MAGA’s vision for America
What sort of America do you want? That question will not appear on fall ballots but will be there nonetheless alongside whether we continue the American experiment in democracy.
Gover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, famously hoped to return conditions in these United States to those of the late-Gilded Age McKinley administration (1897 – 1901). Upton Sinclair savaged conditions in the American meatpacking industry in “The Jungle” a few short years after McKinley.
Today’s second Gilded Age MAGA Republicans are onboard.
Indiana state Rep. Joanna King (R) this week introduced a bill that would exempt children at least 14 years of age and who have completed the eighth grade from attending school to work (with parental permission) on a farm during school hours.
King is treading a wider path blazed last March by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas (BuzzFeed):
Under the new law, children under 16 no longer have to get permission from the state’s Division of Labor to get a job, nor will they need to have their age verified or submit things like their work schedule for a permit. In addition to no longer needing to get a work certificate, children won’t need their parents’ consent.
Sanders’s communication director, Alexa Henning, told BuzzFeed News in an email that the permit was “an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.”
The law’s sponsor said the law was prompted not by local businesses, but by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida think tank, wrote Gene Lyons of the Chicago Sun-Times. He was less than approving:
This isn’t about the white, suburban kids Sanders gathers around her for photo ops. She recently signed a bill funneling state money to private school vouchers, surrounded by a crowd of children without a single Black or brown face in evidence, lest anybody fail to get the message.
To serve the economy
Led mainly by Republican legislators, at least 10 states including Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and New Hampshire have considered rolling back child labor laws, ostensibly to address labor shortages, WGBH reported in October:
“[Nationwide] we’re finding kids in automobile factories on the floor of a packing house, or some chicken processing plants and in other manufacturing facilities, in seafood, in lots of industries where we really haven’t seen children working in decades,” said David Weil, Brandeis University professor and a former administrator for the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor. “And now we’re finding them in significant numbers and in very dangerous conditions, so it’s unfortunately a real return to the past.”
[…]
“We’re seeing a coordinated multi-industry push to roll back labor standards, and what that’s really reflecting is industry’s desire to maintain and expand their access to pools of low wage labor,” said Jennifer Sherer, director of the State Worker Power Initiative at the Economic Policy Institute. “And in this case doing that in a really disturbing way that can expose children to hazardous conditions or long, excessive hours that we know based on research, can put kids in a high risk category for their grades slipping.”
Let’s be clear: Democrats want an American economy that serves you. Republicans want an America in which you serve the economy.
To that end it is not enough that undereducated children be put to work in fields, factories and slaughterhouses. Women must birth more babies even if it kills them.
Evan Koch opines today in the Coeur d’Alene Press (Idaho):
This past week Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise) said that abortion contributes to Idaho’s workforce shortage.
Winder told the Idaho Statesman, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. There’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It’s the number of abortions that have occurred.” (https://bit.ly/GOPQuote)
Winder, who speaks for his party, believes women should produce more babies to create more service workers.
Relaxing child labor laws, forced birth for addressing a shortage of “service workers,” and Lyons’ comment about bills funneling state education funds away from public schools takes me back to a persistent memory. I’ve referred to “royalists” among us who, while professing their love of America and freedom and all that, exhibit an attitude toward governance that’s more feudal than modern. Their condemnation of liberal “elites” is a bit of projection, isn’t it?
Driving the first time through a Beverly Hills neighborhood decades ago, I was suprised to see beat-up pickup trucks parked in front of so many grand homes. It took a moment to realize they belonged to groundskeepers and gardeners. Service workers.
Since then it has always seemed that the conservative attitude toward education spending has been this: How much education do waiters and gardeners need anyway?
“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” — Nebraska social worker Grace Abbott, 1938