I’ve touched on this before, but it seems that government process has diverged from solving problems for the greater good and instead solves problems for the least common denominator. Let’s take child labor laws. On the surface, it would seem to be a good thing to protect children from working in conditions that would harm them. But one law maker’s harm is another’s no harm. So the generally broad interpretation of harm can include children not working during school hours. Of course forcing children to attend school is altogether another harm, but let’s skip that digression.
In last week’s Connecticut Law Tribune, (h/t Colin McEnroe) there’s an interesting article about a three generation pizza restaurant taking of the Department of Labor over, you guessed it, child labor laws.
For Michael Nuzzo, so many family memories have been made in pizzerias.
He and his brothers grew up working for their father, Fred, in the original Grand Apizza in New Haven. And now Michael operates a Grand Apizza restaurant in Clinton, where his three children, ages 8 to 13, help out on Friday nights and Saturdays. Sometimes, Fred drops in to roll dough with his grandchildren.
It’s a continuation of a family tradition for the Nuzzos, spending quality time together making pizza.
But the state’s Department of Labor saw something different. An investigator visited Grand Apizza on May 12 and told Michael and his wife, Migdalia, that state laws prohibit children under 16 from working in restaurants. No fines were levied and no enforcement action was taken against the restaurant.
But now, the sauce is flying.
The Nuzzos fired back late last month with a federal lawsuit against senior officials at the Connecticut Department of Labor alleging that the state is encroaching on the parents’ rights to raise their children.
“I want to be left alone to run my business so I can pay my mortgage and send my kids to college,” Nuzzo told the Law Tribune last week. “My restaurant is an extension of my home, and my children are welcome here any time.”
Nuzzo thinks a local gadfly is responsible for complaining to state officials. “There’s somebody in town who has got nothing better to do, and she’s always been a thorn in people’s sides,” Nuzzo said.
The story about the state’s crackdown on a small family restaurant has made national news. The Nuzzos have appeared on ABC, CNN and Fox News to tell their story, and the fight with the state already seems to be worthwhile. “It has increased business,” Nuzzo said. “We’re getting calls nationwide, and some people just came down from Boston to have a pizza and say they support me.”
Legally, the case raises some interesting questions about state labor laws, how they’re applied and how they might violate people’s civil rights.
“It’s an interesting issue from a lawyer’s perspective,” said Raymond J. Rigat, who represents the Nuzzos and runs his general practice a few doors down from Grand Apizza.
In his complaint, Rigat argues that the Nuzzo children regularly attend public school, never operate dangerous equipment at the restaurant and always are under their parents’ supervision. Nuzzo added that his children never miss school to work at the restaurant.
Rigat’s complaint seeks a declaration that prevents the Labor Department “from prohibiting the Nuzzo children from learning the pizza trade under their parents’ tutelage at the family restaurant.” He alleges violations of rights under the First, Ninth and 14th Amendments.
The legal issue, the article concludes, may be difficult for the courts to handle, because the courts can’t handle nuance. I can sort of understand that, since families, after all, have a long track record of abusing child labor in the more agrarian days. And it was only a 100 years or so when child labor in the textile industry sparked all these labor regulations to begin with. But clearly this is just another case of government lacking common sense. The process of government can’t differentiate between something bad, and something benign. Which brings us to the next news bit of interest. In Los Angeles, via the LA Times, there’s a move to streamline the application process for opening restaurants.
It seems that in L.A. it can take up to two years to get through all the permitting processes before opening a restaurant. The L.A. City government, noting the boom and bust economic cycles, figured out they needed to do something about that.
Now, developers seeking to build restaurants will be assigned case managers to help them through the process, said Raymond Chan, executive officer of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.
In addition, the city has worked with the county Department of Public Health to eliminate conflicting rules among the many agencies that regulate restaurants.
“Building a restaurant involves almost all the building trades — mechanical, architectural, health, grease control, electrical,” Chan said, and each one requires a different set of inspections.
Until now, he said, inspectors from different departments would come to a restaurant construction site and demand different types of safety measures, or insist that the owner pull out materials that another inspector had insisted on using.
In one case, he said, a restaurant owner put in one type of equipment for processing and removing grease at the behest of the health department. Then, he said, the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, which handles trash removal, insisted that the part be replaced with a different type of equipment — at a cost of up to $40,000.
Ensuring that all department regulations are in sync is something really needed in Norwalk. Talk to any Norwalk business owner and they will tell similar tales of one inspecting official requiring one thing, and another requiring something else. Too often the political shorthand for streamlining government is about reducing operational costs and it’s corollary, taxes. That shouldn’t the whole sum of the argument. Operational efficiencies can cost money to implement, but they can result in higher revenues by increasing economic development. It’s too bad that at least in Norwalk, the conversation about government stays moored to the dock of taxes.
