Back To Work!

Republicans have new idea to fix labor shortage: Loosen child labor lawshttps://t.co/y4yyNhIr3V

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 3, 2021

Yes, Newt Gingrich wanted to do this 10 years ago:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called child labor laws "stupid" Friday in an appearance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid," said the former House speaker, according to CNN. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

"You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America," he added.

It was just a matter of how you define "child":

In Ohio, the Republican-controlled state legislature took up a measure last month to allow businesses to keep teenagers under the age of 16 at work until 9 p.m., with a parent's permission. Previously, they had only been allowed to work until 7 p.m. The bill was introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat.

Likewise, the Wisconsin Senate last month also passed a bill which would allow businesses to hire 14- and 15-year-olds to work from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weeknights or 11 p.m. on weekends. The measure would only apply to businesses which run less than $500,000 in sales annually and aren't governed by a federal statute known as the Fair Labor Standards Act.

... In 2011, Wisconsin eliminated limits on the number of hours — and days — that minors aged 16-17 could work, and even replaced the phrase "child labor" in state law with "employment of minors" in 2017.

Won't anybody think of the children?

In an op-ed for the Bucks County Courier Times, a local Pennsylvania Newspaper, high school junior Darcy Leight wrote that she and her peers were experiencing burnout at much higher rates due to the increasing pressure to work longer hours in recent months.

"A job I intended to work strictly during the summer has somehow found its way into my fall schedule and has become almost equivalent to academics on my priority list. And I don't even know how it happened," she wrote. "The coupling of a job anywhere from five to 35 hours a week along with being a student is extremely stressful.

And just as a reminder that we have, indeed, always done it this way:

To put this in some context:  the first child labor laws in the U.S. on the federal level were passed in 1938, largely because adults were desperate for work, not out of a new concern for child labor.  Woodrow Wilson had signed an early bill into law, but the Supreme Court ruled that it regulated intrastate commerce and the law was voided.  So child labor has not been regulated for yet 100 years in this country (and Newt Gingrich thinks that's been not quite a century too long; but that's a topic for another day).

In 1903, Mother Jones led a "Children's Crusade" march from Kensington, Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York, summer home of then president Theodore Roosevelt.  The march was to demand laws to get children out of factories and mines and into school.  Roosevelt refused to meet with them, and yet to this day TR is lionized, and no one mentions his indifference to the horrors of child labor. 

Is this a great country, or what?