Sarah Huckabee Sanders Just Screwed Over America Big Time - Ring of Fire [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed legislation loosening the restrictions on child labor in her state, effectively undoing 90 years worth of progress on preventing child labor in America. This is a massive giveaway to corporate America, as it provides them with a cheap, expendable labor force that is constantly being renewed. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins talks about how disgusting this new law is.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who as we mentioned earlier this week, is apparently on Donald Trump's shortlist. To be a possible vice presidential candidate sent a message to children across the state of Arkansas by signing a new piece of legislation this week. And that message is, get off your butts and get to work. Huckabee signed the Youth Hiring Act, which effectively undoes about 90 years worth of child labor protections in the state of Arkansas. Here's what happened. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 banned the employment of kids younger than 16 in any occupation or those younger than 18 in especially dangerous jobs. And then this week, Huckabee Sanders decided, you know what? We know better than the federal government over here in Arkansas. We can decide what to do with our kids. And if we have a 13 year old that wants to go work in the factory, by God, let 'em go to work, we're no longer gonna have those restrictions that say that you can't work a high schooler till midnight when they have school the next day. That's just preposterous.

This legislation, and of course, pending legislation in states like Wisconsin and Iowa and pretty much all over the country right now, it's not to help struggling families who need their kids to work. It's not to give these kids a leg up in the workforce. For those who don't want to go to college, they want to go straight to work. That's not for them either. This legislation is a massive gift to corporations. As the New Republic pointed out. Um, the Bill's passage comes after Hannah Dryer's shocking New York Times report, revealing a shadow workforce of migrant children across industries in every state, like 12 year old roofers in Florida and Tennessee, or 13 year olds in Michigan, making auto parts on an overnight shift that ends at 6:30 AM or in meat plants from Alabama to Minnesota. So we already have an epidemic of corporations breaking child labor laws here in the United States, and a lot of them are actually using migrant labor to do it.

So it's a lot harder to track the violations. What this legislation that Huckabee Sanders has signed, and again, you've got other pending legislation, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire. It's just to make it legal like, okay, these companies are getting in trouble for hiring child laborers. Let's just make it legal. So now they're not in trouble. It's not protecting kids, it's putting kids in danger. It's not helping struggling families who may need their 15 or 16 year old to go to work. It is a massive gift to corporations because now they have this new pool of labor that they can pull from, and it's a very renewable source of labor too.

Oh, and by the way, I don't know if y'all know this, but for the first 90 days of employment, any minor working anywhere in the United States for the first 90 days can be paid as little as $4 and 25 cents an hour. That's federal law. So not only do you have a renewable source of labor, if a kid gets hurt, there's another kid right down the street, you can just replace him. Or if it's a migrant kid, you just ship 'em across the border and wait for another one to come back over. But you also save money because you're paying them $4 and a quarter an hour. This is abuse. But now in states like Arkansas, thanks to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, it's legalized abuse of children.