Iowa's new child labor brochure is horrifying
Ultra-cringe, ultra-cruel, and totally not fetch
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
It’s a rainy Fourth of July here in New York, the dreariness and downpour somewhat appropriate given the national regression we’ve been experiencing of late; a sunny celebration of freedom and independence right now would feel forced, at best.
On the other hand, honest journalism feels like an act of revolution these days, especially the kind that doesn’t toe a line of imagined “objectivity” and buries the truth. So let’s celebrate the fact that we live in a country where that’s still possible, even in an era of mass media ownership and consolidation. We’re here right now, aren’t we?
I’ve got a series of good stories in the works, some in the final stages of reporting and writing. Today, I’ve got some original reporting and analysis on a subjects that I think together represent a cross-section of a country engaged in cold civil war and ongoing skirmishes with irony.
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Iowa Republicans’ dramatic rollback of child labor law went into effect over the weekend, providing business owners with a plethora of fresh opportunities to overwork minors in dangerous new environments. From permitting 16-year-olds to toil in mines and meat processing plants to opening the doors of meat lockers to 14-year-olds, not to mention special provisions that allow migrant laborers as young as 12 to toil for up to 14 hours per day, this thing is absolutely… groovy? Da bomb?
While digging around the Iowa Division of Labor’s website today, I discovered a digital copy of what has to be — even by the low standards of perpetually under-resourced and aesthetically limited state capitol offices — the most unhinged and baffling government pamphlet that I have ever seen. It is cognitive dissonance via Adobe InDesign 1.0, a detailed guide to the dos and don’ts of exploiting under-age laborers illustrated with a what look to be stock photos from a teen fashion catalog circa 2003.
Every page of this thing is more unsettling than the last, to the point that one begins to suspect that what look like AI-generated approximations of promo for old Disney Channel original movies were actually included to draw attention away from the fact that so many of the new law’s lax standards are actually so inadequate that they violate federal child labor laws.
In fact, the list of all the places where Iowa’s new law falls short of federal standards is on the second-to-last page of the 12-page pamphlet. Not included anywhere in the little bible for the minimum wage, minimum age workforce is mention of the fact that a simple note from a teacher or mentor allows kids as young as 14 to work with bandsaws and on demolition sites. These aren’t jobs filing paperwork or babysitting workers’ kids, either. A 16-year-old in Wisconsin died this week after an accident at a sawmill. It was a job that was illegal for him to have in Wisconsin, but now legal in Iowa.
As I reported for More Perfect Union earlier this year, the new law was first conceived in a meeting of a workforce development task force housed within the office of Gov. Kim Reynolds. That task force is made up almost entirely of corporate lobbyists, and it just so happens that the topic was broached and moved forward during a post-election meeting that the head of the Iowa AFL-CIO — a badly outnumbered labor “counterbalance” to the squadron of very well-compensated representatives for trade groups and industry alliances — could not attend.
The initial suggestion came from lobbyists for the Iowa Restaurant Association, which was angling for longer hours and more responsibility to wring out of cheap back of house labor and the ability to recruit younger kids to serve alcoholic beverages in restaurants and taverns. Retailers, grocery stores (especially Reynolds mega-donor Hy-Vee) and movie theater chains also pushed hard to make sure they could undercut a tight labor market.
It would be one thing if the law focused only on those “after school” jobs, but that is hardly the case, no matter how hard the pamphlet tries to create that impression.
Putting aside the fact that the people featured on these pages are likely in their late 30s or early 40s by now, do those look like kids who will be working in slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, construction sites, and mines, as. specifically permitted in the program? Don’t be shy: The answer is a resounding no. All across the country, migrant children have been discovered working brutal overnight shifts for low wages in factories and food processing plants.
Naturally, the Iowa law codifies egregious hours for migrant pre-teens working exhausting and physically punishing jobs on farms and other places where they can be disappeared from public view. And the pamphlet makes it, like, totally sweet.
I was told that JBL, the meat processing company that was caught with a preponderance of migrant minors working backbreaking jobs in the dead of night, did not want to play a role in the law’s passage, considering the blowback it received. But that’s where trade associations come in, spending members’ money to advance these bills without putting them under the microscope.
A similar law will go into effect on August 1st in Arkansas, where a fifth of the population was on Medicaid until the unwinding began and started a mass abandonment. There are people working to undo that damage right now, and I’ll have more on that in the next edition of the newsletter.
Now let’s take a look at some (mostly) positive headlines before you get your holiday going.
Labor: The main reason that businesses have been pushing so hard for the right to hire children, other than sociopathy, is that they really don’t want to pay actual adults the wages that they are collectively demanding. That dang free market!
We’ve now entered a third straight summer of pronounced labor unrest, and depending on the progress in negotiations between UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, what could be the most economically significant one yet.
