It always feels weird to write a post pointing at a single thing that's bad these days when there's so much else going wrong, but here goes. (Maybe partly because it seems like this story is getting even less notice than all the other ones.)
Iowa's legislature is advancing bills to roll back child labor laws, putting kids back into dangerous work situations they were legally excluded from more than a hundred years ago. Because Iowa has a Republican trifecta, that likely means the bill would be signed.
According to what I've seen on Twitter, this is not just a random bit of Republicanness, but is directly the result of meat-packing corporations recently getting caught employing children in dangerous jobs after hours.
As the writer of that thread points out, it won't be little white kids who end up working in these dangerous jobs on the third shift: it will be brown children, the children they're already hiring illegally.
It's not a worker shortage, it's worker exploitation.
The thread ends with this:
Guess what. It’s already legal for kids as young as four and five work in the fields. I am positive that meat plants are like - why can’t we do that too??
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