To everyone talking about how they worked as a kid, the bill talks about industries with labor shortages, such as meat-packing and construction.
These are very difficult jobs and are also quite dangerous, it's not like being a store clerk. Working in a meat packing plant can bear a toll on your mental well being.
As a child, you can't be well aware of what you're getting into, and these industries can be predatory to their employees (big surprise as to why they are understaffed), by not respecting labor laws or pushing the limits of them.
Want your kids to work forced overtime attaching dead chickens to hooks in a fridge? I don't think it's as beneficial as working as a clerk. I wouldn't even be comfortable with kids working in kitchens, since these industries are predatory as well!
Ugh.. anyone thinking of sending their kid to work in a meatpacking factory should read the Jungle by Upton Sinclair instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
Stories I’ve heard lately are that the meat packing industry has been steadily slipping back on safety by repeatedly lobbying for and winning the right to run plants faster and faster, which has increased injury rates.
ProPublica has some consistently high-quality reporting on meatpacking as a an industry from all kinds of perspectives - the (mis)management of them during the pandemic, the hiring of children to work there, the horrid safety conditions, etc.
I'm not sure if ProPublica has a free, public dataset on meatpacking plants but they generally have datasets that you can purchase that pertain to particular areas of reporting: Medicare and Medicaid overbilling / fraud; repeated pollution violators who keep paying fines instead of stopping polluting; etc. If anyone knows of a dataset on meatpacking plants, health and/or safety violations, etc. please do share the link to the dataset.
It's kind of ironic for some people in this thread to dismiss meatpacking jobs as "low value" when they have been crucial to keep the supply chain functional. Severe chicken shortages around 2020-2021 were mainly caused by workers in that industry falling ill, because the work conditions there are ideal incubators for respiratory illnesses (cold temperature, indoor environment, lots of people inside the same space, etc.). These jobs exist so anyone can walk into a grocery store and have an obscene selection of animal protein available for purchase without ever having to touch an animal. They are crucial to the modern consumer society and the way these workers have been mistreated have been awful enough without adding god damn child labour to the mix. We need far more regulatory pressure on the industry, not less.
The argument that more pay & benefits for these workers will make meat more expensive is also nothing but a scare tactic. There is already so much automation that the increased cost will hardly be noticeable when it is distributed among purchasing units at the consumer end.
Since the jungle was published, more recent research has been published to show that simply having a meatpacking or butcher factory in the community causes more violent crime, sexual assault, and drug addiction.
In case you've been living under a rock for the past several decades, it's because Republicans are trying as hard as they can to roll back the clock on safety, government regulation, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, trans rights, unions, fair working conditions, health care, birth control, abortion, and equal pay.
Profit before human or worker rights? People working in these companies in Germany are fucked up because of all the killing and handling of dead animals.
And how do you need to be to want kids working in anything before they completed their education (minus a couple easy summer jobs). Some American legislators are scum.
Not to mention, this is the lowest of low value jobs that they’d be employed in, which can be actively harmful to your career as you never get the time to develop high value skills due to the strenuous work involved in these positions.
A teenager with ANY work history on their limited resume has a huge leg up over the equivalent teenager who has a little more other stuff but no work history.
Poster is saying that having a manual labor position takes up time that could be used to study more and get better grades, take higher level/honors classes, interesting extracurricular activities, etc. There is an opportunity cost.
You give kids an education and let them do some summer jobs if they want to earn something additionally but you don‘t let them work a real job when going to school. And gaining work experience starts when having vocational training. Look up the German dual education system we have in Germany
a leg up when? if they’re a 17 year old drop out looking to climb the meat packing management ladder maybe? trades won’t care about meatpacking experience, and if you’re trying to look good for college you’d be better off doing anything else
I worked terrible jobs because I had to starting at 14 (tobacco farms, cleaning meat plants, unloading trucks) and all it did was age me, no one cared about the experience and once I was through college putting it on my resume would have been a detriment
They are doing this to allow all the child migrants to work without issue. That entire child labor pool that is growing rapidly to the point Hyundai is spinning off subsidiary only to reduce the blame on themselves, they are still keeping the supplier.
MN law currently prevents working on a construction site at all until age 18. That includes benign jobs like hanging/finishing drywall, painting, cabinet installation, and many other jobs that seem entirely fine for some 17 year olds to do.
Construction sites are rife with alcoholics and drug addicts, usually a result of coping with injuries from the work. Site managers pride themselves on hiding as many OSHA violations as they can when the site inspector shows up.
I would never want any child working on any construction job, unless it was my own family business.
Yeah but it's tricky to decide and list all of the exact tasks which are allowed and which are prohibited, and keep updating it each year. Plus ensure that it's actually enforced, when kids might want to do the dangerous stuff or be pressured into it and it's not like there's an inspector right there watching everything.
A blanket prohibition on construction sites just seems simpler and much more enforceable.
I think he's talking about the All-American freedom to exploit as many people as possible, child labor laws are obviously too strict and infringe of the freedom of red blooded Americans
There are not really any benign jobs on a construction site. Pretty much everything you listed there requires ladder work, which in theory at a corporate level, you need to do safety training on.
I wish there would be exceptions to child labor regulations, but just the opposite kind: I could already do programming at 8 quite well, but I started professionally only after I was 23 because of all the rules. I wish I supported my family more by doing knowledge work.
Now the work introduced here has nothing to do with knowledge work, and it just takes away time from building a carreer, so of course I’m against that kind of child labor.
I'm not sure what was stopping you from working until 23, but in the US people can generally start working full-time at 16. I certainly know people who dropped out of high school after 10th grade in order to start working as mechanics.
"The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) administers and enforces the federal child labor laws. Generally speaking, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the minimum age for employment (14 years for non-agricultural jobs), restricts the hours youth under the age of 16 may work, and prohibits youth under the age of 18 from being employed in hazardous occupations."
I was born and raised in eastern europe before having access to internet. US is much more business oriented thinking by default than eastern-europe (where education comes first), although young people nowdays have global access to a lot more information.
I'm not from the US but I started working part-time as a developer at 16, and full-time at 17. This was 10+ years ago, but I know more teenagers now doing something similar than there were when I was growing up (for non-typical teenage jobs).
It's very unlikely you could write software at a professional level at age 8. I wrote my first video game at age 10 using Basic (a clone of Space Invaders), so did many of my friends. That doesn't mean we could find a job as software developers at that age. Sure, there are progidies in all forms of art and science, but again thinking you could write software professionally as a kid is very different than actually doing it as there are many skills and personality traits you develop as you grow up that are critical to successfully develop software, or to execute any task really that requires organization, time management, decision making, negotiation, prioritize tasks, etc.
