There’s a bumper sticker that brags “Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.”
Well, if you’re in Virginia, and you’re still on summer vacation this week, thank the amusement park lobby.
Every schoolkid in Virginia (and half of those in Maryland and D.C.) knows the story: A couple of decades ago, the Virginia amusement park lobby calculated that it would benefit if school didn’t start until after Labor Day (which, by the way, is when it should start). So the industry pushed through a bill blocking localities from starting school any earlier.
Ben Freed at Washingtonian has a good story on this lobbying win, and how the industry continues to pour money into politics, in part to preserve this rule.
Here’s a fun detail:
“As a general rule, I do not support going [to school] before Labor Day, but I clearly would be open to looking at specific circumstances,” McAuliffe told the Roanoke Times in January. “A lot of people have talked to me, a lot of folks who have made massive investments in our tourism business.”
Kings Dominion’s parent company, Ohio-based Cedar Fair, isn’t among McAuliffe’s donors, but he’s still got plenty of reason to be sympathetic to the park’s cause. His 2013 campaign took in about $134,000 from amusement parks, sports teams, and other recreational ventures, according to donor records.
Here’s my question: Do the amusement parks benefit from the later school start? Doesn’t a week of vacation at the end of the summer cost a week of vacation in June? Fairfax County families may still be frolicking this week, but Montgomery County kids will get out a week earlier at the end of the year.
This has always bothered me about the “King’s Dominion Law,” so I went back and checked the contemporaneous debate. It turns out, the whole thing makes more sense if you think of workers, rather than customers.
“Kids are turned down for jobs now because they can’t work through Labor Day,” Democratic lawmaker Alson Smith argued at the time. More to the point: Amusement parks would lose much of their high-school-aged workers in the last week of the summer, while families from Pennsylvania and New York might still want to come to the park.
