Missouri State Senator Wants To Eliminate Child Labor Laws

Republican Missouri State Senator Jane Cunningham wants to eliminate child labor laws, saying they prevent parents from teaching their kids good work ethics.

Cunningham wants to revoke the parts of current state labor law that say kids under age 14 can’t work and kids age 14 and 15 can’t work more than three hours a day on school days, more than eight hours on non-school days or before 7 a.m. or after 9 p.m. She thinks teens should be able to work late-night jobs at resorts, restaurants and motels. And she’s sponsored a bill, S.B. 222, referred to the state senate’s general laws committee on Feb. 10, that would enact the changes.

Cunningham’s bill would also bar state labor inspectors from walking into workplaces to check on child labor law compliance, and make it harder to categorize children in a workplace as “working.” (But, to be fair, her bill does bar kids from “dangerous” jobs in quarries, mines, explosives factories and the like.)

As David Gee at Staffing Talk put it:

And those generous, benevolent businesses that exploit, woops, I mean employ, these kids, wouldn’t be subject to inspections from the buzz killers at the Division of Labor Standards. Heck, if we’ve learned anything in the last 170 years when the first child labor laws came into being, it’s that we can trust the marketplace to treat workers right without interference from a bunch of fuddy duddy overseers.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.