I was helping my father in the late 80s to write an accounting software for his own accounting firm. Of course I didn't know accounting, but I could write some basic stuff (in QBASIC) to help with the UI, and he installed it at some places where he was working at professionally. It was a time before you could buy accounting software in eastern europe, so everybody was writing their own.
This is definitely going to get used as a stick to beat parents with and do the usual sidestep from talking about why people's standards of living keep declining. "Oh youre complaining about not affording food but you have two kids wasting their time in school?"
Because the goverment should not dictate wages. The market should. The minimum wage should actually be zero. I would certainly like to see a minimum wage of $30/hr but realistically I know that's not possible, particularly in low skill level tasks that today can be easily automated. Wages is the number one cost in many industries, some operating with very tight margins. If you give industries a reason to automate they will, and those jobs will be gone forever once the investment is done and machines are in operation. Which is not a bad thing but you don't want it to happen suddenly without having a plan to retrain the workforce and give them valuable skills like they do in other countries like Germany. So if you want better wages, it is simple, get people skills that are in high demand.
"So if you want better wages, it is simple, get people skills that are in high demand."
It's simple in theory, but in practice it seems difficult. How do you provide people in low skill jobs with better skills? I'm sure many of them are capable of learning higher skills. However, I would guess there are many others already operating at their top level. They would likely be able to learn other lower skilled jobs, but I don't see them jumping to a higher level. How does that work in Germany?
I defo agree the gov should provide transition periods and guide people whose jobs are getting obsoleted --don't cravenly say "learn to code" when you threaten to shut their industries down.
Also, the bell curve distribution means many people as you say are performing at their utmost and could not adapt to higher skills demands. That's just nature. But we do have to provide some kind of opportunity for them. Simple assembly or sorting used to be some of the things industry used to find work for them in --but a lot of that got shipped overseas and those people lost their independence.
Yes. And kids now commit less crime, drink less alcohol, smoke less cigarettes, get better education and get injured with lifetime consequences less often.
Even teenage birth rates are now much lower then in the 50ties.
There are many operations withing these industries that are not necessarily dangerous let alone difficult. I guess when you hear of construction or meat-packing you think about 15 years old kids hanging from a harness 50 ft high or butchering a cow. This is ridiculous, there are many roles that would be completely appropriate for a teenager in virtually any industry and we have agencies that could make sure kids are working in safe environments and conditions.
Your point is taken, but we have to consider the opportunity cost. For kids not academically focused nor have even with the temperament for vocational ed., who may be getting into trouble at school or flirting with drugs, a steady job even if it's a little rough could be a lifeline. Working in meat processing is extreme, but I don't think it is anywhere near kitchen labor. We can certainly pair these work exemptions with stronger workplace safety oversight, to your point.
While we're at it, let's save people of color by making them slaves. Hey, if they're flirting with drugs and dealing with poor social support, then this is a lifeline!
An illustration of how this completely bogus argument a societal race to the bottom.
We cannot bandage serious social issues with more serious social issues. Masquerading this degree of child labor as being a lifeline is tone deaf and short sighted at best, but teetering on amoral and vile.
Opportunity cost? We’re talking about 13-14 years olds sanitizing meat packing facilities on the overnight shift as was recently exposed up here in Minnesota.
I don't think you'll find that these jobs could compete with being a school drug dealer. Both in time spent, popularity, and profitability, drug dealer is a much more appealing job for teens.
Really? That's what you thought gp was objecting to? Not the fact that the work is low-value and dead-end? Not the forced overtime? Not the parents subsidizing an exploitative industry? You thought this was about seeing chickens on hooks?
Since nobody else has said the actual problem, it's twofold,
1. The danger of putting the dead chickens on the sharp hooks -- shorter, weaker, less mature children are more likely to be injured or injure others with those hooks
2. The forced overtime - a kid needs to eat and sleep a ton, not spend 2 hours working at 3pm, then another hour at 9pm and another 4hours at 4am and then another 5 hours at 11am.
They have commitments that we as a society want them to make, like going to school, and those are incompatible with the modern just-in-time labour practices. Not that those are good for adults either, but it's even worse for kids to drop out in order to meet the anti-benefits scheduling. Children have neither the power, nor the maturity to push back on a boss that is taking advantage of them
Nah bro, he's saying you should be comfortable sending your kids to work at the sewage treatment plant picking trash out of giant piles of shit. But don't worry, there will be proper oversight and safety in place. It's mush safer to put a small child inside a machine, as they fit much easier. Safety first!
And to add to that, watching adults perform the task is much better preparation for adulthood than being forced to do something the adults are not willing to do themselves.
As a teenager I got to see my father and two uncles kill, sanitize, and pluck one goose and two chickens that we had for a Thanksgiving dinner one year. It was rather interesting, and it gave me more appreciation and insight into each of them as individuals (the men not the birds).
Unless you grow everything yourself, the production of fruits and vegetables that you consume also involve exploitation and suffering. The humans aren't being eaten, but they're hung out to dry all the same.
Even if you do grow everything yourself, people had to suffer to obtain the nitrogen and phosphorus in your fertilizer.
I have a good friend whonwpuld frequently cut chicken's heads off with an axe while helping out ar a familt farm and another who would frequently go duck hunting with his dad and describes killing the ducks by violently spinning their necks.
I've never done any of these things but my friends seem fine to me.
The problem with children working in slaughter houses isnt that the children will be exposed to dead animals, its that they'll be exposed to unsafe working conditions and taken advantage of by their employer.
Your point can really be expounded on a lot. I am one of those people who, as a kid, hunted various types of game. I also worked a summer as a 17 year old at ritewood egg in southern idaho. Although I wasn't butchering animals, the mental toll of watching where the 2-dollar-a-dozen eggs came from was more noticeable than hanging and gutting a deer in the woods.
I have no issues with children (14-18) having jobs, but there are industries we should strive as a society to keep them from. I wouldn't want kids working in animal food production for the same reasons I wouldn't want them in coal mines. It is important to consoder that those _reasons_ to start to dissipate as one matures and gets older and able to hold their own.
As a society we really should be striving to give kids the best opportunities to engage in constructive play and school before jobs in my opinion. Not that my opinion matters at all though...
Really it's the repetitive motion injuries that are by far the most dangerous here in this specific industry. Especially in people that are still developing and are not fully grown. The industry will gladly burn them up and then farm off their injuries to socialized healthcare for the rest of their lives.
