what we say when we want policy that imposes traditionally adult decisions (like you know, surgery) on minors? We have to let them do it or they will kill themselves.
What does Wisconsin allow children working on family farms to do at what age? Tractors, balers, skid loaders, etc. are all heavy equipment.
Is this family business related. In which case, law or not, you have a job.
Just tell Ms Olen that unions can organize child labor and the Dems will be all for it.
As a sophomore in high school, I begged for an after school job. I found one at the local F. W. Woolworth store. I was 16 years old. I worked 5-9 through the week and 9-9 on Saturdays. The hours continued until the company advised me the Saturday hours violated child labor act. I was disappointed. Cut me back to 12-9 on Saturdays. As a kid, I considered myself wealthy (at a $1.40/ hour). It was sweet.
Before I closed up my business, I offered my grandson a job. He wasn't interested. Didn't need the money. Times have changed.
Children need to learn how to work. If they don't learn how to work or how to derive happiness and fulfillment from work they do not learn to value work.
Children who do not learn to work and to be self sustaining and fulfilled grow up to be entitled shithead leftist adult who want to go ruin and steal other people's work.
It is a partisan issue because democrats are interested in telling parents how to raise their kids.
It is a partisan issue because democrats want you adults to be empty shells of hatred that burn and loot the hard work of others.
In other words they want young adults to be Marxists.
arguing for the sake of argument
Kids who are working don’t have time for drag queen story hour, which is apparently the supreme cultural experience of all time that everyone has to attend and provide glowing praise.
Empathy outside of one’s immediate circle opens you up to manipulation, which explains a lot about Democrats.
You're probably gonna get a whole bunch of comments from old people like me, who remember the teenage jobs we had where the only limit was "less than 20 hours a week". Gas stations, restaurants, small retail, grocery stores, a video rental joint. Tons of places to work after school and into the evening until closing time, for a couple bucks an hour.
Incredibly valuable life experiences. Apparently all gone. Any attempt to restore even a glimmer of hope is now slandered as "child labor", as if starving, filthy 8 year olds are picking at a coal face. You want to prevent that? Go to the cobalt mines in the Congo, where the minerals for your cell phone and Tesla are extracted from the earth by actual children, not American teenagers.
Empathy makes you retarded. These 17-year-old "children" need only a small leg up into adult life. But they need to carry their own burdens while they do so, not be bullied into helplessness under the whips of the "empathetic".
Or, as a man with a physical disability once told me, after rejecting an offer of help up a flight of stairs: pity kills.
Perhaps some Stanford law students would be more respectful of others if they had learned the interactions required to work with others doing manual labor.
Yeah, I'd much rather have 15/16 year-olds sitting around playing video games. Dems' opposition to this trend is 'for the children.'
"A bill co-sponsored by Sens. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Angus King (I-Maine) and Maine House Democrats Jared Golden and Chellie Pingree would allow parents who own logging operations to employ their 16- and 17-year-old children to operate mechanized equipment — under supervision...."
If this includes sawmill equipment and/ or chainsaws, it's a mistake. In PA, the highest workers comp rates are highest for these jobs. It is high for a reason, they are the most dangerous jobs.
Nobody opposes forcing 14 and 15 year olds to do work; indeed, we legally mandate it: it's called going to school. The question is whether the kids should share in the bounty that results from their efforts. Maybe banning paid work in favor of book learning had some internal logic to it when we thought all kids should be going to college, but that was never more than a dangerous fantasy. Teachers just don't want to lose out on their grift.
Before reading the 'drag queen bit' I was going to say, relax. Allowing kids to work at age 14 or 15 is not like we're saying it's OK to cut off body parts, take hormone blockers, and change out their gender.
On the other hand, while I do believe kids should work, I also think it's crucial that parents sign off on it. I do believe work permits should continue. But...it should definitely be left up to each state to figure out on their own. The Feds don't need to get involved in this until the kids start cutting off their genitals at age 6. Wait. I mean until the kids start working coal mines at age 12.
PS- it's hard for me to match up Democrats with the word 'empathy' when they are the ones consistently denying school choice, and consistently applauding aborting pre-born kids, some pushing for it at any stage including post birth. Selective empathy at best. Ugh. Did I have to bring up abortion?
As per NIOSH, agriculture is a dangerous occupation. Yet as a fifteen year old with my temps license, I had two jobs during the summers, shearing Christmas trees with a machete, which began at 0600 and then running a tractor, pickle sorting machine, combine, hay baler, etc until 11:00 PM or so.
All this to say, these bills may just be pushback to reverse nanny state policies. Furthermore, the group of journalists who worked on this subject, never bothered to speak to any rural teenager with a car and a girlfriend.
Work is good for kids (and for everybody!). The left just wants to live off of other people's work and to teach kids that this is the way of the world. We are currently running out of other people's money. Right now!!!
