From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's the Big Tick. I'm west Kosova today Why some US states are loosening child labor laws. For quite some time now, owners of retail stores, fast food joints and restaurants, and other businesses have complained that the tight labor market means they can't find enough people willing to work for the low pay and often poor benefits these kinds of jobs sometimes offer. Now, several US states are responding by easing up on child labor laws.
Laws intended to protect teenagers by limiting the hours employers can schedule them to work and the kinds of jobs they can hire them to do. Tuesday afternoon, Governor sanders Son House Bill fourteen ten into law.
House Bill fourteen ten relates to the work permit that is required for an individual under sixteen years of age when they want to get a job.
Kids under sixteen would be able to work six hours a day instead of four, and sixteen and seventeen year olds would be able to work the same hours as adults. Jessica Dunker with the Iowa Restaurants Association argues those changes will help businesses and Iowa teens.
This has been controversial, to say the least, but it's not the first time we've seen political pressure to put young people back to work.
The issue of child labor was way more contentious historically than most people realize.
That's historian doctor Betsy Woods. She's written a book about child labor in America, and I talk with her a bit later in the show. First reporters Rebecca Rainey and Chris Marr tell us where this is happening and how it's playing out. Chris was starting to see several states passing these laws that are loosening restrictions on child labor. What exactly is happening.
A lot of the bills are along the lines of letting fourteen and fifteen year olds work later hours on a school night, or eliminating a special work permit requirement for workers under sixteen. And that's the bill that we saw Arkansas actually pass and the governor sign a few weeks ago.
There's at least.
One bill out there in Iowa that's maybe a little broader and more concerning from the sort of child safety advocates perspective, and that bill would loosen a lot of different kinds of child labor restrictions. Do things like let teenage apprentices work certain manufacturing and warehouse jobs and lessen the potential liability for businesses if an underage worker is injured, and let sixteen and seventeen year olds serve alcohol, which is normally reserved for workers who are eighteen and up.
So that's probably the one that has gotten the most attention from folks that are concerned about child safety in the workplace.
And some of these bills also allow so kids to work late night shifts, is that right, and work in industries that are considered to be more dangerous than kids are usually allowed to work in.
The Iowa bill is really the one that changes which industries kids are allowed to work in, and that's one that has moved through the state Senate, still waiting for a final state House vote, although that could come any day. There was another bill in Minnesota that would let I think sixteen and seventeen year olds work in construction, probably less likely to pass this year since that's a Republican sponsored bill and a Democratic majority legislature.
Now, Rebecca, what does the federal law say about what kids can and can't do?
That's actually something really interesting. Some of these bills will run a foul of federal labor law. And so what that means is basically, states are telling employers to follow rules that are weaker than those at the federal level, meaning that while state enforcers may not come in and police, you know, the rules, it's going to be up to the federal government itself to make sure that those employers
are following the rules. And that goes into a whole other issue of where the federal government's agency that's required to police these issues is extremely underfunded and understaffed. But just to go back to some of the federal rules so that we're reminded, so the US Labor departments Wage an Hour Division is the subagency that is in charge of enforcing all sorts of laws under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which includes prohibitions on the kinds of jobs
and work that kids can do. All sorts of federal limits set to protect kids, especially fourteen and fifteen year olds, from working in dangerous conditions. Child labor laws usually specifically limit where kids can work, what types of jobs they can do, and the hours that they can work. Usually fourteen and fifteen year olds have more restrictions when it
comes to hours. Some things that may be surprising for folks is that it's illegal for fourteen and fifteen year olds to work more than three hours on a school day or past seven pm on a school day that includes Fridays, and during the summer they are allowed to work after nine pm. But you know, again, some of
these time limits may not be very obvious. Also, when I talk about places that kids shouldn't be in, for example, there's just something that they call hazardous occupation orders that say, okay, kids can't work with certain types of dangerous machinery. For example, kids aren't supposed to be in manufacturing facilities or in meatpacking plants where there's these large pieces of equipment that could tip over that could potentially harm them, even things
like meat slicers. We also recently saw a case brought by the Wage an Hour Division involving a fast food chain where a kid was working with a deep fryer and suffered from deep frier burns.
Chris, how is it that state laws can violate a federal law? Why is that a lot?