And you're completely correct. There are reasons why we don't let kids make a huge number of different contracts. They don't have the knowledge to know when they are being exploited.
From being able to support a family with only the husband salary, to supporting it with two full time salaries, to barely supporting it even with two full time salaries, all the way back to child labor.
The transformation back into feudalism is nearly complete. Hope you're happy with the freedom to develop your slave career. Don't forget career is the most important part of your life, don't forget to pay your 50% taxes so that we can give them as social support to people who compete with you on pricing, as we artificially choke supply with regulations so that god forbid your work will lose its leverage over your life.
I think we're about 5 years away, maybe less, until company towns come back, as a "new and modern" solution to living costs crisis, you just have to sign a contract saying you will never leave the town unless you pay the debts to the company(and somehow your rent, groceries and medical bills are tiny bit more than what you are paid a month)
It's not a company town unless the company owns all the businesses and houses and pays you in company scrip. If you are going to call company planned residential projects for employee housing "company towns", then there are already company towns in Silicon Valley, but you'll have to excuse me for not feeling sorry for the workers.
Do you really think Elon Musk would be able to prevent himself from putting his face on the town currency? He may or may not care to name the store Elonmart.
Like spending $44 billion on a marginally profitable social media network, seemingly in a fit of pique at the SEC, and inserting a VIP modifier of 1000X into the algorithm so that his posts always pop to the top of everyone's feed because he was mad that the US President's tweet got more attention? Does that sound like the actions of a person with zero interest in wielding power over the residents of his new domain?
4 years ago, Google had proposed a massive housing development of their own, which some then compared to bringing back "company towns". My reaction was, we must be in a pretty crappy state where company towns are an improvement (over the current housing situation).
I already saw some documentary about gentrification. And how the restaurateur were building houses to house her workers. Charging pretty obscene rent and somehow telling nothing was wrong there... That isn't too far away from true exploitation.
In summer tourist areas, it's pretty common to bring in students from e.g. eastern Europe and (I think) often provide housing. But doesn't seem like a terrible deal for everyone involved. A lot of ski areas have dorms as well for seasonal workers.
Those are short term with a well defined end date and with clear upfront costs. Company towns were anything but, with workers frequently surprised with random charges at the end of the month just to make sure they don't accidentally make any money and pay off their debt to the company l.
They weren't all strictly the same though, there's some variations on the theme. One company in the past was in the business of buying fish from fishermen in small remote towns, transporting and selling it wholesale. They were also in the business of financing the boats for the fishermen. The terms of the loans were predatory and the company was a monopoly in the area, whatever money the fishermen made just went back to the company.
I was with you until the rant about taxes and regulations. I was under the impression that child labor laws are a form of regulation and that loosening these laws would be a form of deregulation.
The transformation back into feudalism is nearly complete.
Calling bad stuff "feudalism" is extremely tiresome as well as showing ignorance. It's unfortunate you have to muddy-up an otherwise OK rant/summary with this confused terminology.
Conventional agricultural labor on the land wasn't easy but it extraordinarily different from low-paid factor labor. This a return to Factory Capitalism Classic, which was a new system in most places starting in early 19th century. Peasant children might well have worked along side their parents in the fields at times and the work might have been back-breaking at times but the growing season then dictated everyone got substantial time off by virtue of there being nothing to do. Factories, mines and workshops were the first places that could impose relentless 18 hour days because they the organization, technologies and market to do that.
> Neo-feudalism or new feudalism is the contemporary rebirth of policies of governance, economy, and public life, reminiscent of those which were present in many feudal societies. Such aspects include, but are not limited to: Unequal rights and legal protections for common people and for nobility,[1] dominance of societies by small and powerful elite groups of society, and relations of lordship and serfdom between the elite and the people. Obviously, former are rich and the latter poor.
and it's an excellent and poignant term for the golden faucets wealthy vs two jobs hungry kids poor, backed by "prosperity gospel" and slave prison labor and disenfranchisement of felons and other human rights violations.
That the misuse of terminology has gotten large enough to have a wikipedia page doesn't mean it's not misuse. These policies are only "reminiscent" of feudalism in the minds of those who don't know the history of conventional capitalism.
..is rooted in feudalism isn't it... the mentality is similar, you nearly own people who can be grateful they are allowed to work for you, and you consider yourself more entitled than those.
the only däshift is from owning people born on your soil to nearly owning people who work for you.
and as they need these frickin "brains" for their work and that makes them crave "freedom" you have to give them as much freedom as needed --- and as little as it's sufficient --- so they move cash your way.
the term neo-feudalism is well understood and has a well defined meaning, as established by the mere existence of the Wikipedia article.
what we see is a concerted attempt of some golden faucets to push the world as feudal as can be. as little personal freedom, as much bubbling-up economy as possible.
it's a pushdiwn of social market economy via capitalism back to high tech neo feudalism.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but that was basically the mother working a full time job that now has to be off loaded and distributed to places like schools, child care facilities, etc.
Homemaker labor is still labor. Both parents working is different now in shape but not really that new.
It’s a win-win; it might also reduce the kids’ propensity to waste time on edu stool, thus improving the pipeline of cheap labor and voters who don’t see anything wrong with being a perpetual underclass.
You just described these jobs as "low value", so what valuable work experience can be gained for teens? What are the work hours like for teens? Is the work environment safe enough for teens?
The industries that are excited to use child labor (which is what this is) are only doing so because they have a shortage of capable adult workers that want to work in the conditions and for the pay provided.
Aside from the fact that most kids can’t tell when they’re being exploited, why should kids be the stopgap for corporations that not even adults want
According to the rules of the “free market”, these jobs should either provide better conditions or working conditions or both in order to attract talent, because the issue is not an oversupply of capable workers, it’s less.
Or in the case where passing the cost of better pay & benefits onto the customers will reduce demand of their products/services making continued operation unviable, then their business don't deserve to continue to exist. But instead of letting the free market sort itself out, they seek to exploit children in order to prop up their unethical and unviable business.
The industries that are excited to use child labor (which is what this is) are only doing so because they have a shortage of capable adult workers that want to work in the conditions and for the pay provided.
Aside from the fact that most kids can’t tell when they’re being exploited, why should kids be the stopgap for corporations that not even adults want
According to the rules of the “free market”, these jobs should either provide better conditions or working conditions or both in order to attract talent, because there’s plenty of workers— they just don’t want to work for the lack of return.
Could be several different reasons that all boil down to supply/demand and leverage.
In the article, it's claimed that many businesses can't afford to pay more, which is fairly believable for small businesses and for industries with global price pressures. The workers can't find better jobs, so they take whatever they can get.
