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The cost of degrading minimum-wage workers
“If you don’t shut up and pay attention, you’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life,” was a frequent outburst from my elementary school teacher in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Teaching reluctant 10-year-olds how to do long division without a calculator probably wasn’t the focal point of that man’s career. However, today, I question […]
Pay your interns because they deserve it
Over 20 years ago, I got an internship in the White House Press Office, and of course it was unpaid. Paid internships were quite rare in Washington, D.C., even though hundreds of interns had been producing work that was just as valuable as paid staff. But after decades of taking advantage of young people, reinforcing […]
We let teens fire guns. Why are we afraid to let them read books?
Similar to the rest of the United States, my home state of Iowa cannot make up its mind about how to treat our children and teenagers. In Iowa, children aged 10-15 can legally deliver newspapers and complete other light work for a few hours during the week and more hours on the weekend. Iowans who […]