At the same time that a growing number of sports fans are raising an eyebrow at the practice of cheering on a football team as grown men are repeatedly concussed in the pursuit of a higher score, we have legislation introduced in key ag states that would put kids as young as 14 in meat packing plants as a means of addressing the labor shortage.

The idea is wrong on so many levels.

Yes, family businesses and agriculture, in particular, have long traditions of involving children at the earliest possible age. Small meat plant owners often rope in their sons and daughters to sweep floors, assemble or disassemble packaging in an area separate from the production line or kill floor. Sometimes the kids fall in love with the business. Usually no one gets hurt. Usually.

Every year thousands of football players from peewee to the pros leave it all out on the gridiron and go safely home to eat dinner with loved ones. Then there’s the horror of watching Damar Hamlin, 24, nearly die on national television when a freak, ordinary tackle sent him into cardiac arrest during the Bills-Bengals game. Or seeing Miami Dolphins’ Tua Tagovailoa’s hands seize up in an indication of severe head and neck trauma after a sack during a game, also against the Bengals, in September. He also is 24.

Yes, these are grown men, legally speaking, who have weighed the benefits and the costs and decided to play. Protective gear is constantly improving, as are medical protocols, and most professional football players will not wind up with the kind of brain damage we now know plagued Junior Seau, Aaron Hernandez, Ken Stabler and more than 100 others diagnosed with CTE post-mortem.

But accidents will happen, on a football field and certainly in a meat plant. Even in a small facility the packaging or dry storage room is close to cutters, choppers, stuffers, augurs and belts that can grab the smallest loose end and drag a limb — sometimes even a whole body — into an unforgiving piece of equipment. Although protective gear and equipment design is improving constantly, a smaller or mid-size company is unlikely to have the latest and the greatest models.

Overall, meat processing workers are about three times more likely to be severely injured than the average American worker, OSHA reports. Far more dangerous occupations exist, but there’s a reason we don’t give teenagers a policeman’s uniform and a gun, or let them drive logging trucks.

Or work in meat processing plants. To be sure, many of the worst accidents happen at large facilities, often in the wee hours, doing jobs that supposedly would still be off-limits to teenagers. Even so, accidents happen because of human error, sometimes fed by a kind of cowboy culture among plant employees, and who is more prone to error and social pressure than teenagers?

The notion that these jobs could be supervised as part of an educational apprenticeship is a fig leaf, one that will be stripped away immediately when something, anything, goes awry. There are far better, albeit more complex, solutions.

Or is honest-to-goodness immigration reform such a fraught idea that it’s easier to put 14-year-olds to work in a meat processing plant?

Is the solution to the labor shortage really 14 years old?

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