"why don't those who do them deserve to make ends meet?"
They do, but society can't get it together to balance interests in a way that works for everyone (if that's even possible). Also, $15/hr should be fairly doable in a rural area.
That's what we should call a "Low value" business, which is actually what many businesses and entire industries are in the real world. Restaurants say they can't find workers, when the truth is pay and work conditions cannot attract workers. They say they can't afford to pay higher salaries, the response is "then raise prices". They say "then we'll lose our customers". Good! The business is not valuable enough and that means customers have to do without.
There is absolutely no need to continue with low value economic activity.
You seem to be missing the supply/demand and leverage part. Workers take the low value positions because they don't have an alternative. Not to mention the consumer culture of racing to the bottom. You'd have to fix those for the low value businesses to go under. Of course stuff like farm work and grocery stores are low paying, so it's not like they're just going to disappear.
> Workers take the low value positions because they don't have an alternative.
I'd like to correct that with "they believe they don't have an alternative." Almost all of them can get a better job, and that's why they are leaving bad employers and bad industries. Information is traveling faster than ever right now, and people are waking up. Gone are the generations of older people recommending a young person to take a shit job. Instead they are getting advice from the middle generations who have already been burned to stay far away from these jobs. Even people at the bottom have mobility and will go where better opportunities are found.
> Of course stuff like farm work and grocery stores are low paying, so it's not like they're just going to disappear.
Farm work has been massively automated with tractors and harvesters, those jobs have mostly disappeared. Today but a tiny percentage of the work force are employed in farming, when before it was the majority of the population. Grocery stores have changed as well. When before there were clerks handing goods over the counter, now people grab their products from shelves.
Not all work is worth a living wage, and not all workers are in need of that. If you try to force that, the work will either just not get done or it will be automated, and more people will be unemployed.
Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers is valuable even if the work itself requires little skill.
And there we have it. "I don't view your work as being valuable enough to justify you being able to obtain basic needs for yourself (like food and shelter), let alone a family. Now give me my frappe."
Funny how we will still call such employees "essential" when it's time to force them to work in shitty and potentially dangerous conditions.
A significant chunk of the userbase here work in jobs that use <flavour of the month> frameworks "reinventing" the <flavour of the year> stack because it will totally "disrupt" some completely saturated market, in companies averaging less than 12 months inbetween pivots and still earning less than 60¢ in revenue per $1 cost, more than five years after founding because they hire Stanford grads to write CRUD apps at a per person cost of starting entire small businesses. Of course they feel the need to validate the existence of their own jobs by shitting on "low skill" jobs that have actually been essential to keep our society functioning especially over the last 3 years.
Speak for yourself, my first jobs were flipping burgers and making pizza. Both "low skill" and paid accordingly. I could not have supported a family on those jobs but I was not trying to and they gave me experience and references as to my work ethic and character that were helpful in gaining higher skill, higher paying jobs.
>my first jobs were flipping burgers and making pizza.
Can you read the article first before typing out your next comment? Those jobs have always hired teens without these imminent changes to child labour laws. You are defending something that hasn't changed, and isn't relevant to what people are concerned about as reported in the article link in this thread.
Sweeping the floor at a factory is just not a high value job. Anyone can do it, and if you demand that they pay $40/hr with full benefits they will just buy industrial Roombas and deprive someone of a job he may have been happy to have as a first job or for supplemental income.
No. Someone who's happy to have a first job OR as supplemental income is not going to demand $40/hr with full benefits in those sectors. You are using a completely hypothetical scenario to justify exploiting children.
Ok I misread your conment. I was responding to those who seem to think that any job should be able to support a family, or should not be permitted to exist. Not supporting exploitation of children, dont know where that came from.
They are not, that's why minimum wage has lagged behind livable wage standards in the United States and Canada for decades, because minimum wages aren't livable wagges.
>the work will either just not get done or it will be automated
But I thought the free market runs itself? If an employee is bad they'd be gone in an eyeblink, so if a job is bad, why should it be allowed continued existence? Unemployment is at historical lows which is part of the reason why these awful jobs with awful pay can't be filled.
>Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers
There are plenty of adults who work in """high value jobs""" failing all of that every, single, day. Some of them are here in this very thread advocating for child labour despite not having a single minute of experience working in any of these jobs that are about to exploit children.
> Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers is valuable even if the work itself requires little skill.
You can learn this anywhere... in fact, I think there's a place where children can go that they're supposed to be on time, listen to staff, follow instructions, and get along with others. It's called school, dummy.
I can always tell when I’ve hired someone who did not grow up working actual jobs when they were young. School is not an adequate substitute for what you learn punching a clock.
Why not give them experience working in high value jobs? Like software. I'm sure with some training we could flood the market with very cheap front end developers for example.
Nothing wrong with it--whatever that term has come to mean exactly. But, as many SV companies have found out over the years as VC subsidies have dried up, there are a ton of services people want but only so much money most people will pay for them.
Pick up and drop off laundry? Sign me up! For $50? Umm. Maybe I'll pass.
Of course you see this effect where middle class people in developing countries have far more full-time help than all but the wealthiest do in the US and Western Europe.
I suspect that in the coming years, we'll see far more self-service, automation, and some services that are pretty commonplace today becoming much more of a luxury.
If the value of their production exceeds the living wage, nothing. If it doesn't, there's nothing the company can do but pay less than the living wage or fire the employee.
I don't understand. The current labour shortage is, 100%, hands down, fully stop, start to finish, a result of boomers retiring.
This has been a known thing, an upcoming problem for decades. Everyone knew this was coming. Everyone.
Canada is trying to get out of this hole (the fact that there are 1.4 births per two Canadians), the "population collapse" hole, via immigration, with 500k immigrants per year.
That would be like 5M immigrants per year in the US.
For a comparison, due to the 1 child policy, China's population will halve before 2035.
China is in very, very serious trouble. The entire West is too, but China's trouble will be far worse. Japan keeps building robots, and mechanized walk-assist devices.
There was no "great resignation", simply a well known "great retirement".
Now, should people be paid a decent wage? Of course!! But that won't change this problem one bit, as there are simply not enough working age adults.
And to highlight this, not only do retirees reduce thr number of candidates available for work, they also require more care. Health care, end of life care, nursing homes.
Heck, expecting an independent 70 year old to shingle a roof, something a cash strapped 30 year old might engage in, is far less likely.
So a "too heavy" society is a major issue. And we knew it was coming, for decades, and did not resolve the issue.