Aside from my paper route (starting in 3rd grade), my first job was busing tables at an IHOP in Chicago’s southwest side. I was 14. At 15 I became a short order cook at a nearby A&W. Lots of jobs after that (toughest was post hole digger, much harder than grave digger) until I eventually headed to law school and then law practice. Every job was a beneficial learning experience. Although dangerous jobs warrant sensible regulation, I have no confidence in the ability of our sheltered chattering classes to strike reasonable balances, especially regarding family farms and businesses.
Same situation as Third World countries and caste societies like India.
Work is better than fancy internships for adolescents. But not forced labor. We could solve all of this by enforcing immigration rules, especially in our local poultry plants, largest employers in the region since NAFTA closed the factories. Sorry for $12 chickens and having to pay actual citizens to blow the leaves off lawns and streets, including politically connected county road contractors who hire off the books, Alpharetta and Buckhead, but the market will adjust, and our state and local tax obligations in policing, schooling, ESL, Medicaid, Medicare, and social services will plummet. Especially regarding child molestation cases, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Though in that case I don't mind paying the prison costs.
It will involve deportations. Sorry not sorry. But the market will adjust; citizens will take back those jobs; my mailbox will stop being pelted with Jalisco bottles and vodka pints; my property won't be overrun by my neighbors' wild and certainly not rabies-inoculated pit bulls, and my creeks won't fill with diapers and bulk tortilla packages. And the deadly road racing culture will cease.
Why should I pay through the teeth for other's cheap chicken? I imagine most here have never experienced how this happens at the hyper-local level, let alone are aware that it is abetted equally by leftists, democrats, libertarians, and the GOP in collusion with each other.
Democrats are horribly terrified that teenagers will learn to do something useful for other using tools. And that gives them power, making them less amenable to the manipulation by teachers and professors.
It’s probably meaningful that you rarely find an example of, say, a woke electrician or plumber or truck driver. This is not an ideology that infects people at random. It’s clearly a class phenomenon.
- Malcom Kyeyune
In the light of this analysis Carlyle's rhapsody on tools becomes a prosaic fact, and his conclusion—that man without tools is nothing, with tools all—points the way to the discovery of the philosopher's stone in education. For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this is the last analysis of educational truth.
—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900) (1886)
Barring kids from working "real" jobs and working past 9 p.m. is a really bad one-size-fits-all policy. There are a lot of teens who would benefit -- and not just monetarily -- from such employment, especially if (because?) the alternative is spending more time online. The idea that not letting teens work past 9 on a school night means they'll spend more time studying, or will get 10+ hours of sleep and arrive at school the next day bright and chipper, is a bit of a fantasy.
Also, I don't know if the law makes any exceptions for family businesses. If it doesn't, that's a shame.
Issues with rural kids working on family farms vs safety of doing so have existed pretty much since the start of the child labor movement. I don't think kids should be working in meat packing plants, but I helped my uncle with felling and splitting trees back when I was a kid, and that wasn't even commercial. He just wanted the wood for his fireplace.
Speaking from personal experience: I got my first "job" in 1955 at ten years old delivering circulars for a grocery store two afternoons a week. Then I parlayed that into a stock boy job at 12 and a delivery boy job at 16 when I got my driver's license. By the time I was a junior in high school I was running a three man survey team laying out roads, storm drains and lots at the newly filled Lake Norman North of Charlotte. From the time I was 15 I was working almost every afternoon and Saturday until dusk. This employment hurt my academics so much that I got a five year scholarship to study chemical engineering, and later a graduate fellowship in Ops Research/Systems Analysis. While in college I also worked. In fact starting at ten and until my retirement at 68 ten years ago, I was continually employed, either part time when in school or full time when not.
I started work early because I had to, not because I wanted to, but it was the best thing that I could have done. I learned time management, the value of a dollar, the importance of education and numerous other critical life lessons. In fact, although my daughters didn't have to work after school like I did, I "encouraged" them to do so. None of us have ever regretted it.
Ms Olen attended Smith College. She came from money and has no personal experience with poverty or what it takes to escape it, which is why she is advocating closing some the paths that lead out of it.
Quayle said...
So let me see if I understand the left’s position on the youth: 15 year olds are old enough to unilaterally choose to cut off their breasts or their genitals, but they’re not old enough to operate a backhoe or to cut meat? Is that the assertion?
not quite!
the left’s position on the youth: SEVEN year olds are old enough to unilaterally choose to cut off their breasts or their genitals, but 15 year olds are not old enough to operate a backhoe or to cut meat? Is that the assertion?
When I was 13 (70 years ago) I was operating heavy equipment.
If kids spent more time working at a job, they would have less time to spend on social media developing depression and anxiety.
Let’s be clear: We’re not talking about kids babysitting, getting a summer job, or working at the mall for a few hours after school, all of which are perfectly legal.
