ALBANY, N.Y. — For decades, a carveout in New York’s child labor laws allowed kids as young as 11 to legally partake in the time-honored tradition of a paper route.
Flipping papers into suburban hedges, bicycling through snow squalls, dodging dogs and getting stiffed for tips became a rite of passage for generations of youths.
But a change to the law quietly made via the state budget this month makes clear the job is now not allowed for anyone under 14 years old. The move was first reported by Politico.
The change comes even though paper boys and girls have mostly gone the way of phone booths, mimeograph machines and their urban “newsie” forebears who shouted “Extra! Extra!” on street corners.
While many teens used to take on paper routes as after-school jobs, that became rarer decades ago as more daily newspapers switched to early morning deliveries. Newspapers are now increasingly online and tend to rely on adults with cars to make home deliveries, according to industry watchers.
“The need for a workforce of kids to go throwing newspapers on stoops is just a thing of the past,” said attorney Allan Bloom, an employment law expert with the Proskauer firm.
Lawmakers made the change as part of a broader update of child labor laws. Bloom likened it to a “cleanup” as lawmakers streamlined the process for employing minors and increased penalties for violating child labor laws.
Diane Kennedy, president of the New York News Publishers Association, said she was not aware of any newspapers in New York using youth carriers.
Christopher Page recalled buying his first guitar on earnings from a paper route started in the late ’70s in suburban Clifton Park, north of Albany.
“I just had a 10-speed that I destroyed,” said Page. “It was truly rain or shine, I’m out there riding the bike. Or even in the winter, I would still ride the bike in the snow through all the potholes and the ice.”
When dogs chased him on his bike, Page would ward them off with his shoulder bag full of newspapers.
At age 13, Jon Sorensen delivered the Syracuse Herald-American on Sunday with his 11-year old brother in the Finger Lakes town of Owasco from the back of their mother’s Chevy station wagon.
“That was back when papers were papers — a lot of sections and a lot of weight,” recalled Sorensen, now 68 and Kennedy’s partner. “I can remember trudging through the snow. … I don’t think I ever dropped one, because if you did you had to be heading back to the car and pick up another copy.”
Sorensen stayed in the newspaper business as an adult, covering state government and politics for papers including New York Daily News and The Buffalo News.
“The hardest part of the job wasn’t delivering the paper, it was collecting,” Sorensen recalled. “It wasn’t always easy to get people to pay up.”