For additional clarity, the world will be at about 5 billion at 2040, without war or plague.
Cash strapped 30 year olds are most likely to engage when engagement means no longer being cash strapped.
To resolve that, the 60yo+ generation now controlling 80% of the wealth will need to part with that wealth to incentivize the following generation to maintain their standard of living.
It turned out that when pressured with indefinite hand-to-mouth conditions, people found other ways to checkout of the economy, even if it meant living in the woods.
Cash strapped 30 year olds are most likely to engage when engagement means no longer being cash strapped.
This isn't the cause of the labour shortage, and it will not solve it either.
Note: I already said; fair wage is sensible.
To resolve that, the 60yo+ generation now controlling 80% of the wealth will need to part with that wealth to
This number is wildly inaccurate. But beyond that, no one is hoarding anything.
Instead, it is called "retirement savings". It is money for housing, health care, nursing home costs, food, and to help offspring. Once retired, the valves open, because few have pensions, and even those that do, it is not enough.
So your desire already happens, naturally.
What you are describing is called "being responsible", and an attempt for people to not burden themselves on their children.
These are not miserable bastards, trying to keep money from the young.
And when these people die, that money doesn't vanish, it flows to offspring.
I am interested by your sources, the most generic world population projection I see online for 2040 are some kind of peak between 8-10 billions and then it is slowly decreasing until 2100.
But I am really interested if there are other projections with lower numbers!
With a lack of labour, comes a lack of medical care.
While there was a problem with health care funding in Canada, current issues are more severe. There are not enough doctors, nurses, and so on.
And this problem will get worse and worse, as it will everywhere. For example, even with covid numbers way down, hospitals in many areas of Canada are constantly overrun. Hospitals overrun is made worse, because many people have no family doctor, and must go to a hospital for minor issues.
There are not enough beds, with people often stuck in the halls, or being discharged early.
And this is just at the start of this employability crisis.
Now imagine how life expectancy looks, if you cannot get surgeries which extend that life, or, even have issues getting basic blood work done, and preemptive tests.
Most of the population stats you see, are predicated upon life expectancy staying the same, not crashing.
Secondly, China has been lying about population numbers for years, and recent numbers show it is far worse that they admit.
An ominous note here: this is not a temporary thing. With some reproductive numbers approaching 1 per two people, we are already slated for half a century of this, at least.
And if we try to bring those numbers up to "replacement" levels, as some areas have urged/begged their citizens to do? If we try to return them to at least 2.2 per couple?
It means a generation or two of people still caring for the excess elderly, and also caring for the excess young. Squeezed on both ends.
> It means a generation or two of people still caring for the excess elderly, and also caring for the excess young. Squeezed on both ends.
If you're talking about Gen Y and Z ( though Gen Y [millenials] only has another 10-15 years in a suitable baby-making age range) they'd have to also not be living paycheck to paycheck or with a very minor cushion to even entertain the idea of having kids.
I'm in my late 30s and I only have a couple friends who have had a baby in the last 10 years (well one is pregant). The rest are unable to afford more than their own 100-150 square foot room in a shared house due to the housing crisis in my city (Vancouver). I've already resigned that I would never be able to afford kids even if I wanted them
people actually wanting to start a family, let's go to child labour to offset the problem for few years
Quebec has all sorts of bonuses, tax deductions, monthly payouts per child, and Canada (the federal level) kicks in incentives as well. Quebec provides extremely low cost day care too.
Nothing makes a difference. It isn't money.
I often see couples with 2 new cars, $1000 smart phones, 70" TVs, saying it's money. While clearly everyone isn't well enough off for this, if money was the issue, why are well off people not having 4 kids? Or even 3, often?
How much money do you think the government provides to couples (or single parents) with kids? It's not enough to enjoy some of the luxuries our parents had, such as being able to rent a place where you don't share a bedroom with your kid, or being able to rent a place with space to do things like have a sex life that's not basically the same as doing it in front of your kid because the walls are paper thin, or being able to go on family vacations once or twice a year, or being able to feed your family healthy food.
In Vancouver, I have only a couple of friend with kids. One has a FAANG management job after years of IC. The other is a single mother who works odd jobs and has kids in their teens now (one might be 20 actually). She receives alimony and government benefits, and allowed her to keep them fed and even take them on vacation once a year, but only because she locked in a rental unit 20 years ago and never moved or got evicted, and has some untaxed money coming in from selling art, the benefits, and she never eats out (only cooks and shops on budget). And she has shared custody with the father of one who does have some kind of job.
This isn't possible for people who don't have that stable place to live, and even then she doesn't have the freedom that my parents did to take them to things that cost money
Your predictions make sense but your timelines are off. China's population isn't going to halve by 2035. The graph you saw was either about birth rates, or did not have a Y-axis starting at 0.
Essentially, price elasticity of demand. There's a ton of services/products I would consume at an arbitrarily low price that I won't at a much higher price. And some services have a very large labor component.
>If there are less working age adults, there should be less demand for goods and services, so some businesses need to close.
I'm not sure how that follows. An aging population wants a different basket of goods and services but it's not necessarily smaller and is likely to be greater with respect to e.g. healthcare.
It's really depressing how we totally fail to permanently learn our lessons. We're just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past because there are so many uneducated (and "educated") people who suck the propaganda tit all day every day.
It's so bizarre that people will campaign for and champion the rollback of regulations that negatively affect them directly. For what? To feel like your political "team" won? There are REASONS why children have been taken out of the workforce. There are REASONS why food, water, work safety, etc should be protected with regulations.
It turns out the majority of people are just incapable of empathy or logic. So depressing.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Rather than writing everyone off a Just That Dumb(TM), perhaps the really neat trick has been to convince a sufficient proportion of people that their salary depends somehow on carefully not understanding "living wages" and "rising wealth inequality is a problem" and "the planetary ecosystem is in bad shape".
Disclaimer: for my own part I certainly have a substantial amount of decidedly uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between "I want a nice comfy life" and "I'm literally part of this problem, aren't I?". From the outside I probably seem like just another zombie to some people.
Ironically, although that quote is by Upton Sinclair, it is not from The Jungle, which concerns the meat packing industry.
I'm sure that other people's minds exist. I don't have overwhelming evidence that they are capable of empathy or logic. How do _you_ explain poor, rural people fighting for the benefit of billionaires? IMHO, it defies logic. How do _you_ explain people campaigning against the civil rights of people whose personal choices have zero effect on the lives of those campaigning against them or negatively affect literally anyone in the world? IMHO, it shows a complete lack of empathy.