Agree with Tim Maguire.
Full-time working moms have childcare in place. It was the stay at home moms who needed someone on an emergency basis to take over for them. Summer jobs have become unpaid internships for wealthy kids or paid internships distinctly created for underrepresented minorities. And jobs for kids working at the mall died out with the malls.
When they are not "pouncing," they are "racing."
Republicans in statehouses nationwide are racing to make it easier for companies to hire youngsters.
Makes sense to me. If we have a labor shortage that requires millions of illegals to pour into the country, why not replace some of them with 15 or 16 y/o's that want to work? In the old days, my parents both had part-time jobs after school, and they would earn money for some fun on the weekends.
Slave labor! We need kids safely ensconced in after skool woke gender stimulation.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/pentagon-doctors-claim-7-year-olds-can-make-decisions-injected-hormones-puberty-suppressants
This validates that I am not just old and cranky. Each successive generation has gotten weaker in mind, body and character. Not as, strong, smart, or moral. (according to the Govt)
Many have recounted their own working experience. Mine falls within others. Thinking of some of the most dangerous. Unloading grain. Spinning PTO shafts 12 hours a day. Every farm kid knows a man that has lost limbs and digits from PTO shafts. Those shafts that transfers power from a tractor to an implement, like a grain auger, elevating grain to the top of a grain bin.
Mowing hay bales, we used both elevators and hay forks. One of my earliest jobs for hire was running the tractor that pulled the hay fork up into the barn. I was probably 8ish. It is mind numbing boring, unless you're 8 and get to drive a tractor...for money! Tractor operation in general. First field job was harrowing in planted corn, 20 foot harrow on a small tractor.
When us boys got older, I was the youngest of 3 day bought a B Farmall with a belly mower...we used it to mow all the fence rows. The wheels were about 40 inches apart, so prone to tipping over. Which happened a couple times a year.
Working livestock. Cattle and hogs. In with sows an boars, and 1200 lb steers ready for market.
Anyway, lots of danger, and the only broken bone was my brother getting pushed out of a tree when they were young.
Should 14 year olds be working? I suppose it depends. What I know to be a fact...the govt ALWAYS gets it wrong when taking these decisions away from parents. That translates to, the govt should not be creating laws, or standards, the cancels the power of parents to make such decisions.
The children long for the mines. They crave for the opportunity to dig for coal. We should, nay must, send them back into the earth for its treasures.
Won't someone think of the children?! Ha!
I see the problem as the govt fearing those that work before age 18 will discover independence, and grow to be successful independent people shunning govt "help".
A free and independent populace scares Washington DC senseless.
I was 14 when I worked over the summer in construction. There is nothing dangerous about it unless you are the one setting the trusses. Almost all of it is safe, and nobody would allow the 14 year old to do the parts that might be dangerous as there are plenty of tasks that are suited for their non-skilled labor. The same could be said for almost every industry they mentioned. But what they WANT you to assume is that these kids would be crawling through mine shafts or walking I-Beans 40 stories up without a cable.
And it is partisan because if the (R) is for it (D) must oppose, and vice versa. It is impossible to have bi-partisan issues because one side is evil.
If a 12 year old decides he wants to take massive doses of hormones to irrevocably change his body then that's his right as an American and how dare you question it!
If a different 12 year old wants to work a landscaping job after school then it's the government's place to prohibit that--why that young fella doesn't know what he's giving up, the danger he's putting himself in, and after all it's our job (collectively) to make decisions about his health and bodily autonomy!
Perfectly rational, perfectly logical, perfectly consistent.
(I did official work from 13 on; had to get a regional manager's sign off at one position when I was 14 as they usually didn't hire anyone under 16.)
Sometimes, 2 miles underground, those seams of coal get really tiny, and only 11yo or 12yo fingers can dig them out.
Am I crazy for wondering if there is coordination between the authors from disparate news organizations all using the same misdirection-by-omission and misdirection by association when reporting these changes?
The Iowa relaxation is only for teenagers engaged in a formal work-training program.
The Ohio and Arkansas changes still prohibit any work classed as dangerous.
Yes, I'm a fogey that as a teenager had to find an employer willing to jump through all the paperwork, reporting, and inevitable delay between hiring and start-date that were the consequence of the state's teen work-permit law.
It's blatantly obvious that this has disparate impact and results in life-long lower employment for certain minority groups, and the lack of mention of this aspect in the big coastal media when reporting on changes to child-labor laws is setting op red-flags for me that this is really intentional discrimination and the NGO-set is upset that it might stop.
Somebody has to do the work other than illegal immigrants.
Democrats like to keep the available workforce reduced to improve their unemployment numbers. The Uniparty has cooperated and raised the dole which, obviously, reduces the size of the workforce.
I worked 12 hours a day, maybe illegally, when I was 15. It doesn't seem to have affected my health or longevity.