That's a good question. It's not really allowed, but some states will try to do it anyway. And I guess we see this on a lot of different areas of policy where states will maybe try to push the envelope. So basically what would happen there is federal law would
override the state. There would be a few businesses, some very small businesses, that are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the federal law, and so in that case they would revert to the state law, and those businesses actually could have the fourteen and fifteen
year olds working until nine. But another piece of this that we've heard in our reporting is that some of this may be strategic on the part of business and industry groups that want to be able to have more younger workers in their restaurants and retail jobs, for example, with the goal of saying, hey, if we get out there and maybe we can get five or ten states to pass these looser restrictions, then we could use that as leverage to kind of pressure Congress, maybe not this Congress,
maybe a future Congress, to say, hey, why don't we do the same thing at the federal level and actually relax those federal laws.
There's plenty of ways for people to get around these federal rules when states weaken these laws. While the Feds may be able to come in and target some of these larger businesses that aren't exempt.
There's also a whole patchwork.
Of exemptions that they have to navigate through.
You mentioned, Chris that industries are pushing for this. What industries in particular want to be able to hire younger kids.
With the Iowa bill in particular, there were some state retail and restaurant associations that were advocating for it. There was actually a federal bill proposed last year in the previous Congress that would do similar things along the lines of letting teenagers work later hours on school nights and work more hours during the week during the school year, and in that case it was advocated by the National Restaurant Association. I think a lot of it is pushed
by restaurant in retail, but certainly not just that. The Ohio bill is advocated by the National Federation of Independent Business, which is a small business advocacy group that spans all different industries.
Rebecca, I suppose it's no coincidence that some of the industry is pushing for this are the ones that are having trouble finding people willing to work these low wage jobs in a tight labor market, and are thinking that teenagers are a good way to fill in.
When we read some of these stories, even the most egregious cases, a lot of these kids say they want to be working. Sometimes kids don't have any other choice but to help feed their family in addition to going to school. So there's lots of layers to why this is happening. I think when it comes to the labor market question, a lot of unions and labor advocates will say that if companies are struggling to find workers, they
should raise wages. But as we all know, with inflation, it's not always easy for a company to be willing to sacrifice the bottom line in that way.
You know, we've seen some pretty egregious violations reported, like this case of the Packers Sanitation company that had kids going in and cleaning meat packing plants and ended up facing a one and a half million dollar fine from
the Labor Department for that. And I think it's going to be interesting to watch going forward whether we might see some response from states in the other direction, maybe not this year, maybe in future legislative sessions, but to strengthen their own enforcement efforts around child labor violations.
And I should say Packers Sanitation Services says they have a zero tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of eighteen, and they say they're fully committed to working with the Department of Labor to make additional improvements to
enforce that prohibition. When we come back why it's not always easy to police child labor laws, Chris, Is this something that's happening more in red states and blue states or is this a trend that's happening around the country no matter who's running a state.
I think a lot of the proposals we're seeing that would relax child labor restrictions do tend to be in red states Republican majority legislatures Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, among others.
How exactly are these laws enforced? What is the federal government supposed to do, what are the states supposed to do, and what are businesses supposed to do?
When it comes to actually going and slapping someone on the wrist for a violation, people will send complaints into the agency, or they would see it during an investigation. Perhaps they were referred by another federal agency. Like in meatpacking, for example, there's a lot of food safety inspectors who will be in there more often than the Department of Labor. If someone is in the door, sometimes they can say, Hey, that person looks really young and maybe they shouldn't be
working here. I'm gonna let the Wage hour Division know. But the problem is the wage in our division is extremely understaffed and underfunded. The last time I checked with the agency, they said they had seven hundred and ninety four investigators to cover more than nine point eight million workplaces in the United States. So a lot of times these investigations happen when a catastrophe happens. You know the case that we saw with packer sanitation and the children
working overnight in the meatpacking plants. It was teachers who said, we have kids who are falling asleep in class, are not showing up to school. Sometimes not until the violation happens that the federal government gets itself in the door.
Unfortunately, states can and do sometimes do their own enforcement around child labor violations. But how robust that labor enforcement is at the state level varies pretty widely from state to state and even then across the board. As with the federal agency, the state agencies are chronically underfunded, and even the funding and positions that are available. A lot of states had trouble keeping those filled and have continued
having trouble filling them since the pandemic. I would just add on the earlier question about red states and blue states. It was interesting to see that Arkansas, in addition to the bill to eliminate work permits, came back a few weeks later and enacted a separate build to increase the penalties for child labor violations. It's a case where the state sort of went both ways this year.
