Red states across the country have begun rolling back child labor
protections because of course, you have corporations that really,
really need more labor that they can exploit and
pay as little as possible, children are perfect for that.
Now, Iowa is one of those states and thanks to the work of More Perfect Union,
we now have restaurant groups and other businesses in need.
We know about the restaurant groups and other businesses looking for
cheap labor and how they fueled the efforts by state lawmakers to propose
this bill and potentially pass it.
So, before we get to the industries behind the bill, the money behind the bill, why
don't we tell you what the bill actually does, again, this is in the state of Iowa.
It was sponsored by a Republican state senator by the name of Jason Schultz.
Let's watch.
>> The next part of the bill was clearly written for
the Iowa Restaurant Association, Hotel and Lodging Association, and
National Bureau of Independent businesses.
The state leaders in low wage jobs,
it would allow 14 year-olds to work in giant freezing meat lockers and
raise their mandatory clock out time from 7 PM to 9 PM and then 11 PM in the summer.
>> The research that has been done has found pretty clearly that 20 hours is
kind of a cut off and when kids work more than that during the school week,
the grades start to plummet and their school completion rate starts to plummet.
>> Imagine having child labor laws that allow for
them to work as late as 11 PM at night, that's insane.
But the proposal goes much further, okay?
So teens under 18 will still hypothetically be barred
from employment in fields like mining, logging, demolition,
and they will be barred from operating dangerous machinery, maybe.
I mean, there have been child labor law violations all across the country
where children do stuff like this and they just get slapped with a fine and
then they do it again.
So again, there's the law and then there's the enforcement of the law,
enforcement of the laws are lacking.
So even though the law says that, or the proposal says that children won't be
doing these things, just let's wait and see what actually happens.
Now thanks to a newly added section to this child labor proposal in Iowa,
the bill would allow the Iowa Workforce Development and State Department
of Education heads to make exceptions to any of the prohibited jobs for
teens ages 14 to 17, participating in work based learning or
a school or employer-administrated, work-related program.
So, in other words, if the right people sign off on it, kids as young
as 14 can be working in these areas, in these incredibly dangerous jobs.
The bill would also allow 16 and 17 year old's to handle alcohol,
and that basically means that literal teenagers, 16 and
17 year old's would effectively be placed in pubs and
bars where they would be serving liquor to drunk adults.
Let's just pause on that for one second, because while we've been hearing
from Republicans who fear monger about books in school libraries.
They falsely claim that the books are pornographic and dangerous for the kids.
Apparently not a peep from Republican lawmakers when it comes to this proposal
that would put 16 and 17 year old's in bars and
pubs where you have drunk adults, where they would be serving the drunk adults.
Amazing, it really is amazing stuff.
Okay, so why are Republicans pushing for this?
What's really going on here?
Well, an Iowa lobbyist actually pretty blatantly admitted that the state's child
labor bill was written by the restaurant lobby and handed to Republican lawmakers.
Let's watch.
>> The bill was really spearheaded by the Restaurant Association.
We sort of came along, we were invited to come along.
>> That's Brad Epperly, a lobbyist who works for
big corporate clients like the Iowa Grocery Industry Association.
He's outright admitting to us that the Iowa Restaurant Association was
the driving force behind this bill.
They're an affiliate of the National Restaurant Association, a trade group that
represents some of the biggest names in fast food, like Burger King and Taco Bell.
They also lobby for big corporations like PepsiCo and Cisco.
And from one look at their newsletter from this time last year, you can tell they've
been hard at work spreading the gospel about the benefits of young labor.
>> You know, it's amazing, everything old is new again.
I mean, if you wanna see what the benefits of child labor really look like,
just take a look at what child labor was like before unions
succeeded in passing necessary child labor regulations.
I mean, you had kids who were just permanently injured as a result.
You had children who died on the job.
What are we doing?
