The Complaint Department: Child Labor Laws, Beer at the Ballpark and Lifestyle Influencers

The second installment of what may or may not become a regular feature...

Republicans and Conservatives say they want to protect Our Precious Children from being aborted, but seem to lose interest in Our Precious Children immediately after they’re born and aren’t nearly so keen to protect Our Precious Children from school shootings and AR-15s.

(OK, now that I write that sentence, I’m definitely going to turn that talking point into a cartoon.)

And now – according to an article in the Kansas City Star – it turns that in the past two years at least 11 states are trying to loosen up child labor laws to help employers fill empty jobs.

Remember all those people who got fired when the pandemic hit?

Turns out a lot of them decided to retire or found a way to make a living from home and when their old companies wanted them back, said take that crappy job and shove it and now those crappy jobs need someone else to fill them.

American businesses have done all they can to make sure their top executives are so richly compensated they can afford their very own island or penis-shaped rocket or gold-plated toilet (and I didn’t make any of those items up) and to have enough money to overpay the people at the top they need to screw the people at the bottom.  

Minimum wage jobs with shitty benefits are going unfilled so now Corporate America wants to be able to hire 14-year-olds to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries so we can get back to the Good Old Days when Our Precious Children That Need To Be Protected worked as coal miners.

No wonder Republicans don’t want them aborted.

Businesses are arguing that rolling back child labor laws will allow Our Precious Children to gain “valuable work experience.”

Which reminds me of unpaid interns who are expected to work for free to gain “valuable work experience” and in a semi-recent call for unpaid interns, the business in question said previous unpaid internships would count in the applicant’s favor which makes me wonder just how long those unpaid interns are expected to work for free and the answer appears to be:

FOREVER.

But if you finally figure out that being an unpaid intern is never ever going to lead to a full-time job, isn’t that valuable work experience? So I guess those businesses actually have a point.

My last two years in high school I worked 40 hours a week at a local restaurant as a bus boy – a job that also required me to clean the restrooms – and here’s what I learned:

1. People are slobs.

2. Men’s restrooms are disgusting, but women’s restrooms are even worse and on a regular basis appear to have been the scene of some sort of prison riot that involved water cannons, small fires, thrown rolls of toilet paper and quite possibly hostages.

3. Never order French fries five minutes before a restaurant closes because cleaning the deep fryer is a big job so those poorly-paid employees who want to go home half-a-millisecond after the restaurant closes might clean the deep fryer early and if you insist on getting some French fries because the restaurant is still technically open, don’t be surprised if those poorly-paid employees dig them out of the trash and heat them up in a microwave and I did not make that example up either.

OK, that last one is actually pretty handy to know (you’re welcome), but I learned all that valuable information in my first week and didn’t learn another goddamn thing in the next two years.

According to a former federal and union worker safety official:

“This is a push by certain industries to see if they can get away with hiring children so they can pay them less and disguise it as job training. These entry-level jobs provide little in terms of skills.”

Baseball beer sales

Not so long ago I wrote a piece about baseball’s new rules and how they might have Unintended Consequences because it’s pretty much impossible to predict how the rule you created in your head will play out in the Real World.

But having what turned out to be a limited imagination, I mistakenly focused on the Unintended Consequences that might take place on a baseball field.

For example:

The pitch clock that requires pitchers to throw a pitch within 15 seconds with nobody on base and 20 seconds with a runner on base has shortened games by about 27 minutes which is pretty much what Baseball hoped for, but it turns out that also means fans have less time to drink beer.

Which means less money for the teams.

Traditionally, teams stopped selling alcohol after the seventh inning which gave over-served fans some time to sober up before trying to drive home through the Automobile Clusterfuck that occurs when 27,000 people try to leave a parking lot with a total of eight exits at the same time.

So after the pitch clock shortened games, a number of Big League Baseball teams extended beer sales through the eighth inning.

The Milwaukee Brewers president of business operations said “the safety and the conduct of our fans has primacy” and so far they’ve had no issues, but it’s a small sample size and they’re going to continue to test the policy, which kinda sounds like they’re going to sell beer closer to a game’s end and see how many fender-benders Brewers fans have while attempting to drive home.

Everybody associated with baseball that was quoted about extending beer sales danced around the issue, but as Unintended Consequences go, a pitch clock on a baseball field putting more drunk drivers on the road is right up there.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/sport/mlb-extend-beer-sales-pitch-clock-spt-intl/index.html

Child brides

According to the Kansas City Star, a Missouri Republican who is pushing a bill to ban all “gender transition procedures” for people under 18 because he wants to protect kids from making bad decisions, has also made a statement that seemed to suggest 12-year-olds should be allowed to marry.

Then State Senator Jerry Lee Lewis French-kissed his 13-year-old cousin, sat down at the piano and pounded out a rockin’ version of Great Balls Of Fire.

Actually, the Senator’s name is Mike Moon and he’s known for being hard-right and making extreme comments and back in 2018 when Missouri decided to raise the minimum age for getting married to 16 (because we looked inbred idiots when it was only 15) he voted against it.

So the same person who wants to protect kids from gender transition procedures because kids might not make the best choices, doesn’t seem all that bothered by the idea of 7^th graders getting married.

My home state of California gets up to some really silly Aren’t-We-Progressive Bullshit like suggesting an arrested person shouldn’t have to tell the cops what gender they are (if you’re arrested, the cops just might have to decide what part of the jail to put you in) while my adopted state of Missouri can come off like a collection of hillbillies who think indoor plumbing is a Communist plot.

I’d split the difference and live halfway in-between, but I recently made that drive and halfway in-between would be somewhere in Wyoming and I’m pretty sure it’s called “Big Sky Country” because for long stretches there’s not much else there.

Which considering some of the hijinks people get up to, might not be a bad thing.

Lifestyle Influencers

According to stories about her semi-recent accident on a ski slope, Gwyneth Paltrow is no longer focused on being an actress because she putting all her cosmic energy into being a “lifestyle influencer” which is what I’m going to start putting on job applications once the banks fail and Social Security collapses and the people who pay my pension go bankrupt (wait, some of that already happened).

When I apply for one of those jobs Corporate America needs filled, I think “lifestyle influencer” will look better on my application than “semi-retired political cartoonist with too much time on his hands.”   

Hey, y’know who else it a lifestyle influencer?

Drug dealers.

Also: 19-year old strippers, ex-wives, debt collectors, mothers-in-law, police officers, bookies, cellmates and just about anybody else who has any sort of human contact with other people. But calling yourself a “lifestyle influencer” sounds a lot better than “know-it-all-who-dispenses-way-too-much-unnecessary-advice person” plus that’s never going to fit on a job application.

And depending on what direction the rest of my life takes, I may need to beat out a 14-year-olds for one of those coal miner jobs.