In the case of say Arkansas, where the governors or Hockey Sanders made a big point of saying, we're no longer going to require you to provide proof of someone's age. Does that kind of send a message to employers that are not really going to be looking so closely at this.
And that's the point that I think a lot of sort of child safety and labor advocates made about that bill. You know, the supporters of the bill said, well, this is just paperwork. We're just getting rid of some government or red tape. If teenagers want to work and their parents are okay with them working, why should they have
to fill out more paperwork from the government. But the advocates on the other side said, well, this is a check, This is a way of having some proof that we know how old this person is, we know what they're allowed to do on the job and what they're not allowed to do, and how late they're allowed to work. So yeah, I think that's a concern for the safety advocates that yeah, maybe it does send that message that the state's not really going to be watching that closely.
Rebecca. Let's say everyone's doing their job the way they're supposed to do and federal inspectors with a Wage an Hour's Division or a state investigator finds out that there's a child labor violation. What happens from there?
I know on the federal level, it would start an investigation by the Wage an Hour Division. They would audit their books, request how they sought proof of age, how long this person had been working for them, also so that they can calculate potential penalties, that sort of thing. There's different levels of violations that could be found as well.
If a company is found to be willfully violating the law is very aware if they've had previous violations, the penalties that they can face can be much higher.
What are the penalties, like what does this.
So this is an issue the Apartment of Labor and the Biden administration has said is making their enforcement abilities harder because the maximum civil monetary penalty for a child labor violation right now is a little over fifteen thousand dollars per child, which you know, officials believe is just not enough of a deterrent. And that's something that the
Biden administration has requested Congress change. They want not only more funding for their enforcement, but they also want them to pass legislation to increase these monetary penalty amounts.
Chris, what is the argument that people in favor of listening to these laws are making?
Business groups and mostly but not entirely Republican lawmakers sort of make the argument that work experience is valuable and if a fifteen year old wants to work a few hours on a school night, you know, scooping popcorn at the movie theater or whatever it might be, that's valuable life experience. It's a way to earn a little money. Presumably they're there with their parents' permission, although not every
state requires that. There's documentation of that. And some of these folks have said to me Hey, look, this is not really fair that we're sort of getting lumped in with this case of kids cleaning meat packing plants using caustic chemicals. You know, this is not the kind of thing we're advocating for. We agree that that's wrong and that's illegal, and those companies should face penalties for it.
But we're talking about, you know, letting teenagers work until nine pm or sort of cutting out the permit application process for teenagers who want to work, and so parental
rights is a piece of that too. In Arkansas in particular, where the legislature enacted this law to get rid of the work permit requirement, state lawmakers pointed out, look, if parents want to let their kids work, and the kids want to work, then why should the state be in the way to sort of put up this additional red tape and say, well, you have to go through this permitting process.
To do it, Rebecca, so far, we're seeing this happen in really just a handful of states. When you look down the road, you cover this all the time, what do you see. Do you think that we're going to start to see this expand I.
Would say no, and that is because the heightened scrutiny. We have seen of these types of cases when it comes to various child labor violations, But when it comes to Congress actually moving in this direction of loosening laws, I would predict that we would see things go actually in the opposite direction, more protective of children if there
were any policy changes in DC. However, we do have an election coming up, and there's always the potential for things to change, the makeup in Congress to change, So, you know, I think Chris is right in saying that states are maybe planning the seeds for a future administration of future Congress to consider something like this, especially with the state of the economy as it is.
Rebecca, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having us, Thanks for having me when we come back. The push to peel back child labor laws is history repeating itself. Of course, we have heard this story before, as doctor Betsy Wood can tell you. In fact,
she's gonna tell us. She is the author of Upon the Altar of Work, Child Labor, and the Rise of American Sectionalism, Doctor Wood, I think a lot of people have been surprised by the sudden rise of these child labor laws that are going into fact in different states because for a long time the question about children working had been settled, that it was something we didn't want.
