Oh Hell, 16, 12, 8 — Put Those Worthless Kids to Work
One thing about kids – they work cheap. Heck, they’ll sweep the front steps for a shiny quarter and wash your car for a dollar.
Paul LePage, the Governor of Maine, wants to utilize that good news and loosen the child labor laws.
Right now in Maine you have to be 16 to work. LePage wants to lower that to 12 because “12-year-old children should not be restricted from working and learning life skills.” I think the key words here is “children.”
At 12 years old getting through the day without springing a leak of hormones is work enough. You can’t drive at 12 years old so that means walking to work. In Maine. Where I hear it snows. And there’s more uphills than downhills. While making for great stories to your grandchildren, I’m not sure being exploited as cheap labor is a “lifeskill.”
Republicans are determined to undo every labor reform we’ve had in this country since sweat shops burned to the ground. And trust me, they don’t mean having their own kids work. They mean your kids.
Hey, LePage, you know what they call a 12 year old forced into the workplace to take a job from an adult worker who needs a job? Two Democrats in training, my friend, that’s what you call them.
LePage says he’s only trying to allow kids to work in the summer. Sorry, but I agree with the folks who commented on the story. It’s a ploy to make even cheaper labor available to employers who don’t want to pay a living wage to the millions of adult workers looking for decent work. Kids who want to work during the summers mow lawns, babysit, deliver papers etc. A no-so-transparent regressive Repug trick.
1When did it become desirable in this country to despise children? At least other people’s children. “We” don’t want to feed, clothe, house, or educate them. I don’t understand. I’ll never understand.
2And your last sentence is wonderful! Maybe it’s the silver lining in this whole, terrible muddle!
Oh, boy. . . I worked for a brief period in Labor Law from the blue collar side where the attorney was fighting large corporations for various and sundry reasons, i.e. discrimination/harassment (racial/sex;) wrongful terminations after unions did what little they could specifically when claimants were getting close to vesting their pensions. The machinations were astounding. A very hard road to hoe. Very disheartening, especially if you are more to the accountant way of operating, meeting deadlines.
After a while I ran for my sanity. These idiots out there need to go away.
3“And trust me, they don’t mean having their own kids work. They mean your kids.”
Right wing labor practices mirror their war policy. All is good, when they and theirs don’t shed the blood or suffer the pain.
LePage must be a real watchdog for education. Hungry kids in a classroom. Not a problem for him. Let them be tired, hungry kids.
Let me guess, he’s a “christian.”
4When Jesus said “suffer the little children” I don’t think he was speaking that as an encouragement to make it happen.
5In Shindler’s List, Shindler put children to work in his bullet factory to save them from the Nazis. Their little fingers could reach inside the casings to smooth the edges. Paul LePage could use this as an example to promote his program as one that benefits children, because right offhand I can’t think of any others.
6This reminds of Newt’s positions during the 2012 GOP primaries. He wanted to put children to work
7I can see this working as part of a wingnut nefarious plot to deport Libs. Employ kids and promise them a cigarette break twice a day if they swear their parents are illegal commie infiltrators and are exportable. That is one way they could win elections. Of cousre,the downside is the Koch Bros would demand a flood of cheap,illegal laborers to flood the market and put kids out of work.Then the kids could be deported and won’t need to be educated.
8From “A Christmas Carol” by Dickens:
“The Spirit of Christmas Present mocks Scrooge’s former insensitivity by hurling his own words back at him as he regards the appalling children of humanity, Ignorance and Want:
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree; but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The bell struck twelve
9The modern GOP seems to think that the age of the Robber Barons at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a social utopia, that totally unrestrained capitalism is economic perfection, and that the poor, no matter what their age, are poor because they’re failures at life. This is the mindset that causes revolutions.
10Here’s the thing, Page-y puss. If you are going to give pre-teens the right to work under all sorts of conditions and for pi** pay like their elders, then dammit! You’ve got to give them the right to vote at least in state elections! I triple dog dare yah to do that! When they experience what their own parents have to put up with every day just to earn a damn nickel, they will definitely not vote for you or your ilk!
11http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-249-mass-children-abused-in-state-custody-in-2012/
Just found this. Old enough to be abused in state custody,they are old enough to work,I guess. Somebody’s guv gots some ‘splaining to do.
12I know we’re working to elect Wendy Davis in TX, and plenty of other important races, but a few bucks sent to Mike Michaud, the Dem with a good chance for trouncing Paul LePage, village idiot, might be a good idea.
13e platypus onion mistakenly thought Mass. was governed by LePage when I posted above article. I am a doof who can’t read and for that you have my sincerest apologies. (hangs head in shame) I’m an idiot.
14There’s one profession that kids would be great for and it’s in big demand in Maine: chimney sweeps! All the sweeps in Victorian London had a scrawny kid to climb down the chimneys. Of course sometimes they got stuck, and they tended to die young from scraping and inhaling all that soot, but there are plenty more where those came from.
15Because my family was poor, as in no food, moving constantly, difficult education ( you got to a new school and they were ahead or behind what you had learned at the previous school-12 schools between 2-6 grades) so I started trying to bring home money by the time I was 9–at 12 I was working a full 40 hr week (housekeeper, cook, watching 5 children 8-6 Monday-Friday) plus babysitting on weekends…
16I don’t remember it making me a better person–if anything it made me terribly afraid of making my way as an adult, as a therapist said, “There were no adults around you, you were the best adult in the room, it’s no mystery why you didn’t want to be an adult, all of the “adults” around you were crazy, drunk, scam artists or victims of terrible abuse!” Pretty muchs sums up my experience, and the experience of a foster child that I took in..
e p onion–you are not an idiot–I took in that foster child because of the abuse in the system, and that was 30 years ago in California…sigh
e p onion: No shame here — you’re among friends. There are days when I can’t read or keyboard and occasionally wonder if I should have a court-appointed guardian. We didn’t have a whole lot of money when I was a kid, but I never had to put in 40-hour weeks at a job. The repubs have picked on everyone else, so why not kids? Grrrrrr!
17Maine’s a big lumber state, you know, and it’s a lot easier to cut timber in the summer months than when it’s cold. Hey … let’s give those industrious tweens on school break some 17-pound, 24-inch gas chainsaws and send ’em out into the woods!!
(With do-it-yourself tourniquet kits, of course.)
18VeeGee, I second your idea! Would also like to know how this idea of LePage has gone over with the down easters.
19JJ — best post of yours I’ve read. Clever, insightful, angry, and the last two sentences — bless you.
20When this was published, it was a joke – I guess Mr. LePage thought it a great idea:
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