US debates letting teenagers on to assembly lines

“Are we actually arguing about whether 14-year-olds should work in meatpacking plants?” asked Terri Gerstein in The New York Times. Amazingly, it seems we are.

The Iowa legislature is currently considering a bill that would allow children of that age to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers, and allow 15-year-olds to work on assembly lines moving items weighing up to 50 pounds. And Iowa is far from alone.

Republican legislators across the US are seeking to loosen child labour laws. In Ohio, there’s a push to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9pm during the school year – in violation of federal law. The Minnesota legislature is debating letting the construction industry recruit 16- and 17-year-olds. Last month, Arkansas’s governor signed a bill eliminating a requirement for 14- and 15-year-olds to have a state work permit to get a job.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

‘Liberals are freaking out’

These enacted and potential rollbacks are happening at the same time as the media are reporting a “surge of child labour violations on a scale and of a type that we hadn’t heard about for many years”, including many cases of companies illegally employing migrant children.

Liberals are “freaking out” about these latest moves by state legislatures, said the Washington Examiner, but we’re not talking here about “sending eight-year-olds into coal mines”.

Arkansas is just making it easier for teens to work and earn money, by scrapping some redundant paperwork. It’s still illegal to employ 13-year-olds in that state, just as it was before.

The reality is that “parents know better than bureaucrats what is best for their children”. Many teens could benefit from, say, working a part-time job at Walmart for $14 an hour, especially if they’re saving for college.

And with the current labour shortage, employers stand to benefit, too. Today’s youngsters “spend too much time on social media and too little growing up” – so “anything reasonable that a state can do to make it easier for them to work is welcome”.

‘Campaign to roll back worker protections’

This isn’t about helping teens earn a bit of pocket money by babysitting or doing a spot of Saturday work in a shopping mall, said Helaine Olen in The Washington Post.

This is part of a concerted campaign “to roll back worker protections” and to reduce average wages. “We’re talking about teenagers working long and late hours year-round in often dangerous occupations”; about underage children operating fryers in kitchens and working on assembly lines.

If we’re short of workers, we should put up wages or expand the number of legal immigrants, not exploit teenagers.

Children will pay a stiff price for any easing of child labour laws, said Steven Greenhouse in the Los Angeles Times.

During the pandemic, many teenagers fell behind academically. Enabling them to hold longer-hour jobs makes it more likely they will quit school and “ultimately become lower-paid, less-productive workers”. This will only “hurt America’s overall economy in the long run”.