Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children

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If you took the time to read it, you would know that's not at all what this legislation is about. These regulations existed because children were exploited and taken advantage of in the past. [1] Would you care to inform us of the specific changes in Iowa that have now made "children working in dangerous conditions" no longer a concern?

I'll provide a counterpoint now, you can just reply "sorry I was wrong". [2] just a few months ago a US based organization "Packers Sanitation Services, Inc." was found illegally employing minors across eight states, with children as young as 13 cleaning their meat processing plants with hazardous chemicals during night shifts.

14 year olds don't need to log more hours at the office or cleaning industrial bone saws. They need to log more hours in their education and playing with their friends.

Well, even in your analogy, there would be no point in giving vaccines if the diseases had been eradicated. I haven't had to take a polio vaccine, have you?

I agree with you that we get to live in a society where we are prosperous enough to enjoy safer working environments - I guess I see labor laws as the cart being pulled by the horse here. The fact that working environments are so much better regulated and safe means I think we don't need to pearl clutch so much anymore about younger people wanting to engage with them.

But I don't want to leave this point - the rules were arbitrary. Why is 18 a magical year where you are allowed to train on a forklift? And there is an entire category of work almost none of these laws apply to in the US - agricultural work. I was allowed to drive a tractor on a farm at age 12, but was not allowed to use turn on a deep fryer at 17. These are not very equitable rules - these are rules of convenience.

In an era when we are (supposedly) supposed to be pushing kids back into trades and apprentices, why so much hullabaloo about them not doing enough college prep?

I mean, I would argue you're not making a rational argument here.

> 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.

That's pretty vivid imagery for someone who doesn't want an appeal to emotion. It even has "won't someone think of the children" vibes.

The arguments against this are that we've litigated it in the 1920s and discovered that child labor = exploited labor. Children have less volition than adults and so we're putting them into a vulnerable position by including them in an adversarial relationship of negotiating for pay/work. I'm not saying kids have to go to college to make a living (at the moment that seems clearly unnecessary). But why shouldn't kids go to a trade school to learn in a safer environment, instead of being at risk in on-the-job learning in dangerous environments?

Also there are other pieces of school that are more fundamental to day-to-day life than college. I learned a significant portion of my communication skills in high school. Are you okay with kids missing out on high school in order to take a job? That feels like it is likely to severely limit their ability to get other work later in life if they should ever lose that one skill they learned. "Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one." The whole point of school is to get a broad base of skills that you can apply to multiple situations. Any work kids would do in their formative years has the potential to undermine this by competing for their time.

> Well, even in your analogy, there would be no point in giving vaccines if the diseases had been eradicated. I haven't had to take a polio vaccine, have you?

You picked an ironic example given that the polio vaccine is still administered in many parts of the world since, up until about 10 years ago, it was still very much a part of people's lives in some places.

> But I don't want to leave this point - the rules were arbitrary

All laws appear "arbitrary" if you don't know why they were written in the first place.

I invite you to learn about Chesterton's Fence.

> I agree with you that we get to live in a society where we are prosperous enough to enjoy safer working environment

You've got your causation backwards, there.

> The fact that working environments are so much better regulated and safe means I think we don't need to pearl clutch so much anymore about younger people wanting to engage with them.

The entire damn point is there's people tearing down those rules.

> Why is 18 a magical year where you are allowed to train on a forklift? And there is an entire category of work almost none of these laws apply to in the US - agricultural work. I was allowed to drive a tractor on a farm at age 12, but was not allowed to use turn on a deep fryer at 17. These are not very equitable rules - these are rules of convenience.

Sure, because there was a very strong political lobby that worked to ensure labour protections didn't apply to children working on family farms because they wanted cheap labour.

Sound familiar?