> The measure would permit children as young as 14 to work in roofing, construction and demolition,

Those are comfy air conditioned office jobs.

Don't forget cleaning meat packing plants. Fucking cush jobs, amirite?

The bill explicitly states packing plants are not allowed.

More precisely from what someone said above, meat packing plants are now allowed, but as a meat packer is not allowed. So they could have something like an office job at a plant (manager's assistant..? I don't really know how they're organized).

Let children be children.

It's not that simple though. For example, my son is 11 and wants to work. He wants to earn more money than I can find house chores to pay him for. He could absolutely help in an office or retail situation. Neither my wife nor myself have encouraged this. He came up with it all on his own.

I went to school with several kids who were gifted mechanically. They suffered in school. It wasn't just not beneficial. School was directly harmful. Had they been able to spend less time in school and more time working, they would've been much happier. Instead, school became a kind of purgatory they had to endure.

There are also situations in which kids are in a bad home environment but are essentially bonded to their parents by the fact that they cannot work. To be 100% clear, this bill sucks. I'm completly against it. But there is a form a child work reform that should happen IMO.

I'm not against children taking responsibilities, helping and working a little bit here and there to earn themselves some money and develop themselves in many ways, but just throwing them into the labour market is going back in time a couple centuries.

"My son is 11 and wants to work"

"He wants to earn more money than I [want] to pay him"

Well which is it. Would he work for free? No? Then he doesn't want to work, he wants money.

Why didn't I think of this? I should be making up things which I pay him unrealistic amounts of money for in order to teach him that work is about being an extractionist sponge rather than trying to find a way to make a meaningful contribution in exchange for a social/economic reward.

He both wants to work and wants money, like most humans.

What does that mean? Let them play with plastic toys, then as teenagers smoke weed and fuck each other?

How about we let children and teenagers be people. They want to help their dads in their day to day lives, family and work are closely connected. Teenagers want their autonomy and their own money, they want to learn skills that they can use as adults. Instead we send dad somewhere away from his family to earn money and isolate teenagers from the real world and expect them to just get it at 18. Preventing children and teenagers from doing any actual growing up, infantilizing capable people with ambitions and a restless desire to learn and grow in the world, that is dysfunctional, not letting them hammer some nails or pick some apples or whatever.

how about sweeping that nice, air-conditioned chimney?

If you took the time to read it, you would know that's not at all what this legislation is about. These regulations existed because children were exploited and taken advantage of in the past. [1] Would you care to inform us of the specific changes in Iowa that have now made "children working in dangerous conditions" no longer a concern?

I'll provide a counterpoint now, you can just reply "sorry I was wrong". [2] just a few months ago a US based organization "Packers Sanitation Services, Inc." was found illegally employing minors across eight states, with children as young as 13 cleaning their meat processing plants with hazardous chemicals during night shifts.

14 year olds don't need to log more hours at the office or cleaning industrial bone saws. They need to log more hours in their education and playing with their friends.

If you took time to read it you would find that meat packing and hazardous chemicals are still illegal under the new bill.