That's a very cynical view of your fellow human beings. Everybody is capable of empathy and logic. It's just that our brains try to conserve energy and don't want to spend energy thinking too much about stuff.
Your post is ironically a great example. It's easier for your brain to decide that these people are some kind of un-empathic illogical (sub)humans, than for your brain to really try to empathise and think about how things have lead to this point for those people.
But these economic changes aren't being propounded by a majority of the people. They're coming from people who currently have an electoral majority, which is not at all the same thing. The latter can be engineered by tailoring the borders of voting districts.
Go read The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquite and Alastair Smith, which explains how it's practical to rule a polity with a curated selection of supporters.
How do you explain the fact that you seem to be completely unable to understand other people who disagree with your politics? IMHO, it shows a complete lack of empathy.
> It's really depressing how we totally fail to permanently learn our lessons. [..] It's so bizarre that people will campaign for and champion the rollback of regulations that negatively affect them directly.
From my exposure to the political right, they've been preoccupied with CRT, drag queen story hour, and censorship. Occasionally immigration pops up, but politicians even on the right prefer to ignore that (as any graph of immigration to the US vs. which party is in power will show).
I haven't seen even a hint of a grassroots campaign against child labor restrictions - or any kind of campaign at all, just bills suddenly appearing out of the blue. This is strictly a top-down push, not even from the politicians, but their puppet-masters. They're banking on voters' loyalty and lack of alternatives to not lose any votes.
If there's a lesson we forgot, it's how to limit corruption in politics, not that maybe child labor is OK.
The puppet masters at the top are the 'tail wagging the dog' about the whole CRT/LBGT/etc issues. When you tell a group they are threatened they'll stop paying attention to 'little things' and focus on the threat. Meanwhile the oligarch class robs their pockets blind.
I saw this[1] comment today which uses a different shader on the notion of revisiting settled decisions. It was about Meta re-discovering why cubicles are a solid choice for productivity. This is fine. I don't think it'll pass.
> yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.
Why is solution to get more workers. And not solve the root issue. Cost of living. If we could drive down the cost of living in entire west the labour would short much of itself out. Housing and food should be cheap with our level of automation. Where have we gone wrong with all this?
Exactly. These articles talking about "labor shortage" are buying into the newspeak of the corporations. It is a pay shortage not a labor shortage. Pay more and you will have more people willing to take the jobs.
The superior outcome is to break apart the large slaughterhouses and businesses, and allow smaller family owned farms and coops to redevelop and thrive.
I'm from the midwest and the large groups like IBP are some of the worst labor abusers we have in the US. For the longest time they depended on both the labor of illegal aliens and the mentally handicapped[1]. To expound on this, something I didn't realize as a kid living up there, is large amounts of the disabled where shipped to Iowa from other states like Texas. These disabled people would then be exploited for pay around a dollar a day at meat packing plants.
At least in the midwest two major things are pushing for more exploitive childhood labor...
First, much better treatment of the handicapped and access to abortions where defects are detectable in the womb.
and Secondly, the entire Trump administrations 'build a bigger wall' had dramatically dropped border crossings at least up until the year 2019.
My first job was when I was 14, working the express lane for a grocery store after school. The job was easy and I wanted money, what's wrong with that?
I didn't grow up poor, but I wasn't given an allowance and there was no expectation of my parents buying frivolous things for us. If I wanted magic cards or to go to a concert I had to pay for it myself. Having a job at a young age taught me the importance of saving and the value of a dollar. It also gave me more ambition, I didn't want to be stuck at the grocery store forever. I moved over to the hardware store at 15 and used the skills there to learn how to build things. Those skills directly transferred into helping friends building robots for the FIRST competition my senior year of high school. We then became world champions, so I guess it worked out for me.
You’re talking to another person who started working well before turning 18.
I lived and worked in a few places as a teenager, including one where many of my teenage coworkers ended up dropping out of high school to work as close to full-time as they could at the urging of their parents (or grandparents). They worked hard, but I’m sure you can imagine the impact this had on their already shaky prospects. I left and am doing okay, but that wasn’t the norm.
Child labor is a fundamentally different beast across the classes and regions of America, and it’s either naive or disingenuous to pretend kids picking up a little spending money and some life skills is the primary form it takes.
Yeah that's all great, very nice that you had this attitude and for you this was a way to learn the value of money and realize your hobbies. Very good. But I'm sure you can see how for some families this will be the "new normal" - both parents can't afford their rent/medical/energy bills working two full time jobs, so the moment you turn 14 you have to work to help support the family. This isn't some dystopian pessimistic fantasy - this is just how life works in majority of the world already, look anywhere outside of developed world and getting kids to work is normal. It isn't about them being able to afford magic cards - it's about being able to survive.
Like others have posted already - if wages for grown ups weren't bad enough, now they will compete with actual kids who can earn less. Is that the market you want for the society around you?
I've seen back breaking poverty, kids as young as 5 breaking rocks into 50 pound bags of gravel making less than $1 a day. My heart weeps for them and I do help them financially by sending them to school.
I don't believe in magical thinking. People will do what they need to in order to survive. I understand why people have such a visceral reaction to kids working, but action is generally better than waiting around for someone to save you.
Yes, I 100% agree with you, and that action is literally anything else than letting kids join the labour pool. If the market is so skewed that you can't make ends meet with 2 full time jobs, it's time for protest, for civil disobedience, for revolution. Letting kids work is a very temporary patch on the shitty situation - in few years even that won't be enough, then what? We bring company town back? You have a house and food provided as long as you work for corporation X, except you can never leave until you're dead? Because that's where this kind of thinking leads to - we allow our working conditions worsen not because of some objective market conditions - but because the mega corporations demand it. It's not even about the elites or 1% - it's about pure unadulterated capitalism.
Competing in the labor market so that 1% can become super rich is what most of us do to survive. You could argue that's not moral and I agree, but that doesn't change because of an arbitrary age limit.
Either we accept the idea that it's moral that someone needs to effectively be a slave to the system to enjoy basic rights such as a roof, food and medical care, or we don't. Age shouldn't play a role in this.
Age does play a role in this. Adults have at least the possibility to have developed better critical thinking, life experience to make an appreciation of what's being offered to avoid predation.
With you on the struggle against modern slavery that is rampant against adults, let's not make it a child/teen only concern, but until then we certainly need to distinguish adults from the to become grown up men and women.
There is a reason we have different moral, legislation and rules w.r.t the treatment of children. That applies to employment, intimate relationships, sales of stimulants, ability to hold a credit cards etc.
