Like if a law isn't working to protect children, it's a good thing to change it! How do we talk about that if every discussion starts with how horrifying it is to change the laws that protect children.
When I looked at the Arkansas change, it didn't really seem like a big deal. Previously parents had to fill out a form and send it to the state and wait for approval. A form isn't going to stop a parent from describing the duties inaccurately or ensure that the employer actually sticks to the description that the parents agreed to. The way things go, the state agency probably felt a lot of pressure to rubber stamp them. And so on.
I'm not sure I analyzed it well, but apparently we can't even talk about it, because change is bad.
My guess is that industrial plants are desperate for labor, and have been routinely breaking the law to employ vulnerable (most migrant) child laborers. Since this sort of abuse is precisely what the laws were designed to protect against, these firms couldn’t pass the work permit requirements: and having these laws in place made it easier for state and federal agencies to investigate and hold those companies to account. Now these powerful interests have bought themselves some new laws that protect them from being held accountable.
People should be horrified about this, frankly. There are similar laws advancing in Iowa that also remove these protections for meat plants, and also eliminate liability if children are killed. It reversed decades of human progress, all so a few powerful producers can make a tiny amount of additional profit.
The rest of the changes to the Iowa law don't seem particularly egregious:
https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ba=SF167&ga=...
It's hard to read, but it seems like the change related to meat packing allows 14 and 15 years to package meat in a cooler, where before they would have to do it in a room that wasn't a cooler? Like there's a provision in the under 18 section about no work in slaughter, meat packing and rendering, but an exception for assembly.
Like fine, there isn't really that much need to do a nuanced read of how involved a 14 year old should be in packing meat, but the change to the law there doesn't seem very big, essentially updating it to allow for modern practices (with the caveat that I read it in a reasonably correct way, I'm not gonna argue very hard that I did...).
And I've seen plenty of people here argue in favor of child labor, so I don't know what you're worried about.
Example of one calculation method, take the probable incidents, multiply the probability by the negative impact. Likelehood of kid injurying themselves in a physically dangerous area, very very high. Hospitals are full of kids every weekend that injured themselves in their own home, negative injury likely bad bruise or broken arm lasting days to weeks. Online probability of harm = low. Severity of harm most likely = name calling or mental bullying. Bullying impact likely low unless bullies also physically live nearby which then brings it back to in-person harm.
Not the person you are asking, but I can already guess what their reasoning most likely is gonna be.
Get a large sheet of paper and fill it with buzzwords like "tiktok", "groomers", "CRT", "lgbtq propaganda", etc. Throw a few darts at it, and you should get a possible semblence of the reasoning I would expect the grandparent comment user to give you.
I always try to give a poster the most charitable interpretation possible and steelman their argument before even considering making fun of it. But I legitimately struggle to come up with any charitable interpretation of an argument that claims "underage users browsing internet without state-mandated age verification is more dangerous than them working in a meatpacking facility or a slaughterhouse".
