In response to the outcry regarding the use of child labor in meat packing plants, the State of Iowa has decided to consider amending its child labor laws to eliminate some prohibitions for 14 and 15-year olds. They can’t work on the butchering floor, but the legislature will permit them to work in freezers and meat coolers.
Oh, and we forgot that employers will not be liable if these kids get sick, injured, or killed due to employer’s negligence. This is obviously a state that cares more about its meat production than children’s lives or safety. But who cares? They’re mostly immigrants, anyway, and are, of course, totally expendable.
And Iowa’s not alone. That great state of Florida, the one with the governor who believes that no one should read or think, also has similar bills in its legislature. Why not? It has a great history of migrant farm children out there 12 to 14 hours a day. As these proposals increase across the country, they tell where our values really are.
Prayer for the Day
Muffled by the interests of greed, we cannot hear the cries of children,
As legislators race to put more children into factories and freezers;
Silenced by threats, no one will search for the abuses that occur,
For corporations and their profits govern those who hold power.
Save us, O God, from a return to the days of child labor,
When little children were tied to huge machines.
In the name of the One who calls us to care for children,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use child labor as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both child labor and poverty until the end of time.
- Grace Abbott, American social worker or children (1878-1939)
A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President (1882-1945)
Hear this, you who trample on the needy, to bring to ruin the poor of the land, Saying, “When will the new moon be over, so that we may sell grain;
And the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, practicing deceit w/false balances;
Buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals,
And selling the sweepings of the wheat.”
Amos 8: 4-6