The enterprising Republican solution to proliferating labor violations is to repeal as many child-labor protections as they can get their hands on. No child-labor law, no child-labor violation! Much of this effort is driven by a Florida think tank called the Foundation for Government Accountability, which receives funding from various reactionary nonprofits, including the Bradley Foundation. Since 2022, nine states have passed laws to weaken child labor protections, including Florida, Iowa, and Michigan. Earlier this month Democratic Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have required employers to secure work permits to employ 14- and 15-year-olds. Not to be outdone, in Congress Rep. Dusty Johnson, Republican of South Dakota, introduced a bill last summer (“the Teenagers Earn Necessary Skills Act”) to expand from 18 to 24 the number of hours that minors are permitted to work during the school year, and to extend permissible night-time work hours to 9 p.m., up from the current limit of 7 p.m. “If a high school student can play in a football game until 9 p.m.,” Johnson said in a prepared statement, “or play video games late into the evening, they should also be allowed to hold a job.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: The Republican fetish for child labor is bad politics for the GOP and good politics for Democrats. There is, so far as I can tell, no constituency for exploiting child labor, except for a few management ghouls. A Democratic party that can’t defeat a GOP grown nostalgic for the days, more than a century ago, when children labored in glassworks, tenement sweatshops, coal mines, and copper mills, is a Democratic party that just isn’t trying.
