Iowa governor will sign bill rolling back labor protections for children
I&#x27;ll just take the other side of the argument.<p>My family didn&#x27;t have much money when I was growing up, so the only hope I had for things like a car or a computer or video games was a job. Despite wanting a job desperately, I couldn&#x27;t get one in our state until I was 16. And even then, I was one of only a handful of teenagers at my school who were able to get one.<p>And <i>on</i> the job I was a second class citizen. This was your standard burger-flipping fast food restaurant. Yet it was kind of ridiculous the kind of rules and restrictions me and the employer had to follow for me to work there. I was allowed to operate a motor vehicle to drive to work, but once I was there I wasn&#x27;t allowed to use things like scissors.<p>More punishing was that there were all sort of hour restrictions on when and how often I could work. So I was denied enough hours to be eligible for health insurance (something I didn&#x27;t have at the time).<p>Working as a teenager was entirely and without exception a positive experience for me. It had almost no impact on my schooling (if anything, menial labor made me take school more seriously), it gave me a ton of experience, and it was a huge cash infusion that let me afford a car, save for college, and even have spending money to keep up with my richer peers.<p>So while I totally understand that we don&#x27;t want children ripped from classes and forced to defuse landmines at 5c an hour, the comments in this thread are really disheartening to me. A lot of these restrictions were arbitrary BS. I am absolutely in favor of giving kids more responsibility if they want it. Taking away the options for the sake of &quot;their own good&quot; is moralistic pantomime coming from privilege.