Arkansas just made child labor easier, and that’s a good thing
Washington Examiner
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Most successful adults began working as teenagers.
Perhaps they delivered newspapers or manned the till at a McDonald’s. Perhaps they spent weeks in the summer detasseling corn or their Saturdays directing cars into parking spots before college football games. But whatever they did, all those people who worked as teenagers learned at a young age an important lesson for adulthood: that they needed to work, earn, and be responsible for making their own way in life.
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Arkansas’s Republican legislature and governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, should be commended for passing a bill that makes it easier for teenagers, 14- and 15-year-olds, to work.
Several liberals are freaking out over the new law, but it is or should be a model for national child labor policy. This is not about sending 8-year-olds into coal mines. The law brings Arkansas into line with several other states, not all of them Republican. Colorado, for example, has a similar law, as do Arizona and Texas. Many states require permits for 14- or 15-year-olds to take part-time jobs. But it is not obvious how these permits benefit the teenagers in question.
It is sometimes claimed that permitting allows a state to verify each child’s age, but birth certificates already do this. Moreover, any prospective employee who can write his or her birth date on a permit application already has to put the same information on the federal W-9 tax form. There is nothing magical about a state permit application that makes it impossible to lie or makes one’s age official — it’s just one more redundant piece of paperwork that irritatingly slows legitimate hiring.
In the absence of compelling evidence of abuse, it should always be assumed that parents know better than bureaucrats what is best for their children. Parents already have the freedom to bring children of those ages on to airplanes without any identification, which could result in far worse outcomes than letting them work a few hours at Walmart for $14 an hour. If parents believe their 14-year-old is ready to work a part-time job, the government has no business intervening.
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, it remains illegal to employ 13-year-olds, just as it was before. And 14- and 15-year-olds are still limited, as they were before, in the hours they can work.
Today’s teenagers spend too much time on social media and too little growing up. Anything reasonable that a state can do to make it easier for them to work is welcome. The labor shortage makes this a great time for teenagers to enter the world of work. The market for low-wage service workers isn’t as tight as it was at the height of the pandemic, but youngsters can command higher wages today than they could at any time before 2019. College is expensive, and teenagers benefit from sharing responsibility for paying for it.
Not only is work experience valuable per se, but the wages teenagers earn can be among the most valuable of their lives. Believe it or not, the time value of money means young workers who can save their earnings have a chance to build a lifetime of financial security from their summer jobs. Based on the historical average return of the S&P 500 stock index, every dollar that a 14-year-old contributes to a Roth IRA today will be worth a tax-free $161 when he or she turns 65. So a teenager who can sock away just $7,000 from summer and part-time jobs can expect to have about $1,000,000 to retire on, not counting any savings as an adult.
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That is a much better plan for building wealth than any government program.
So again, Arkansas is doing the right thing. More states should follow suit.