Blacklisted News – by Kate Harveston
The Trump administration — its Department of Labor, specifically — is about to make life a little more difficult for another group of people. It must be Monday.
There’s a lot to like about the idea of apprenticeship programs. They could radically transform the labor market and provide a much-needed source of opportunity in the vast and forgotten middle-ground between the college-educated and the uneducated.
Donald Trump is a supporter of apprenticeships, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when he put his head together with the Labor Department to craft a proposal that would empower apprentice-style employers in America, they landed on what is probably one of the laziest and most unnecessarily dangerous plans they could have concocted.
NOT A BURDENSOME REGULATION
You’ve heard the phrase “burdensome regulations” ad nauseum for probably your entire adult life. But one branch of regulation that’s definitely not burdensome, nor optional, is the branch that protects minors from dangerous workplace conditions.
At the present time, America’s Hazardous Occupations Orders, or HOs, prohibit employers from tasking teenagers under the age of 18 with the operation of chainsaws and a host of other powered equipment; working at height, including on rooftops; and a broad variety of other manifestly hazardous types of manual labor, for more than one supervised hour per day.
For most of human history, one of the principle wars being waged was the one against unnecessarily hazardous working conditions — a position sometimes violently opposed by profit-first industrialists. It’s a rare moment in history when the government of a civilized and well-developed nation such as the United States actively seeks to roll back civilizing regulatory standards designed to keep young bodies and minds out of harm’s way.
But the Department of Labor intends to introduce a proposal that would remove the restrictions we’ve just described. Their mission, literally, is to “safely launch more family-sustaining careers by removing current regulatory restrictions on the amount of time that apprentices and student learners may perform HO-governed work,” reads the official DOL statement.
Putting aside the idea that teenagers should be called upon to “sustain their families,” this proposal, would allow employers to task minors as young as 16 with full days of difficult and oftentimes dangerous manual labor.
IN PURSUIT OF FAMILY-SUSTAINING JOBS
This is business as usual from the GOP. If you’re a hale and hearty 29-year-old, you probably find it difficult to care or worry about the idea of raising the retirement age to 65, or 70 or even higher. “We’re all living longer,” the logic goes. “So why shouldn’t we be working longer?”
Now we’re watching the other side of the pincer close on working families in America. As we chip away at the quality of our retirements by forcing ourselves to work longer into our golden years, and as we relax our child labor laws to the point where teenagers have to, or feel they have to, take on dangerous work to support themselves and their families, what’s left but a nation of indentured wage-slaves? For every minor victory “the left” secures for working families — for example, the Obama-era Browning-Ferris court ruling, which classified contractors as proper employees — we have to deal with a dozen other attempts to undo even a small amount of social progress.
To play devil’s advocate for the DOL for a moment, it’s clear the spirit of this maneuver isn’t entirely out of touch with reality. The idea of expanding job opportunities for people caught in the gulf between America’s old money and its shrinking pool of opportunity is as bipartisan an idea as it gets. But trying to fix this situation by shredding child labor laws is hilariously misguided. Or it would be, if it wasn’t widely expected to be deadly.
The far more sensible approach would be to support a federal jobs guarantee program. There are already millions of available labor-centric jobs in America and millions of able, adult-bodied women and men who are ready to step into them.
Opponents of the DOL’s proposal see this is a clear assault on, in their words, “decades of progress” toward the reduction and elimination of occupational injury and fatality among minors. Said one vocal critic from the Child Labor Coalition: “When I started doing this kind of work 20 years ago, we were losing 70 kids a year at work, and now we are losing usually 20 or less … I think [relaxing these standards] would be a tragic mistake.”
Granted, this presidential administration runs with the “gun control doesn’t save lives” crowd, so why should we expect any different here?
Whether or not you’ve identified this situation, correctly, as a clear battle between the working class and the political donor class is irrelevant. You don’t have to wade too far into the Marxist end of the pool to not like where things are headed when neither our elderly nor our young can count on life beyond employment.