This blog used to have, up there in the masthead, the sentence, "I'm so mad I can't think straight." I thought it was funny, but nobody ever laughed besides me, so...
However, this story, in all its glory, has made me to mad that I'm talking like Yosemite Sam.
A couple of days ago, the Washington Post broke a story about a company that sterilizes meat packing equipment employing children in overnight, mostly unsupervised, dangerous jobs. See here (it's behind a registration wall, but they don't seem to have bombarded me too much for registering, so I recommend it). Short version: Department of Labor fined Packers Sanitation Services $1.5 million for child labor law violations.
Turns out (and not even close to a surprise) that Tyson, the giant food processing corporation originating in my home state of Arkansas, was one of the business Aes that used illegal labor from Packers Sanitation Services (at Tyson's plant in Green Forest). Short article here.
The second half of the article from the Arkansas Times gets to the part that is so infuriating. As reported in the Guardian (here), it seems that the GOP is making a coordinated effort, at the state level, to undermine the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. And, of course, they don't just want them to work, they want the companies that hire them to be shielded from the inevitable accidents (some that will be fatal) that are part and parcel of hiring young, inexperienced labor.
But why? Is the labor shortage that business keeps squealing about that acute? Could we finally be at the point where business will be forced to realize that infinite, eternal growth is not possible? Will every sentence in this paragraph be a question?
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