All down to the fact all the way to being a teen, humans are still in the process of brain and experiences maturation to take on society and independence on their own, without special protection.
You feel that you are entitled to "basic rights such as a roof, food and medical care" but when asked to do any work in exchange for the things that other people provide for you, you call that being a slave?
And/or they'll make more checkout self-service (or even eventually switch to some sort of cashierless system like Amazon has been experimenting with), eliminate baggers (again), generally lower service levels, etc.
Many jobs that kids take (grocery bagger) are low productivity jobs that adults really shouldn’t be doing (and indeed, child labor laws have led to bag your own groceries being more the norm in many states).
Fast food is a good example. It went from a mostly teen job to a mostly adult one, are we really better off because of it?
A privileged comment, and very condescending. Teens working to make their own money to get out of whatever situation they are in is a good thing, not a bad one. Better to work at McDoanld's when you are 16 then when you are 26. But from what you guys are saying, you prefer the latter, and I find it extremely distasteful.
>>Teens working to make their own money to get out of whatever situation they are in is a good thing, not a bad one.
You are looking at it from the wrong perspective - it's not about teens being able to make a little money working at McDonalds. It's about letting companies use cheap labour because they know teens aren't in the position to demand good pay and/or benefits. It drags the entire society down, just so you can say teens have the opportunity to work - and for what? Under 18s should stay in full time education, not work in fast food.
>>But from what you guys are saying, you prefer the latter, and I find it extremely distasteful.
I find it extremely distatestul that you seem to prefer a society where teens are part of the labour force to a society where they aren't, so I guess we won't come to an agreement.
> I find it extremely distatestul that you seem to prefer a society where teens are part of the labour force to a society where they aren't, so I guess we won't come to an agreement.
You are simply speaking from a position of privilege. The distasteful part I find is that you would refuse them agency to make their lives better and rather they would just wallow in poverty. If you had your way, I would be working for McDonalds rather than a FAANG today. And that is why I'm strongly against this kind of "save the teenagers by harming them" kind of thinking.
Jobs for teenagers develop independence, time management skills, discipline, and a way to improve their situation when society fails. And if you want to wait for society to fix all ills, well, that would be nice, but for the rest of us, we would like to have more say in our destiny.
>>The distasteful part I find is that you would refuse them agency to make their lives better and rather they would just wallow in poverty.
Again, you are looking at it from the wrong angle. It's not about denying teens their independence, it's not even about "saving them" as you put it. This is 100% about denying companies access to the teenage labour pool, it shouldn't exist, they shouldn't need it, and any business that relies on it should cease. If you do allow it, you basically skew the entire labour market, dragging down the society - let's say that yes, you are an adult in need, who has fallen on hard times. Why should mcdonalds employ you, when they can employ a 16 year old, pay them less and offer them zero benefits. You've screwed yourself, because you want to give teens some fake "independence".
>>Jobs for teenagers develop independence, time management skills, discipline, and a way to improve their situation when society fails.
Yes, because the rest of the world where working until you're 18 is not allowed is just full of morons who have never developed any of those skills, you're right /s.
>>but for the rest of us, we would like to have more say in our destiny.
It's incredible to me that to you "having a say in your destiny" is allowing teenagers work for a corporation like mcdonald. It's like reading some sci-fi.
The chance was a godsend for me as a teenager. Sometimes I think HN is populated mostly by people who had comfortable middle class upbringings who didn’t need those things, and don’t understand why they would ever be useful.
Now imagine if they didn't have to pay you as much as you were paid, if they didn't have to keep you safe, if you were responsible for injuries on the job, or if you were working in a meat-packing plant where injuries like lost fingers are relatively common.
I don't think anyone is arguing that teenagers should not be allowed to work, but rather that they, like all workers, should be offered protections and reasonable wages if they do choose to work.
Yea, most people are also neglecting that these some states have 'agricultural safety exemptions allow you to be injured on the job with no workers compensation.
As others have said, there exist many jobs teenagers can already work and grocery store jobs are among them. This is about working in a meat packing plant. Imagine how different the environments are, one is already safe and made for families to navigate around in and the other one is ... A meat meat packing plant.
Sanitizing the plant after hours. Exactly the same work I did as a teen at the grocery store in the meat dept. Spraying star-san on stuff for the most part.
This isn't about that, though. This is about artificially creating a supply of workers by lowering standards, rather than increasing the price for the existing supply of workers.
With a looming demographic bomb looming at the horizon we need to value existing workers more and increase individual productivity rather than removing child protection or workplace safety regulations. Spare time jobs aside, children are the workers of tomorrow -- not means to short-term value for shareholders.
You should be able to recognize that a meat packing job and a grocery job are different in significant ways. These child labor law rollbacks are dangerous.
many modern people do not realize that in many parts of the world, for a lot of civilized history, ordinary daily labor was done by indentured people also-known-as slavery or serfdom.
It is a founding myth of the USA that regular people can work labor jobs and have a home and pay for raising children. This happy make-believe has lasted for a while in a few places. It regularly comes apart at the seams, as we are seeing now.
Secondly, many commentators here do not understand that addictive, forced and "no win" products, conditions and living places are the reality for many poor people. Money comes and goes. Watch some non-fiction YouTube about daily life in barrios, coastal South East Asian places, or immigrants in large cities.
edit maybe an additional distinction for context. The British-led industrial revolution started a new series of labor-employer relations.. where, instead of individual workers making one farm or one shoe repair, a set of people could work shifts in an industrial setting, then the goods produced makes a large surplus. The rewards of that surplus allegedly are split, where workers are paid enough to buy them and improve their living. The article here is not about a middle-class high school kid making extra money, it is about fueling industrial work sites with labor from under-18 people, perhaps full-time and perhaps under dangerous conditions, and perhaps with little-to-no transferable skill. This kind of labor is also gamed by middlemen via contracts, deceptive reporting, intimidation and the like.
It seems obvious that more than half the commentators here have no experience with forced or abusive work sites.
"Civilized" history had a lot of kings that went about murdering whoever they didn't like on a whim. That's why modern history has attempted to dispose of that type of ruling class (with some success) while benefiting from production output improving technology and a legal system based on a rule of law.
There's nothing wrong with that, because that was already legal without these new child labour law changes. Please read the article and pay attention to what industries are trying to hire children by pushing for these changes.
FYI, you might want to check out the study. It seems a little suspect in some ways. For example, it took place in 2020 and doesn't necessarily represent the same environment today, mainly due to the larger tax credit and stimulus during that time. It also seemed like the people surveyed were people who already had jobs paying the same or more than the average meat packer. No shit they don't want a job thar pays less. This shouldn't be about nabbing employees from other jobs but increasing labor force participation. Higher wages could help with this but I imagine there are other factors to look at too.
