I Reckon: Child labor and the myth of the labor shortage

In a perfect world, children wouldn’t have to get jobs because their families depended on another source of income to survive. Alas, the reality we find ourselves in doesn’t have that. And in Arkansas, home to the ultimate political nepotism baby Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a law just passed rolling child labor laws to the days when we had kids tinkering with dangerous machinery. Actually, we’re technically still doing that now.

The Arkansas law basically says that children under 16 no longer have to have their age verified before being allowed to work. Hell, they don’t even have to get the Arkansas Division of Labor’s permission, via a work permit. Gov. Sanders’ team said in a statement to NPR that the permit requirement was an “arbitrary burden” on parents. It’s the old “get the government out of my personal life” kind of argument. But don’t be fooled. The new Arkansas law just opens the door for businesses to unscrupulously employ your children — freeing businesses from the requirement of parental consent for 14 or 15 year olds to work. 

What ought to get you is the seemingly automatic responses that supporters of child labor law easements, like this questionable editorial from the Washington Examiner will give, namely that successful adults worked as teenagers, and that teens can now take advantage of a world of work that’s experiencing a “labor shortage”. Pause for a minute and take a walk down memory lane with me.

My first paying job was at a Panera Bread in San Jose in the back of house, making overpriced sandwiches and salads while serving up sous-vide soup (burning myself in the process) for $15.50 an hour, plus tips and single-dollar bills people slid over the counter that I’d split between my other back of house coworkers.

I must have been about 16 or so when I first started working, mainly because I wanted to help pay bills and save for college. I didn’t do it because I wanted character — being poor, Southern and first-generation gave me plenty of that already. No, it was poverty that gave me marching orders to split time between classes and work, and poverty is no doubt the reason why many kids take up work.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn valuable life skills that only a job in food service could teach, but at the cost of doing homework on lunch breaks and getting home at 10 p.m. only to stay up until the wee small hours working on things due the next day? It’s not exactly fair to say that kids will learn and earn from working at younger ages when committing time to work takes away time spent on education and mucks up mental and physical childhood development. I learned that first-hand.

And the argument that children can take advantage of this so-called “labor shortage” for their own benefit? Please excuse me, but there couldn’t be a bigger piece of pig shit in the pig pen. There are people able and willing to work, but the number of jobs that offer a wage you can live on and benefits you can count on is on the decline. Working people are quitting low-paying jobs and finding better ones. The solution for businesses and employers ought to be to take a long look in the mirror and create better jobs now that they’re in a position to attract workers and not the other way around.

However, it seems like the myth of “labor shortages,” taken on its face, makes for a sly cover-up to take advantage of children, who have been historically less likely to strike, paid less and who were easily manipulated. If I didn’t know any better, it would seem as if these arguments in favor of easing current child labor laws are more or less our society’s willingness to maintain the lowest depths of ethical and moral standards in order to keep making profits without changing a thing about how they treat prospective workers.

With states beyond Arkansas, like Ohio and Iowa, considering passing rollbacks on child labor laws of their own, I’m more resolved than ever that the fight for a better future for the next generation ought to have started yesterday. We cannot keep pretending like a nation that strives to be so great can continue to be great when it sleepwalks back into the dark ages.

Quynh Anh Nguyen is a junior writing about the implications of current Southern political events. Her column, “I Reckon,” runs every other Monday.