Iowa Senate Pulls All-Nighter to Roll Back Child Labor Protections

Children in Iowa would be allowed to work longer hours and jobs that are currently prohibited, like assembly-line work or serving alcohol, according to a new bill that the Iowa Senate passed before dawn Tuesday morning, in the biggest push to roll back child labor protections in the U.S since the 1930s. 

The bill, Senate File 542, would let 14-year-olds work six-hour night shifts, 15-year-olds “perform light assembly work” and move items of up to 50 pounds, and 16- and 17-year-olds serve alcohol, if their parent or guardian signs a waiver. The Senate voted 32-17, with one Republican representative joining all 16 Democrats in opposition, and the bill passed at 4:52 a.m.

 “This is important precisely because it doesn’t fit into pre-existing patterns,” said Eric Blanc, an author and professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “It goes above and beyond previous attacks on workers’ rights, which have tended to focus on things like preventing unions, preventing increases to the minimum wage law.” 

Democrats in the Senate tried throughout the debates to introduce additional workers compensation benefits for children, who are more likely to get injured on the job because of their inexperience. They were unsuccessful.

“You don’t like it being branded as a bill about child labor, but yet your bill talks about kids getting injured in the workplace,” said Democratic Senator Nate Boulton in the floor debates. 

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. 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. 

“A business that accepts a secondary student into a work-based learning program shall not be subject to civil liability for any claim for bodily injury to the student…unless the student is acting within the course and scope of the student’s employment at the direction of the business,” the bill states.

This is the most egregious recent attempt to roll back child labor protections in the U.S., which already has a child labor problem that the U.S. Department of Labor has supposedly ignored. Child labor laws were one of the first wins for workers rights movements in the U.S., in the early 1900s. 

“To go this far and to roll back things that were codified over 100 years ago is a pretty unprecedented attack,” Blanc said. “It signals the desire among certain right-wing Republicans, and the corporations that help fund them, to initiate a counter-offense against the upsurge in labor organizing.” 

The past year and a half saw a significant uptick in unionization efforts, with a federally certified Amazon union, over 300 Starbucks stores unionized nationwide, and a union-busting CEO called to testify in Congress. 

The Iowa bill now goes to the House, which is controlled by Republican representatives.