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Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits

A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans
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Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits​

A House committee approved the bill along with others to reduce unemployment benefits and workers' compensation wages.​

A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers.

The House Labor and Industrial Relations panel advanced the child labor legislation, House Bill 156, along with House Bill 119, which would slash the amount of time for which people can collect unemployment aid. A third bill the committee approved, House Bill 529, would change how workers' compensation wages are calculated in ways that could reduce benefits received by some injured laborers.

The bills, which head to the full House, are part of a broad effort by Republicans to weaken labor unions and strengthen employers' hands in Louisiana. They are aligned with steps other Republican-led legislatures have taken in recent years, and on Thursday, GOP lawmakers attributed the moves to Gov. Jeff Landry's directive to "reform" the business environment and remove bureaucratic red tape.

First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don't have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill's purpose.
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The bills, which head to the full House, are part of a broad effort by Republicans to weaken labor unions and strengthen employers' hands in Louisiana. They are aligned with steps other Republican-led legislatures have taken in recent years, and on Thursday, GOP lawmakers attributed the moves to Gov. Jeff Landry's directive to "reform" the business environment and remove bureaucratic red tape.

First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don't have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill's purpose.
“The wording is ‘We’re here to harm children.’ Give me a break," he said. "These are young adults.”
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The committee approved his bill 10-3.
Earlier, the panel advanced HB 119 — the proposed restructuring of the state's unemployment benefits system. Lawmakers pitched it as a way to get more people into paying jobs and a disincentive against remaining in the unemployment benefits system for too long.
If passed by the House and Senate and signed by the governor, the bill would reduce the maximum period for which people can gather unemployment benefits in a given year from 26 to 20 weeks.
The bill would also make the amount of time people can collect benefits dependent on the state unemployment rate, meaning workers would not be able to take advantage of the full 20-week maximum under the current unemployment rate. It sets a 12-week cap on those benefits when Louisiana's statewide unemployment rate is at 5% or less. And it lays out a scale where for each additional half-percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, laid-off workers can collect benefits for an additional week.

Only when the unemployment rate rises above 8.5% would workers be able to claim benefits for the maximum 20 weeks. Louisiana's unemployment rate was 4.2% in February, the latest month when data was available from the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

Critics blasted the unemployment bills Thursday as harmful to laborers.
Christina LeBlanc, a policy analyst for the pro-worker nonprofit Invest in Louisiana, previously the Louisiana Budget Project, said the proposed system would disproportionately harm rural parishes whose unemployment rates fall below the state's overall percentage of unemployed people. East Carroll Parish, for example, has an unemployment rate of 9.8%, according to LeBlanc.

First responders who'd been injured on the job and a representative of the state firefighters' union later spoke against HB 529, the bill carried by Rep. Raymond Crews, R-Bossier City, to change the way payments to injured workers are calculated.
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This quote really says it all :
"First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don't have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill's purpose."
 
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