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Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#101

Post by red-iron-pine »

the_only_law wrote: post #75
falcolas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serving alcohol... ugh. Bartenders already get enough guff from patrons. Imagine a 16yo having to deal with trying to cut somebody off.

Imagine some drunk asshole trying to hit on and harass the 16 year old bartender. I’ve seen it plenty of times minus the 16 year old part.

16 year olds can't be bartenders. In most states the person pouring, or opening, the alcoholic beverage has to be a bartender and has to be 18, or in some cases, 21.

They're a waiter, or someone standing at a counter.

Listen, this law sucks, but these points reek of "won't someone think of the children!". They're not working at a bar at 1am, they're waiting tables at the local pizza place and bringing a beer out with the pepsis.

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#102

Post by [deleted] »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe any rational argument will appease. Risk can be objectively measured but people vote their feelings. This bill is being used to avoid raising wages to draw adult labor into the state's marketplace for manufacturing, agriculture, and other objectively higher risk industries. These young workers will be harmed, and they will have no recourse (as typically happens in America).

> Risk can be objectively measured but people vote their feelings Having done cybersecurtity at a few F500s, I can tell you that risk is often just as "feelings" based as anything else. In most cases risk is a WAG based on whatever model you feel like flogging this week.

[deleted]

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#103

Post by WillPost4food »

zamalek wrote: post #46
WillPostForFood wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16- and 17-year-olds can work and allows them to serve alcohol Teens don't really have smaller hands than adults. This bill is sane. Allowing kids to work for construction is going to improve lives more than blindly pushing everyone regardless of desire or aptitude in college and graduating them with a worthless degree and a half mil in debt. Let teens work in roofing and get some skills that the world actually needs…

> parent has granted permission for the work The bill itself touches lightly on the problem: parents. One massive example of a potential problem: does the bill protect education at all? The kids learning skills that can make them money is really a fringe benefit when you consider how much money their parents can make. Win, win, for all!

does the bill protect education at all?

Of course it does. The vilification of the bill entirely based on the worse case assumptions is really unfortunate.

---

No person under fourteen years of age shall be employed or permitted to work with or without compensation in any work activity.

No person under sixteen years of age shall be employed or permitted to work with or without compensation in any work activity during regular school hours, except the following work activities:

1. Those persons legally out of school, if such status is verified by the submission of written proof to the director.

2. Those persons working in a supervised school-work program.

3. Those persons between the ages of fourteen and sixteen enrolled in school on a part-time basis and who are required to work as a part of their school training.

---

Knowing that there are educational protections, does that make you feel better about the bill?

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#104

Post by Izkata »

rhyn00 wrote: post #92
falcolas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget cleaning meat packing plants. Fucking cush jobs, amirite?

The bill explicitly states packing plants are not allowed.

More precisely from what someone said above, meat packing plants are now allowed, but as a meat packer is not allowed. So they could have something like an office job at a plant (manager's assistant..? I don't really know how they're organized).

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#105

Post by DoreenMichele »

In 2019, 14.4 percent of kids in this country, 10.46 million children, were living in poverty as measured by the official U.S poverty rate. This is higher than the share of adults age 18 to 64 (9.4%) and higher than the share of those 65 and over (8.9%) who live in poverty (see chart).

https://econofact.org/child-poverty-in-the-u-s#:~:text=In%20....

For children in poor families, the opportunity to work is the opportunity to have a better life in the present and lay the foundation for a better future.

For people being all "won't you think of the children," most of the time people up on their high horse are all for taking away options from poor people without doing anything to actually address the underlying issues. It almost always amounts to making things worse, not better, for the target demographic.

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#107

Post by DoreenMichele »

legitster wrote: post #95
sonofhans wrote: post #24

In 18th century London children were disposable labor: like cheaper, less durable horses. Children as young as 5 would work in match factories, dipping matchsticks into boiling sulfur by hand. Their lungs dissolved after a while, but then the factory owner didn’t pay their parents much for them anyway. Young children were the best chimney sweeps, too. London chimneys were a fucking mess, of course, built up rapidly a…

There was that famous Unicef report about the child labor sweatshop in Bangladesh that closed down and most of the children went to work in the sex trade. Regardless of how common that actually is, it seems pretty logical to me that if people are desperate enough for work, it's only because all of their other options were worse . So while I think laws played an important part in ending chimney sweeps and the like, th…

Something I have heard said:

Even before Westerners hear of the deplorable conditions in the third world sweatshop and demand the international corporation do better, locals are lined up down the street and around the corner hoping for a job because they beat you half as much and pay you twice as much as local employers.

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#108

Post by Kon-Peki »

foooobaba wrote: post #15

“Do I want my 16-year-old operating a power saw as a job? No, I don’t“ - then don’t let them? Why do you need to make it illegal for everyone else? Iowa is mostly a rural state, and growing up on a farm you learn to operate power tools when you’re 10, and there are plenty of 16 year olds in Iowa that are more than capable of running a power saw and working on roofs and are proud to do it. Better than sitting around a…

> Iowa is mostly a rural state

Iowa isn't mostly a rural state (though I'm sure plenty of Iowans think that way). It's approaching 65-70% urban - not even close to being in the top 10 most rural states in the US.

What is really surprising it that the small towns all over Iowa have excellent urban form. Suburban sprawl is mostly limited to Des Moines, with a little bit in Council Bluffs (part of the Omaha metro area).

Check out the US Census urban area map and notice how many urban areas there are in Iowa (If a city is represented with a dot, it is an urban area of fewer than 10,000 people):

https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/UA20/UA_2020_WallMap...

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#109

Post by r00fus »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #56
dilippkumar wrote: post #29

Any demographers in here? I wonder if this has anything to do with the baby boomer generation all hitting retirement around now, and the incoming cohort being smaller than the retiring cohort.

A lot of is pandemic moms staying home to deal with kids and older folks that don't want to work public jobs anymore.

A non-trivial amount of folks have died from the pandemic or have some degree of long covid as well.

Meanwhile, large conglomerates use the supply chain scares to arbitrarily raise prices causing real inflation.

At some point, the BS required to do an entry-level / retail job isn't worth it (min wage doesn't pay enough these days), or you're simply incapable of doing what you could before.

Re: Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

#110

Post by MilStdJunkie »

I'm more of a big picture guy when it comes to this crap. What's the general policy direction here.

OK, I get it. Higher mortality, that's at least consistent with the worldview. I do hope someone's planning to pay ladies dump trucks full of cash to pump out these little workers, because there's some bad news about single income households.

That's even assuming said ladies can convince earners to rent wombs for the dubious honor of chucking genetics into this fantastic new future that's being created.

Anyway, single income households. Huh! An article from the 1980s saying they're ALL subsidized in one way or the other! Look at that old-fashioned typesetting. Not sure how that took everyone by surprise! Oh wait, it didn't take anyone by surprise WHO ISN'T A GODDAMN

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