The return of child labor is right up there with the loss of abortion rights in terms of shocking backslides but people don't seem to care as much about it.
Children in Iowa would be allowed to work longer hours and jobs that are currently prohibited, like assembly-line work or serving alcohol
:agony:
The bill, Senate File 542, would let 14-year-olds work six-hour night shifts
:agony-shivering:
The bill suggests that businesses allow “work-based learning programs,” for secondary students in the state to be able to work part-time while they study.
:agony-immense:
The bill then clarifies that businesses will not be liable for injuries or illnesses a student suffers on the job unless the student can prove that their boss told them to perform the action which made them injured or ill.
:agony-limitless:
Just a reminder as well, that these 'work-based learning programs' are probably going to be the same kind of packets that are given to child actors, which are not reviewed or graded by anybody. We will likely have 10-20% functional illiteracy in the U.S by 2030.
I guarantee you the functionality illiterate is a greater proportion of the population than that already
I'm surprised it's only 21%. My phytopathology professor likes to ask really basic questions about geography and history. A class of 100~ couldn't answer what or where Carthage was.
I sentence you to playing 100 hours of video games that are just maps.
I don't actually know, but they sacked Rome by way of Spain, so... Morroco?
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.
:agony-limitless:
On the other hand I guess this explains the weird popularity of YA novels among older people
"In middle-income neighborhoods the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in low-income neighborhoods, the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children. "
Jesus
Edit: From this article about child literacy statistics and man... I've read a lot of things about child poverty and all the injustice in the world, but these statistics got to me a lot more than others. I always knew that I had a very privileged upbringing and this might sound ridiculous to those who didn't, but this made me really sad:
Children in low-income families lack essential one-on-one reading time, whereas on average, children who grow up middle-class families have been exposed to 1,000 to 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading. The average child growing up in a low-income family, in contrast, has only been exposed to 25 hours of one-on-one reading.
In general, when I read the line "In a study of nearly 100,000 U.S. school children, access to printed materials was the key variable affecting reading acquisition." my first reaction was "Come on, what kids don't have access to books?" only to read a few lines later that... low-income families really don't have books. They can't even read the Very Hungry Caterpillar to their kids. It's a $10 expenditure that some families literally just can't afford.
When I was like 10-12 I'd sometimes read as much as a 300-page book a day and back then I'd always brag about it because it made me feel smart, it never occured to me that all those books cost money that many people can't afford to buy for their kids even if they might want to.
Learning to read is fun and easy if you can afford it, but only then :deeper-sadness:
Oh, I'd believe it, but I am attempting a conservative estimate.
"Your honor there is no proof that my client, an esteemed businessman in the community, would tell one of his employees to pull a bone out of the meat grinder that was interfering with its typical operation."
okay, if I, if I chop you up in a meat grinder, and the only thing that comes out, that's left of you, is your surplus value– :unsus:
And that's all they need to say to get elected. A lazy bibe quote and it gives them pass for everything.
Surely this will help the upward mobility of the lower class and break the cycle of poverty. If my grandfather could buy a riverfront property by being a manager at woolsworth and retire by 53, just imagine the head-start these youngsters are going to get.
GOP controlled Iowa Senate Pulls All-Nighter to Roll Back Child Labor Protections
I'm so tired of the media.
They're right tho. Midwest Republicans are the small business parties, their whole schtick is competing to see who can pummel workers the hardest in order to get the local Hardee's franchise owner's vote.
Nationally Democrats are the party of finance capital, but in the heartland states the local parties have enough ties to unions and labor advocacy groups that it would be political suicide to introduce a bill like this. Even if individual Dems voted for this bill or wanted it to pass, only the GOP has a mandate from their base to actually propose it.
I know it is not the case, but I genuinely wonder sometimes if they are doing the grooming fearmongering to distract from child labor law reversing
When you understand that they view children as their property instead of as young individual people, the picture starts to come into focus. "Grooming" is their scare word for a subset of things that reduce their own dominion over their children, but the wider set of things that do that includes "laws that make your 11-year-old take a spanish class instead of going to a meatpacking plant to earn you money"
This is not even a secret. I noticed this a lot reading through articles, how often they proudly talk about "giving control back to the parents". Conservatives want absolute control over their children and every aspect of their lives. That's why they can call gay people groomers and then turn around and advocate for child marriage without missing a beat. Marrying your daughter off when she's 14 is great, because it means you get to decide who she marries before she's old enough to get her own ideas.
It's not a secret, but it can difficult to grasp it because it's a completely fucking alien mindset to us.
It is also why they freak out so much about them going off to college and them coming back hating them or even just going to school in general.
RETRVN to 1890s politics has been the dream of the Bourgeoise for the last 100 years. Now, most reactionary, libertarian, etc. parties usually restrained themselves to Reaganism or a Hong-Kong kind of hellhole, but the United States are setting record low standards worldwide of what's considered acceptable.
Maybe it'll lead to a revival of radical politics, or maybe the doomer in me is correct in thinking we are going to move ever closer to the ancaps' utopia (but with a state to beat up the uppity) with little pushback.
Spot of hope? The first gilded age was succeeded by the progressive era, when we got speakeasies and revolutions and the birth of most modern welfare systems
Rip childhood for Americans 1938-today
Couldn’t even make it
10090 years before we brought back child laborJoke's on us. With declining birth rates, we're dipping into a drained well.
