Two Steps Forward, Ten Steps Backward.

[Editorial]

That is where we are heading!

The Republicans rolled back a woman’s right to choose to the 1970s.

The Republicans rolled back our protections to the 1950s.

Now the Republicans roll back child labor laws to the 1900s.

The conservative campaign to rewrite child labor laws

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank and lobbying group, drafted state legislation to strip child workplace protections, emails show

Washington Post

By Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl

April 23, 2023

When Iowa lawmakers voted last week to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.

At 4:52 a.m., Tuesday, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15 year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.

The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.

And Iowa wasn’t the only state to do this, it happened in Arkansas and Missouri…

That law passed so swiftly and was met with such public outcry that Arkansas officials quickly approved a second measure increasing penalties on violators of the child labor codes the state had just weakened.

In Missouri, where another child labor bill has gained significant GOP support, the FGA helped a lawmaker draft and revise the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

But the voters were not happy, not happy at all!

The excuses that they use to justify their raping if the child labor laws are,

Supporters of the child worker proposals say they reduce red tape around the hiring process for minors. A spokeswoman for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a rising Republican star, said her state’s law relieved parents of “obsolete” and “arbitrary burdens.”

[…]

Child welfare advocates and some business leaders said the new legislation could endanger children on the job and entice others to leave school to join the workforce.

Using children as peons is “reducing red tape? The Republicans don’t want us educated, they want an illiterate workforce that they can manipulate.

A January 2022 white paper previewed talking points that lawmakers would go on to use while discussing the legislation.

The paper called teenagers “a critical source of labor,” and linked the conservative backlash to pandemic-era education policies to alleged overreach by school officials charged with protecting children in the workforce.

“Now is the time for state lawmakers to eliminate unnecessary hurdles to teenage work and leave the decision-making to parents,” the paper declares.

This feeds right back into the Republicans’ “Parental Rights” platform to circumvent the laws!

The question is why? Why do they want to roll back the labor to the 1890s and 1900s?

The billionaire oligarchs love this idea! Cheap labor. The next thing that they go after is OSHA.

I asked Google Bard that question… Has any Republicans suggested doing away with OSHA?

Yes, some Republicans have suggested doing away with OSHA. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump proposed a budget that would have eliminated OSHA. The proposal was met with strong opposition from labor unions and safety advocates, and it was ultimately not adopted. However, some Republicans continue to believe that OSHA is an unnecessary government bureaucracy that stifles economic growth.

In 2019, for example, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a bill that would have repealed and replaced OSHA. The bill was never voted on, but it did serve as a reminder that there are some Republicans who would like to see OSHA go away.

It is important to note that not all Republicans support doing away with OSHA. Many Republicans believe that OSHA plays an important role in protecting workers from harm. In fact, a 2018 poll found that 63% of Americans believe that OSHA is doing a good job protecting workers.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not to do away with OSHA is a complex one. There are valid arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. It is up to each individual to decide where they stand on this issue.

Just like when the Republicans said they were not going to roll back Roe v. Wade. I trust the Republicans as far as I can throw a pig.

***

I have had run-ins with OSHA before I retired, I was put in charge of safety of the factory and we had a couple of OSHA inspections after minor accidents (One ghastly accident, an employee jury-rigged a way to defeat a safety interlock, she put a rivet through he thumb.).

They fined us a half a million dollars for the violations that he found but you know what because the company immediately fixed the problems they waved all the fines except the original accident of $10,000 and I had to retrain the woman (So my retraining of her and her supervisor when like this… “What the f**k were you thinking of when you bypassed the safeties? Did it hurt like hell? Well don’t do it again!” And to the supervisor “Why the f**k didn’t you say something when you saw how she rigged the riveting machine?” The company HR wrote her up for not stopping her from bypassing the safety.).

I found OSHA to be reasonable and professional when they saw that we were not taking an adversarial position. I am old enough to remember seeing elderly men with disfiguration and disabilities from industrial accidents.

[/Editorial]