Please Don't Feed the Teenagers

Louisiana's bold new bid to become the worst place to work in the lower 48.

“Please, sir, I want some more.” George Cruikshank, 1866.

Future historians will scratch their heads over how the Democrats managed to lose a working-class majority at a time when Republican-led state governments were competing to pass laws inviting businesses to treat workers less hospitably than farm animals.

I wrote earlier this month about how Texas and then Florida passed laws preventing local governments from requiring that management furnish agricultural and other outdoor labor with water on unusually hot days, which, of course, are getting hotter all the time, especially in Texas and Florida. Not to be outdone, the lower house of Louisiana’s legislature passed a bill on April 24 repealing the state’s requirement that a certain type of worker, whenever that worker puts in more than five hours, be granted a 20-minute break to eat lunch. No water? No food? No problem!

The punchline is that the type of worker addressed in the Louisiana law is the kind that has yet to reach an 18th birthday, which is to say teenagers, who in my experience are an unusually hungry lot but, alas, are too young to vote. The bill now advances to the Louisiana Senate, where it will likely sail through. As I write, businesses in all 50 states must still furnish their workers with oxygen, but surely the American Legislative Exchange Council or the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability is working to strip away that obstacle to worker productivity as well. Anyway, Louisiana’s Gothic child-labor repeal is the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.