The Teamsters, under new president Sean O’Brien, have been projecting an alpha-aggressive militancy in public statements, social media posts, updates to members, and televised rhetoric. As I’ve reported here, and in detail at More Perfect Union, there is an immense number of significant and tangible improvements on the union’s contract negotiations to-do list, and every time O’Brien’s bargaining team convinces UPS executives to accede to one, the union trumpets the victory online and with the press as if they’ve just seized enemy territory.
Given the misery of their workers and the handicap of 25 years of corporate-friendly contracts agreed to by since-ousted management, you can’t blame them, even if it’s also a way to set the stage for a member vote on a tentative contract agreement in the weeks to come. In the meantime, local leaders are overseeing members’ organized picket practices, where they flex some muscle and make some noise, illustrating to management how painful they can make their first strike in 25 years. They’ve given UPS a deadline of tomorrow to come up with a better economic proposal, which shouldn’t be hard given the awful one presented last time around.
National union leaders are generally predisposed to not wanting to strike, given the cost, logistical challenges, and political pressure that they create. Those challenges are amplified for the largest unionized workforce in the country, but they also serve as leverage, which O’Brien is applying with full force.
If 340,000 workers, including the delivery drivers and package-handlers that do the grunt work were to suddenly walk out, it would cripple UPS for weeks or more before it could get assemble and train enough scabs to do the work with anything even loosely resembling competence.
UPS is a highly complicated logistics empire with more daily moving parts than the US military, and it controls six percent of our GDP. An extended outage would be crippling for both its business and much of the US economy, so its executives, including CEO Carol Tomé, also have every incentive to avoid a strike, considering how eager its competitors are to stake a claim to its crown. Teamsters leaders know this, and it’ll help them extract every penny that they can get out of the company.
If the Teamsters not striking benefits UPS, it won’t be so much due to financial savings as the avoidance of what could become a massive long-term blow to its infrastructure and relationships.
Looming over the situation is a mutual enemy of sorts: Amazon. While O’Brien was elected in part based on tough talk around UPS, and what happens this summer will be part of his ultimate legacy, his time as the head of the Teamsters will be judged even more so by whether he is able to follow through on his promise to organize and unionize Amazon.
At the same time, the world’s largest online retailer has long been a massive client for UPS but is now slowly transitioning to building and utilizing its own delivery service, largely through the sort of subcontractor scheme that gives them total control of the worker but, based on long-held corporate interpretation of the law, none of the liability.
Teamsters organizers have been very quietly targeting those delivery subcontractors for organizing, and a few months ago, went public with their first successful shop vote. In May, the union went public with its first new Amazon unit, consisting of 84 workers at the Southern California contractor Battle Tested Strategies. The contractor’s owner immediately recognized the union and agreed to a contract with the drivers, at which point Amazon promptly terminated BTS’s contract.
The laid-off BTS workers have been picketing for the past week at the Amazon warehouse in Palmdale where they picked up and handled packages. The picket has since extended to three other locations, including a warehouse in San Bernardino on Sunday evening. They keep these things quiet until the moment the workers and local supporters show up, but I got the heads and was able to send a camera over to get footage and interviews. We spoke with one worker who was forced to lift heavy packages through six months of pregnancy, which matches up with what I’ve heard from countless people that work inside those Amazon warehouses, as well.
And now, something completely different.
I’ve never really felt particularly patriotic, but I was also never given the opportunity. By the time I became politically aware, George W. Bush was lying the nation headlong into an ultra-bloody, multi-decade quagmire in the Middle East that was so obviously doomed and unjust from the start that cynicism was the only option. The staggering economic inequality, the rise of far-right violence, and insidious takedown of the modern liberal society have done little to reverse that feeling.
But I do this work — including my full-time job at More Perfect Union — because I know that the majority of Americans want better for one another. We’re up against the wealthiest, most powerful, and underhanded autocracy in human history, a network of maniacally entitled brutes and sycophants who are burning the planet and boiling humanity. And yet, over the past few years, we’ve seen that progress is possible.
It has been staggered and tenuous progress — triumphs of democracy are met with violence and voter suppression, advances in medicine blunted by conspiracy theories and cruelty, strides toward equality reversed by greed and bigotry, and fun things on the internet ruined by supremely arrogant and untalented billionaires. Well-financed forces of regression continue to surge, like the education-focused hate group Moms for Liberty, which had its convention in Philadelphia last weekend and now plans to bring its members’ special brand of reactionary repression to school board elections across the country.
But still we push every day for something better and fairer, for ourselves but more importantly the people who need it most, whether we know them or not. Look at the city of Glendale, AZ, which just voted to create a free, service-infused housing complex for veterans, who are more predisposed to homelessness. These stories don’t get the headlines, because there are no white nationalists baiting the fascism-curious media, nor anything for savvy DC pundits to opine over, so we don’t hear much about them,
Forget a flag or unfettered fealty to the mythos that’s been constructed around it by those who have always benefited most from the mythos and power it represents. If there’s anything that can make me feel some patriotism, it’s the fact that so many people are always working to improve the lives of those people who have been left behind by what the country has become. We still have the freedom to fight for something better.
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Jesus, that brochure...