Serving age bill makes sense

Brian Wilson

Good help is hard to find. This is especially true when it comes to service industries such as in restaurants and taverns. Servers have a lot to handle with long hours on their feet, keeping orders straight, being the front line worker to work with customers and as a result have to bear the brunt of it when the customer has a bad attitude or is just having a bad day. It is no surprise that there is a shortage of servers, especially in rural, and tourist areas where there just aren’t as many people.

Addressing this issue is at the heart of a new bill announced earlier this week.

The bill will allow underage servers as young as 14 to deliver alcoholic drinks to seated customers at restaurants and open more opportunities for young people to earn money while expanding the pool of potential workers for businesses.

Currently state law requires people to be 18 years old to serve cocktails, wine or beer to customers. The bill, introduced by Sen. Rob Stafsholt, R-New Richmond, and Rep. Chanz Green, R-Grandview, would keep that restriction in place for most situations but would allow in a restaurant the server to carry the drink from the bar to the customer’s table.

Under existing laws, the server would have to find another, older server to carry the drinks. As the bill’s authors note, this only allows the server to do half their job. It also takes another, equally overworked, away from their own duties.

This is similar to the silly charade at supermarket check-outs of having to pull another cashier or someone from service desk to swipe the bottle of Korbel over the scanner.

In practice, preventing people under the age of 18 to carry a tray of drinks from a bar across the dining room to a table, does a disservice to young workers by limiting opportunities.

Age restrictions, particularly in food service typically make sense. It makes sense that you want someone with a certain level of maturity to operate a fryer or commercial slicer, things that if mishandled could cause permanent damage. For the same reason, you wouldn’t want youngsters operating heavy equipment in factories or on worksites, there is just not the level of experience or maturity to make split second decisions which could have serious consequences.

In comparison it seems silly to regard fetching and carrying a tray of beverages across a dining room with the same restrictions as operating a piece of road machinery or commercial deep fryer.

There are those who complain about any expansion in child labor rules, and that children should be focused on their educations and being children rather than being thrust into the working world. While I agree with that sentiment to a point, not everyone is in the same situation and the extra income can come in handy. People tend to appreciate something more if they had to work to get it. Such as a young person working to save up money to purchase their first car.

We should not discount the value of life lessons learned from someone’s first job, nor should we create barriers to employment based on silly, and outdated rules about who can carry a tray of drinks to a table. *** Just wanted to give a huge shout-out to the cast and crew of “12 Angry Jurors” performed by the Medford Area Senior High School Drama Club last weekend.

The story has been one of my personal favorites since I saw Henry Fonda in the 1957 movie version when I was a child. The Medford drama production was well done. Admittedly with my son in the cast as the indecisive Juror No. 2, I am a bit biased in my review of the play.

While dramas don’t draw the same crowds as lighthearted musicals, they present an opportunity for the performers to expand their acting skills and push their personal boundaries.

There is something special about live theater and it is always great to see people take to the stage and put on shows here in Medford.

I look forward to this summer’s Medford Area Community Theatre’s production of “Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery” and next fall’s school production of “Cinderella.”

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.