Whenever Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican supermajorities in the Statehouse concoct new “culture war” bills to codify book bans, dictate lesson plans in school, mandate bathroom rules, erase marginalized youth, or outlaw diversity, equity and inclusion as the downfall of society, lawmakers always bray about the need to protect the vulnerable young from terrible MAGA imaginings.
Yet these same disingenuous actors just passed an outrageous child exploitation measure last week as a cheap labor gift to businesses desperate to find workers.
Ohio Senate Bill 50 is a sweet deal for companies looking to hire for less and work low-cost employees longer hours.
Republican legislators want to put kids to work as young as 14 and 15 years old on night shifts for cheaper pay than adults. Let them work later at fast food restaurants after a full day of school, they say. Builds character, they say. Imparts valuable skills (over a hot fryer), they say. Helps them be successful, they say.
Forget about protecting children from greedy corporations looking to maximize profits on the backs of middle schoolers.
Senate Bill 50 is focused on relieving the burdens of employers battling labor shortages — not learning lapses from sleep-deprived child laborers who fall behind in school and life.
Key industries in the state can’t fill job openings with an ever-shrinking pool of available hires, exacerbated, in part, by the nearly sevenfold increase in ICE deportations of immigrant workers in Ohio this year.
Exhibit A is Springfield, Ohio, ground zero for JD Vance’s hateful, dehumanizing campaign to eradicate a legal Haitian community welcomed as a revitalizing engine in the region.
It devastated employers in the area who lost hard-working, reliable employees they can’t replace.
One exploitive solution Ohio and other red states have embraced is to supply companies with child laborers who can temporarily fill employment gaps (and company coffers) during the school year for practically nothing.
Ohio Senate Bill 50 would allow employers to pay 14- and 15-year-old employees the federal $7.25 minimum wage to work late on school nights — instead of Ohio’s entry level wage of $10.70 per hour.
Ohio Republicans did their business pals and campaign donors a solid.
They voted to use minors — who should be focused on school and being a kid — to mitigate a depleted labor base (as workers leave Ohio for opportunities or detention camps) and boost company earnings with bargain rate teenage hires.
Picture eighth and ninth graders on the payroll until 9 p.m., with their parents’ permission, as corporate net incomes balloon from revenue generated by sub-minimum wage middle schoolers who can’t even drive yet.
These are kiddos in school before the sun comes up, off the bus in the afternoon, with friends or buried in homework in the interval and catching a ride to bus tables or man drive-through windows until closing time.
Does it matter to anyone that Ohio’s youngest workers could get home and in bed by maybe 10:30-11:00 on a school night just to wake up early and do it all again?
Apparently not in the General Assembly’s Republican caucus that overwhelmingly drove Ohio Senate Bill 50 to passage.
The legislation clearly regards 14- and 15-year-olds as commodities in service to bottom-line business growth, not as developing children in vital school years who need protection from economic predators.
The GOP measure was crafted to remedy a scarcity of labor problem, especially in the restaurant and hospitality sectors.
It weakens century-old child labor protections with extended work schedules for the under 16 workforce that stretch beyond the 7 p.m. restriction stipulated in the federal child labor law.
The prospect of exhausted teens sleepwalking through school to meet labor demands doesn’t raise eyebrows in Ohio’s ruling party.
The teen labor bill is emblematic of how little state Republicans value public education as a paramount investment in future generations of Ohioans.
So what if kids nod off in class, fall behind academically and never catch up if Chick-fil-A can save on hiring costs and plug job vacancies on closing shifts?
Of course, Ohio businesses who take advantage of the GOP’s largesse in Ohio Senate Bill 50, with low-paid, underage workers historically exploited and abused by employers, still risk federal child labor law violations.
Unfortunately, enforcement of youth labor laws by the Department of Labor hasn’t been great and the number of minors employed in jobs that violate child labor laws is rising precipitously.
But the Ohio lawmakers who bray about protecting the very young from invented MAGA crises are the same ones putting them most in harm with a return to the bad old days of 1938 when Big Business notoriously pounced at the chance to exploit children working long hours for little pay in unsafe conditions without educational opportunities.
We’re forfeiting the promising futures of school-age Ohio kids to accommodate employers who can’t get enough employees.
That’s not character-building. That’s a crime.
This commentary was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.