It Is In Fact A Bad Idea To Let Children Work In Sawmills, And Other Bad Ideas Are In Fact Bad Ideas Too

Koch-funded 'child labor' think tanks working hard to bring about a very bad future from a very bad past.

When it comes to work safety regulations, the Left and Right are at a bit of an impasse. We say we want safety regulations at workplaces because we don't want people to die or be severely injured while they are working, while conservatives largely seem to think that this is all a dirty lie and we just want to control everything and rain on the corporate profit parade. Either that or they are right-libertarians who think that if we just abolish OSHA and leave the corporations to do as they please, safety regulations will be unnecessary because it is so clearly in their economic best interest not to kill their workers.

For a while now, but the last year in particular, Republicans have been chipping away at child labor laws, because of how the poor rich corporations just really need cheap labor and sometimes that needs to come at the expense of other people's kids. For years, outside of the farming industry, a lot of this was just fantasy — like Newt Gingrich's lifelong dream of school lunchrooms cleaned up by child janitors . In the last few years, Republicans in 14 states have sought to roll back child labor protections, such as those barring kids from working too many hours, at night, and in hazardous industries. To really gild the lily, in one state, Iowa, if a business kills your child during an industrial "work program," that business is immune from civil suit.

MORE! May Day 2023: Unions And Fair Wages For Some ... Child Labor For Others? 

 GREAT IDEA IOWA! Let Children Work Dangerous Jobs And Then Give Their Employers Civil Immunity! 

In Wisconsin, Republican legislators recently proposed a law that would allow children as young as 14 to work in bars. Because, sure, nothing would be remotely weird about being served a dirty martini by someone who still takes a yellow bus to school every morning. They also recently tried and failed to expand working hours for kids 14 and older, because Wisconsin, despite its ultra-gerrymandered Republican Legislature, has a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who vetoed it.

Last week, in Wisconsin, 16-year-old Michael “Mikey” Schuls had an accident while working at the Florence Hardwoods sawmill. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.

This happened with the laws that are in place right now. If Republicans are allowed to loosen those laws, which have banned dangerous child labor since FDR ... there will be a lot more accidents like this.

VERY PREVIOUSLY! Today In Labor History: In 1938, FDR Ends Child Labor, Creates Minimum Wage ... At A Cost 

Now, nobody is saying 16-year-olds can't have after school jobs. I, myself, had a job at 16. But I was hanging tube tops and pleather pants at Wet Seal, not operating heavy machinery. The worst torture I endured was Black Friday and the kind of people who bought things that said "Princess" on them (who were just universally unbearable as human beings). When I worked at The Icing, they didn't even let anyone under the age of 18 pierce ears. I'm gonna say that if you're too young to operate an ear piercing gun, you are too young to operate heavy machinery at a saw mill. This feels like common sense.

You know what else feels a lot like common sense? That people working outside in obscenely hot weather should have water breaks so that they don't die of heat exhaustion. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott thought that was just ridiculous and decided to pass a law banning local municipalities from requiring construction companies to give their workers water breaks in extreme heat. 

That law hasn't even gone into effect yet, and two construction workers have already died from heat exhaustion this summer — one in Dallas and the other in San Antonio, neither of which had laws requiring water breaks to begin with.

Via Texas Observer:  

Since [the bill was passed], 11 people between the ages of 60 and 80 have died of heat-related illness in Webb County, the Associated Press reported. Most did not have air-conditioning in their homes. A teen and stepfather died while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park, per a National Park Service release. According to the Texas Tribune , at least nine inmates, including two men in their 30s, died in Texas prisons that lack air conditioning. And at least four workers have died after collapsing while laboring in triple-digit heat: a post office worker in Dallas, a utility lineman in East Texas, and construction workers in Houston and San Antonio .

Clearly, Texas is a pretty dangerous place when it comes to the heat.

Barring trust fund babies, people usually need to have jobs in order to survive. Thus, it is in everyone's best interest that people are not regularly killed by their jobs and that things are done to keep that from happening. This is obviously not something that the invisible hand of the free market can handle, because no matter how unnecessarily dangerous a job is, there will be people desperate enough to work it. And heck, sometimes those people will be kids.

Clearly, these businesses have demonstrated that they are somehow unable to keep from killing their workers without a certain amount of oversight and regulation, that even the threat of lawsuits from workers and their families after the fact is not enough to keep them in line. So yes, it does have to be the job of the government to step in and say "You can't hire kids to work heavy machinery," or "You can't do construction in 100 degree heat unless you make sure your workers get to drink enough water."

There were a total of 5,190 fatal workplace injuries in 2021, up 8.9 percent from the previous year. This is a problem that is getting worse, not better. And something needs to be done.

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