And remember the whole point of this, the whole reason why you have the restaurant
industry and other moneyed interest pushing for this,
is because they just want cheap labor, that's it.
That's all it is.
And it's just so incredibly disgusting because you know with adults,
they might get a little mouthy,
adults might start talking about organizing their workplace.
Kids have less power, kids might be a little less willing to speak out if they
feel they're being mistreated on the job.
That's what's really going on here.
But it's not just the restaurant lobby, tons of other business interests were
involved in pushing this legislation in Iowa and you should know about them.
>> This child labor law rollback originated at a meeting of
the Iowa Workforce Development Board which is overseen by Governor Kim Reynolds.
Most of its members are corporate CEOs and lobbyists and
they meet up several times a year to come up with new policies.
This bill was a product of a meeting in November.
The WDB is chaired by Jay Iverson, Executive Officer of the Association of
Iowa Builders, hence the emphasis on kids using band saws on work sites.
Lobbyists from the Iowa Association of Business and
Industry are well represented on the board which gives member corporations like
John Deere and Google, seats at the table.
And of course,
no race to the bottom would be complete without the Coke funded Americans for
Prosperity and Opportunity Solutions Network, also lobbying on the bill.
>> So we know the people behind it, we know what their intentions are,
we know what the agenda and objective is.
What's so devastating when you really think about it is what children will be
robbed of, because think about what it's like to be a kid, right?
You're already under a lot of stress and pressure with school homework,
all of that, maybe your parents put you in extracurriculars.
I can't emphasize enough how important just free time to explore is
when it comes to personal development.
That's true of adults by the way, but it's definitely true of children.
Giving them the opportunity to just explore the world,
explore what their interests are.
Just have free time to do what they want to do as long as they're safe of course.
Have the free time to figure out who they are.
I mean,
these are important moments in our lives that kids could potentially be robbed of.
Because think about it,
if families are dealing with precarious economic situations, which they are,
and all of a sudden there's an opportunity for their children to go to work and
maybe increase the household income, they might take advantage of that.
And it sucks because parents might do this out of desperation.
And I think that the industries behind this are well aware of that, right?
Not only do they underpay workers, adult workers,
which places them in a precarious economic situation.
That precarious economic situation might even persuade those very
parents to send their own teenagers to work, when in reality, we need to deal
with that root cause of what is causing all of the precarity to begin with.
Finally, we should talk about the lawmakers and
politicians in Iowa who have been bribed by these industries, okay?
So there's grocery company Hy-Vee, for instance,
they've donated over $800,000 to Iowan politicians like Kim Reynolds,
Schultz, who proposed the bill and the Iowa Senate majority leader,
Republican Jack Whitver over the past decade
while also being a prolific violator of child labor laws.
And Iowa unfortunately is not the only state that is proposing such legislation.
You should also note that Hy-Vee, the grocery store that I talked about earlier,
they've already been forced to pay $700,000 for
more than 30 labor law violations since 2000.
But they're undeterred.
They're like, all right,
if we don't like the laws because it ends up leading us to fines and
all sorts of regulatory headaches, why do we just change the regulations?
And they can do that, they could definitely push for
that by bribing the politicians and that's what they have chosen to do here.
So other states that are doing this, we have Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin.
In fact, Wisconsin has, they're all trying as
we speak to expand child labor in their states.
And finally, in Arkansas, as we've covered on the show,
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
signed a bill into law last month that would make it easier for employers to
employ children without having to worry about violating certain child labor laws.
The Iowa bill has passed through committee but
neither chamber of the state legislature has voted on it yet.
There needs to be a lot of push back against these measures.
We cannot go back to the days when children were operating heavy machinery,
working to the late hours of the night.
They're kids, they should be focusing on their school work.
They should be focusing on exploring, figuring out who they are as people,
playing, enjoying time with their friends.
Again, these are incredibly important developmental years, and the idea
that they should be exploited by companies looking for cheap labor is disgusting.