The return of child labor is right up there with the loss of abortion rights in terms of shocking backslides but people don’t seem to care as much about it.
Oh my god
Children in Iowa would be allowed to work longer hours and jobs that are currently prohibited, like assembly-line work or serving alcohol
:agony:
The bill, Senate File 542, would let 14-year-olds work six-hour night shifts
:agony-shivering:
The bill suggests that businesses allow “work-based learning programs,” for secondary students in the state to be able to work part-time while they study.
:agony-immense:
The bill then clarifies that businesses will not be liable for injuries or illnesses a student suffers on the job unless the student can prove that their boss told them to perform the action which made them injured or ill.
:agony-limitless:
Just a reminder as well, that these ‘work-based learning programs’ are probably going to be the same kind of packets that are given to child actors, which are not reviewed or graded by anybody. We will likely have 10-20% functional illiteracy in the U.S by 2030.
I guarantee you the functionality illiterate is a greater proportion of the population than that already
“Your honor there is no proof that my client, an esteemed businessman in the community, would tell one of his employees to pull a bone out of the meat grinder that was interfering with its typical operation.”
GOP controlled Iowa Senate Pulls All-Nighter to Roll Back Child Labor Protections
I’m so tired of the media.
They’re right tho. Midwest Republicans are the small business parties, their whole schtick is competing to see who can pummel workers the hardest in order to get the local Hardee’s franchise owner’s vote.
Nationally Democrats are the party of finance capital, but in the heartland states the local parties have enough ties to unions and labor advocacy groups that it would be political suicide to introduce a bill like this. Even if individual Dems voted for this bill or wanted it to pass, only the GOP has a mandate from their base to actually propose it.
Surely this will help the upward mobility of the lower class and break the cycle of poverty. If my grandfather could buy a riverfront property by being a manager at woolsworth and retire by 53, just imagine the head-start these youngsters are going to get.
And conservatives complain about grooming…
I know it is not the case, but I genuinely wonder sometimes if they are doing the grooming fearmongering to distract from child labor law reversing
When you understand that they view children as their property instead of as young individual people, the picture starts to come into focus. “Grooming” is their scare word for a subset of things that reduce their own dominion over their children, but the wider set of things that do that includes “laws that make your 11-year-old take a spanish class instead of going to a meatpacking plant to earn you money”
This is not even a secret. I noticed this a lot reading through articles, how often they proudly talk about “giving control back to the parents”. Conservatives want absolute control over their children and every aspect of their lives. That’s why they can call gay people groomers and then turn around and advocate for child marriage without missing a beat. Marrying your daughter off when she’s 14 is great, because it means you get to decide who she marries before she’s old enough to get her own ideas.
The Gilded Age: ‘Returned’, or ‘Never Left’?
RETRVN to 1890s politics has been the dream of the Bourgeoise for the last 100 years. Now, most reactionary, libertarian, etc. parties usually restrained themselves to Reaganism or a Hong-Kong kind of hellhole, but the United States are setting record low standards worldwide of what’s considered acceptable.
Maybe it’ll lead to a revival of radical politics, or maybe the doomer in me is correct in thinking we are going to move ever closer to the ancaps’ utopia (but with a state to beat up the uppity) with little pushback.
Spot of hope? The first gilded age was succeeded by the progressive era, when we got speakeasies and revolutions and the birth of most modern welfare systems
