When Iowa lawmakers voted last week to roll back certain child labor protections, they joined a growing movement among conservative Republicans.
On Tuesday last week, The Guardian reported that during an overnight session that ended in the predawn hours, the Iowa Senate voted to allow children to work longer hours and serve alcohol, the latest move by Republican-controlled statehouses to combat a labor shortage.
The bill passed 32-17, with two Republicans — Sens. Charlie McClintock and Jeff Taylor — joining the entire Democratic party in opposition of the bill. And keep in mind too, this is just part of a broader Republican effort to pull the country back into the dark ages.
According to Gizmodo, the bill now moves to the Iowa House of Representatives. Some call it child labor. Others, such as Iowa Republican Sen. Adrian Dickey, call it freedom.
“With this bill, we are strengthening and providing protections to our youth. We are not forcing them into slave labor. We are not selling our children. We are not even requiring them to work,” Sen. Dickey said on the Senate floor. See? No slavery. What more do you people want?
But don’t kid yourselves and don’t listen to the glob talk of snake-oil salesmen like the good Senator Dickey. There is a reason why child labor laws date back to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the United States.
By 1910, over 2 million children were employed in the United States. included children who rolled cigarettes, engaged in factory work, worked as bobbin doffers in textile mills, worked in coal mines, and were employed in canneries.
If Iowa kids are lucky, they’ll get good, hardworking American jobs like the Department of Labor turned up in February. This year, the DOL found over 100 kids as young as 13 years old were working illegal jobs in slaughterhouses owned by Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and other companies.
Or maybe Sen. Dickey hopes his kids can get a gig with Hyundai-Kia, which is under investigation for employing 14-year-olds in factories across Alabama. Actually, Dickey and other conservatives want parents and not the government to determine whether and where 14- and 15-year-olds should work.
“Federal and state entities should be working together to increase accountability and ramp up enforcement — not make it easier to illegally hire children to do what are often dangerous jobs,” Labor Solicitor Seema Nanda said, reports the Washington Post. “No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop.”
The Labor Department has seen a 69 percent increase in minors employed in violation of federal law since 2018, officials reported. Between 2018 and 2022, federal regulators opened cases for 4,144 child labor violations covering 15,462 youth workers, according to federal data.
“The trend reflects a coordinated multi-industry push to expand employer access to low-wage labor and weaken state child labor laws in ways that contradict federal protections,” the Economic Policy Institute said in a recent report. “Children of families in poverty, and especially Black, brown, and immigrant
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