On Monday's Fox and Friends, the Fox News show promoted the idiotic idea of changing federal child labor laws to appease business owners struggling to fill jobs.

The claim from this ice cream parlor owner is he can't hire anyone because all the teens are taking online delivery service jobs.

In April, the US economy added an excellent 428,000 jobs, which is the12th straight month of gains above 400,000, while the unemployment rate sat at 3.6%.

But to Fox News, none of that matters.

Mark Lawrence, owner of Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour whined to co-host Steve Doocy that online apps like Instacart have taken away potential employees from his ice cream shop. His "solution" is to change the federal child labor laws.

Lawrence said it's been hard getting employees this year.

Steve Doocy said the ice cream shop usually "hires high school kids and college kids during their summer, but they don't want jobs this year, do they?"

That's not true.

"Not so much, " Lawrence said.

He continued, "A lot of them have taken jobs with like Instacart and some of the online delivery services because you can make a couple of hundred bucks doing that as opposed to coming to work HARD, in an ice cream shop or any other places and you can work at your whim."

In other words, high school kids aren't lazy as Doocy suggested. They now have an option on how, when, where, and how long to work if they so choose.

isn't that the American way? Who hasn't been impacted by an ever-changing society even before COVID?

And who said working for Instacart is not hard work when they go shopping for you? How is working at an ice cream shop "real work" compared to that? Especially when drivers pay for gas?

Doocy, "Yeah, exactly, pick and choose."

God forbid!

Doocy continued, "So, one of the problems as well from your point of view is the child labor laws because there are certain restrictions on who you can hire."

"If they could change a law so it's fair for you and fair for the families, how would that look," Doocy asked.

"It's quite simple," Lawrence said.

"A high school student can play sports. They could go to an away game for sports and by the time they get back from their away game it could be 11:00 at night or later on a school night," he said.

He continued, "However Federal labor laws state that during the school year a high schooler can only work till seven at night - especially my business, the ice cream industry, 7 o'clock at night is when you just starting to get rolling."

"That would be one of the biggest things," Lawrence said.

Riight. Destroy laws that have protected our youth for decades.

First of all, using high school athletes as your bellwether to undo federal labor laws is ridiculous. Athletes make up such a minute percentage of high school students overall. Plus athletics is part of school curriculum (unless they now consider that as an extension of CRT) and a gateway for college scholarships and other advantages for athletic teenagers.

When a student plays high school sports, they are not being exploited for a profit organization. College is a whole other issue.

And these labor laws are there to stop children from being exploited by greedy owners and companies. It protects them.

And we are talking about 14-15 year olds.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), youths 14 and 15 years old may work outside school hours in various non-manufacturing, non-mining, non-hazardous jobs under certain conditions.

Permissible work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds are:

• 3 hours on a school day;
• 18 hours in a school week;
• 8 hours on a non-school day;
• 40 hours in a non-school week; and
• between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., except from June 1 through Labor Day, when nighttime work hours are extended to 9 p.m.

Child labor laws vary from state to state. Please consult your state department of labor for this information.

There's a reason Fox had this ice cream parlor owner on, and it's not to destroy labor laws. Fox encourages viewers to sue their school board or create some ruckus over anything by dangling the possibility of a sit-down with Steve Doocy.

It's a self-feeding cycle of grievance politics against a Democratic administration.