Expanding [unPlanned] child labor is exactly what American kids need: self-esteem backed by achievement.
Wince said...When they are not "pouncing," they are "racing."
The party of old white people sounds awfully fit and agile.
The partisan issue is whether parents or government should decide when a teenager can get a job.
I was driving tractors and pickups when I was 12 and 13 on our farm. Rural kids grow up faster than town kids, IMHO.
Last time I checked, it was illegal immigrant children who were being placed in illegal employment to pay off their coyotes. I thought the Commies were OK with that.
At 14 I was running 4 automatic screw machines in the summer.
The most important thing any teenager needs to learn is how to work. Show up on time, do the job, follow instructions, advance and get paid more if you succeed, get money to spend on things you want. Learn about life.
As a parent one of the most frustrating things is that it is very difficult to get your teenager hired-especially at high minimum wage rates.
The companies that comply with reasonable safety requirements, and pay premiums for workers comp and liability insurance, will make sure that teens working for them are properly trained and supervised.
The companies that hire illegals, don’t pay insurance, and generally skirt the law will ignore whatever laws are put in place to safeguard the teens.
Basic economics.
Kate said...
“Why do the Mainers want late-teens whose parents own logging businesses to operate machinery? I'm quite interested to know. Aren't these "children" in training for the family industry? Also, King and Pingree are as left-wing squishy as they come. It's a farce to make this an evil GOP issue.
Our partisan knee-jerk reporting makes a potentially complex issue into a stoopid fest.”
It wasn’t that long ago (30 years?) that public school schedules in Aroostook County flexed around the need for kids to be in the fields in the fall with the potato crop. While much of this has been automated, people are still required to operate the equipment, and for the little kids, to go behind and collect those potatoes which didn’t get scooped up automatically. I’d rather do that on a hot September afternoon than be stuck in a stuffy classroom.
Growing up in VT those classmates who came from dairying or logging families had jobs helping out. Summers especially, when the good weather was in short supply. The state had farm exemptions for 14 – 15-year-olds to legally drive tractors and other equipment in the fields. These kids were out there with their fathers and others who worked on the farm. Do these boneheads think the kids were out there solo?
I'd be loathe to send my teenage child to work in a meat packing plant unless we got a really good discount on some prime cuts. The lumber industry is also problematic. If you think raising kids is expensive, try raising a paraplegic or amputee.....I had a paper route at twelve, caddy job at thirteen, fast food at sixteen, factory picker at seventeen. I would have much preferred no job during youth and adolescence. The character building aspects of hard work are vastly overrated. It's hard to reach a balanced judgement on veganism when your clothes stink of the meat pacing plant.
Of course American kids shouldn't be allowed to work in dangerous jobs. That's the job of third-world kids. If they didn't work in mines that produce rare earth metals, we would not be able to get the materials we need to make batteries for our electric vehicles so we can save the world from global warming.
My dad trusted 8-year-old me to drive the 9N Ford tractor, pulling a loaded hay wagon, up to the barn. That's all I had to do. I knew my limitations and he knew that I knew my limitations. I was around 13 or so when I drove the "M" pulling the baler and wagon. Teach a kid responsibility early on, and unless they fall into bad company, they will always be responsible. Both my kids found jobs as soon as they got their drivers license. They have worked ever since, even through college.
Re: to current Wisconsin law - In most cases, agricultural child labor laws do not apply to children working on their family's farm. According to Wisconsin state law, the minimum age at which a minor may work in agriculture during school hours is 18. The minimum age at which a minor may work in agriculture outside of school hours is 12.
Other information: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wisconsin/agriculture-child-labor-laws
I've got a grandson who is fix'n to turn 13. He desperately wants a 'real job'. Go Figure.
I don't see why waiting another two years to mop floors and bag groceries (my first real job) is much of a gain for him.
'At 14 I was running 4 automatic screw machines in the summer.'
You were a pimp?
: )
"...or simply raise wages." It's such a simple solution, why haven't we tried it? It sounds like an argument made by a tenth grader in 'speech and debate'.
I didn't realize that 14 and 15 year olds can't work until 9:00 during the school year. That seems outmoded.
I understand the concern that some young people may end up in dangerous situations. It requires employers to act in good faith, not just in training, but also matching ability with the required tasks. Furthermore, if parents and/or employers act in bad faith, restrictive laws won't improve the situation.
The article mentioned work restrictions on 16 and 17 year olds. Would these be the same 16 and 17 year olds that Democrats want to allow to vote?
I've got two boys ages 17 and 19. Both worked from age 15. One bussing and later waiting tables, the other teaching karate. It has been nothing but good for them. Not dangerous work, but then most work isn't these days. They've got friends who work on the family ranches. Those kids are scary competent. Also just a bit scary to be honest. Fucking cowboys are a different breed.
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