I know, it seems that way, and I empathize with the perspective. From an historical standpoint, isn't as surprising, and that's simply because the issue of child labor was way more contentious historically than most people realize. I think the common assumption might be that child labor existed a long time ago. Everyone knows that it was really awful, especially in dangerous working conditions or in factories and coal mines and things like that, and that the country came together
and realized that this wasn't okay and abolished it. That's not really true. You know. What really happened is more of a decades long battle that lasted for about one hundred years, and I think I should say extends into the present day. It wasn't over with the nineteen thirty eight passage of the Federal Labor Standards Act that did give us our first federal child labor law. The first attempt at a federal child labor law was back in nineteen o six and it failed, and there was another
attempt in nineteen sixteen. That also, I wouldn't say they failed. It's more that the Supreme Court decided they weren't constant, and there were just contentious battles where you know, parents would take these laws to court and say this violated their rights as parents, and the Supreme Court would agree
with them. I think the larger point is the issue of child labor has always tapped into bigger debates in American society, and I think that we're seeing that being revived again today in a way that I would say is kind of consistent with what has happened in the past.
And what is that consistency, What is the argument now?
To step back a little bit, business interests have always sort of been at the heart of public debates over child labors. So in the past, you had textile mills in the South really relying on child labor in large numbers when the South was just starting to be industrialized, and so their arguments were that this was good for the economy. Their arguments were that they were uplifting these children and their families and giving them financial opportunity unities.
There were arguments about the moral value of labor, that it teaches children important moral lessons that will help them in life. And then there was a very effective argument about parental rights that if there are disagreements about this labor and how it affects children and what children need, who should be the one deciding Should it be the government that decides this or should it be parents that
decide this? And so the argument over parental rights is ultimately the one that business interest, I think realized was very effective in kind of pushing this framing of the issue. That is the argument that was used back then, and very strikingly I have seen that again today. It's similar in a lot of ways. Not exactly because there's a whole different framework in the nineteenth century, of course, but I do see some resonances with the past.
Well, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast had jobs when they were teenagers. I did. I had my first job at McDonald's when I was fifteen, and you know, it was a real character building exercise. I liked the Arnie the extra money.
That is kind of what the Fair Labor Standards Act was trying to accomplish in a way, was is this labor appropriate? And so, for example, there's an emphasis on dangerous occupations. There's an emphasis on what is the type of labor that children are doing? You know, is it something furthering, like when you're talking about your experience and
working at McDonald's. You know, this could be something that the number of hours didn't interfere with the other pursuits in your life and could have complimented what you were doing. And so, you know, I think there is nuance there, and I think what's happening now is just surprising because it's a kind of aggressive attempt at rolling back protections that haven't been touched in a long time.
These laws are coming up at a time when there's a tight labor market, a lot of places are looking for people to work in There's this big debate about whether there's really a labor shortage or if there's just a shortage of people willing to work those kinds of jobs for low wages anymore when they have other opportunities. And so now there's this idea that teenagers will do those jobs and that you can pay them a lower wage.
This conversation could just as well have been happening in the nineteen thirties, because during the Great Depression, you know, the idea that jobs should be going any available jobs should be going to children or to youth just started to make no sense, and people were basically more likely to say, well, in this instance, we need to make sure that all available jobs that are full time, full time employment need to be going to adult workers that
need these jobs. And so that moment actually really helped the cause a lot in getting people to support federal legislation to in child labor and for the Supreme Court to finally go along with the constitutionality of this legislation.
As somebody who spends a lot of time looking in the past, I'm and ask you to look into the future. Do you think that this will gain kind of acceptance and popularity.
Well, I don't know how good my crystal ball is, but I would say I don't think we should ever assume that we settled that and that one that's in the dustbin of history. I don't think that we can ever do that, really, even with something like this, Especially maybe with something like this, My take would be typically the side of protecting children from dangerous occupations and from
harmful labor tends to win. I think that that would be the case, But I don't think that the opposition should be underestimated anyway, because they have successfully managed to defeat or weakend child labor laws in American history in
ways that are surprising. They were able to prevent a child labor in the nineteen twenties that had very widespread popular support that everyone thought was going to pass, and it didn't because this opposition was very organized and very effective in being able to rally just ordinary citizens on the basis of of the government takeover of the family and that parental rights are going to be interfered with. So these kind of fear based arguments can be really,
really powerful. So I don't know, I guess I'm going to say I'm fifty to fifty.
On it, Doctor Betsy would thanks so much for talking with me today.
Thank you so much for having me.
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