It just so happened that on Thursday of last week I was watching the hearing of the Louisiana House Labor and Industrial Relations Committee when HB 156 came up for review. What followed was…interesting. But what followed after that was…instructive.

HB 156 is a bill by freshman state representative Roger Wilder, who is a member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus. Wilder also owns a bunch of Smoothie King locations in Louisiana and a couple of other states. As such, he generally employes a lot of kids. Smoothie King is more or less a fast-food place, though what it sells is a bit different than what you get at most fast food places, and everybody knows who works at fast food joints.

College kids. Sometimes high school kids.

It turns out that the law in Louisiana says that if you have kids under 18 working at your place, you have to force them to go off the clock for 30 minutes so they can take a lunch break. You don’t have to do that for the 18-year-olds who work at your place. And in Mississippi, there is no requirement that 17-year-olds go off the clock for lunch.

Generally speaking, if you’re just grabbing a bite to eat you don’t need 30 minutes. You need 10 minutes, 15 tops. So you’re actually wasting time not getting paid if you’re forced to go off the clock for 30 minutes. It’s maybe three or four bucks every shift that you’re losing. Which might not seem like much, but work 22 days a month and that’s enough money to pay your cell phone bill or it’s beer money or enough to fill up your gas tank. And this is money that the government is forcing you not to make.

In testimony supporting the bill, Wilder notes that most of his managers don’t even take the “adults” (meaning, the 18-year-olds) off the clock if they’re just going to run into the break room and eat something really quickly. There’s no need to do that, particularly if the restaurant isn’t all that busy and there is somebody to work the cash register, so they let the kids grab a bite and they save the time that would be spent punching in and out.

That sounds right. Easy record-keeping is mother’s milk for franchisees and small businesses, and every corner they can cut on bureaucracy is great not just for the bottom line but for sanity.

So he brings a bill to get state government out of the hair of people like him and lots of other businesspeople who, again, don’t have to deal with stupid requirements like this in our neighboring states.

The pushback against the bill was pretty mild. Democrat Tammy Phelps of Shreveport, who occupies the seat formerly held by Barbara Norton, offered up some pretty mild grumbling about the bill. That was about it, and then it was voted easily onto the House floor.

And when that happened, the clowns on the Left went on Twitter rampages about it.

The sponsor of Louisiana's legislation to weaken child labor laws owns several Smoothie King franchises.

“The wording is ‘We’re here to harm children.’ Give me a break. These are young adults," he said during the hearing. From @ByPiperHutch #lalege https://t.co/jG4zSOqf6K

— Julie O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) April 18, 2024

Naturally, that’s the Louisiana Illuminator, which cares so much about kids they’re constantly celebrating perverts who groom them for queer sex.

But the idiots who follow Julia O’Donoghue had to go utterly ballistic over Wilder’s bill…

I hope all of his employees quit and find other jobs.

— Cheri (@Arecheri) April 18, 2024

https://twitter.com/ATillmanBester/status/1781265194359865537

@SmoothieKing– your franchise trying to eliminate lunch breaks for young adults. As a parent, I’m never going to Smoothie King again in my life.

— lovinlsutigers (@NYC_su) April 19, 2024

No one thinks they went to BR to harm children. They're there to maximize profits. Whoever gets hurt be damned.

— BillyMackSW! (@mack_sw) April 19, 2024

I won’t let my kids have summer jobs if this is how they’re going to be treated.

— Morgan Hester Shows (@MorganShows) April 18, 2024

Why in the world do we allow these despicable capitalists to feel safe saying these things in public?

— Donna (@DonnaspahrDonna) April 18, 2024

Yet another method of socializing business costs, at a very high cost to children.

— JBR (@jbr1657) April 18, 2024

What’s so incredibly dumb about this, as Wilder noted in his testimony on the bill, is that employers in the QSR space and other low-wage, low-skill employment areas, are generally desperate when it comes to staffing. Finding kids who will actually do any work in those jobs, or even to consistently show up on time and not quit a few days into the job after the employer has invested a bunch of time hiring and training them, is the single hardest thing for owners and managers of places like Smoothie King to do.

The idea that you can just “exploit” your workers by starving them for an entire shift is beyond stupid. It has zero basis in reality. Tell a kid she can’t have a snack at a Smoothie King when its downtime, and she will quit on the spot and go to work for the equally-desperate competitor down the street. Everybody knows this.

Everybody, that is, but the emotionalist morons on Twitter who are not screaming at Wilder and demanding boycotts of Smoothie King.

And of course, they were stoked up by the Advocate and Louisiana Illuminator, a pair of leftist propaganda shops which are funded by out of state non-profits pushing every form of cultural and economic Marxism they can.

This is why I keep harping on how important it is to steamroll the Left in Louisiana. These are not serious people, they’re idiots who don’t understand how the world works and all they have to offer is emotional diarrhea about public policy, and they’re ginned up by Hard Left money from outside the state. They don’t win elections here anymore, and we are under zero obligation to give them any political influence at all.

So don’t.

Here’s hoping Wilder’s bill sails through the House floor and has an equally ride through the Senate, which is once again beginning to look like a repository of RINOism. There is no reason not to pass this bill, something made pretty clear by the stupid and unpersuasive argumentation offered by its opponents.