These legislatures in this states also don't want to lobby the federal government for a relaxation of hyper-strict immigration rules that ld increase the available labor pool. So (according to them) we're simultaneously full and experiencing an invasion of foreign workers, but also have so few people to fill jobs that we need to let teenagers work in metapacking.
Paying adults more does not really cover a labour shortage, it just ensures the ones that can't afford to do that go bankrupt or relocate so it's a false equivalence. Whether this is the right solution people will have to figure out for themselves. Personally I'm not against it. For a lot of people school can be pretty pointless.
Paying adults more forces companies to focus on value, and to work that contributes to the economy.
By travelling around, I was surprised by the non-sense and the lack of efficiency of the economy in some countries.
In some places that are 'developing', citizens were working as hard of harder than in wealthy places. But most of them were in non-productive jobs, like security agents to just guard a few houses, tricycle driver (when ppl could just walk), train platform monitor (in the Philippines, I was annoyed because there was someone at every platform, like a lifeguard in a swimming pool, but to make sure you weren't stepping to close to the edge),...
Often, workers are even trapped in cheap labour ! Western companies outsource in some places just because it's cheaper, and hire nothing but unqualified workers as long as they accept low wages.
These branches would never hire qualified workers or uni graduates, because they're just there for the low wages.
So we need to increase the salaries, and make sure children have access to education and better jobs.
Also, "it just ensures the ones that can't afford to do that go bankrupt" is just basic capitalism and market economy. They been pushing that on us for decades. According to the media, it was the only alternative, and the key to a better world.
Why would that be different, when the market conditions impose a better wage ?
Why are the republicans suddenly moving the goalposts ? Do they mean they were wrong ?
Using kids to plug (certain) labour gaps should be permitted but onorously expensive, kids need to cost twice/thrice as much to employ. Most of extra pay beyond minimum wage should be locked away and made available after they turn 18.
I started working willingly at 15, setting up networks and routers in then-booming internet cafés. It were part-time jobs, of course. At 17 I managed to get a government contract to set up a firewall at a military facility.
I don't see anything wrong with underage labor if it is not forced and doesn't disrupt social life or school. I see more harm to kids from "social" networks.
It will be "forced", in the way that you can no longer support your family doing some jobs, so your kids have to work as well to avoid starving. The point here isn't to let children work, it's to have children work to avoid paying adult workers more.
Will the new law only allow underage workers to get meatpacking or construction jobs? If not, I find your comment pointless. Some adults work in meatpacking or construction and other adults in IT.
I find it hard to believe you are not being disingenuous but actually this clueless. Why do you think those jobs have trouble filling open positions? It's because employers don't want to pay higher wages to offset the unfavourable working conditions. Adults can see that's a bad deal, hence the labour shortage. Child labour law changes are meant to suppress wages by using children who either don't have enough diligence yet to realize this is a bad deal, or stuck in situations where saying no is not an option.
This has nothing to do with giving kids opportunity and volition. This is about giving corporations leverage to continue exploiting workers.
Having children compete with adults in the market is going as far backwards as possible, leading to the US--what should be a very rich nation--to start utilizing Chinese and rural India manufacturing ideologies.
In this post I've read A LOT of incorrect population decline estimates. Here is a paper from The Lancet - not retracted, that I know of - that charts the populations of the present day through 2100 for almost all countries in the world:
"Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study"
Click on the large 'View PDF' button to read the paper; there is no paywall.
The wildly incorrect statement that China's population will halve by 2035 is very much off base:
> The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million [248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427]).
China will become the largest economy starting around 2035 but the US is once again forecasted to become the largest economy starting around 2098, according to that study.
With the semiconductor on-goings (both by the United States as well as a the EU) over the last six or so months I think this changes the calculus on this, though.
---
I am wholly against child labor in all its forms and posters who are arguing that bagging groceries part-time after school as a middle-class kid is somehow equivalent to working in a meatpacking plant (a slaughterhouse) or on a construction site are either woefully naive or are arguing in bad faith.
These lawmakers are apparently proposing to reduce the age of labor to 14. That's exactly how old I was when I began working in CA. If anything I'm wondering why 14-year-olds can't work in those states already.
> I'm wondering why 14-year-olds can't work in those states already.
They can in a vast majority of cases, there are just more restrictions to ensure they aren't being exploited by businesses (hours, inherent danger of the jobs, acknowledging that a 14 year old is still a bloody child, etc). Those restrictions are being removed.
I desperately would prefer the newest generation devote their time to becoming fully educated citizens that will shepherd society forward as I retire. I do not want the newest generation having entering adult undereducated and already disabled/injured from factory work as a child.
Because they're still children and they need the education first.
Because child labor in most cases amounts to slavery. Why should any child spend 8 hours of their life daily slaving away instead of learning and playing with their peers
> Because child labor in most cases amounts to slavery.
Yes, that is bad. But, what else do you propose?
Everyone is against child labour, but many kids in the 3rd world don't have better alternatives: if they don't work, they starve. Is that better than child labour?
[I understand the article and most of the discussion is about the US, of course the US is a rich country and could easily take care of the kids without slave labour]
What about sending kids to college to become industrial or IT engineers ?
They could automate or improve efficiency in areas where cheap manual labour isn't necessary !
They could also do research, to keep America at the leading edge of the industry !
Oh wait, it means planning for the future economy. And it means universities, mostly operated by governments. This all sounds socialist, hence is bad.
It also means that children from the minorities will have a future where they're paid better than you, it's inconceivable.
And anyone won't just be able to hire a poor child to profit from is work, so it's bad for the short term economy.
Am I right or wrong, on why republicans want that law ?
Turns out you can enjoy a pretty excessive lifestyle on the cost of exploiting your population. If you can keep them at bay physically (overtime) and financially (living wage) you might as well keep doing this forever.
What are they gonna do? Protest during the 8 free hours they got a day? Run for any significant political position with the 2 dollars left from their living wage?
Of course children from minorities could have a future but why care about that when you're well off?
What if approaching neo-feudalism was the goal, not a side effect?
I've worked with the construction and trades industry for a long time - not as an employee, but as a vendor. I've talked to thousands of business owners. Most times at great length about their business and the industry.
The most common complaint for decades is a lack of employees. Nothing new here. But a lot of it is that the smaller companies don't have a concerted effort to attract talent. This is because most of the trades - plumbing, electricians, etc, are small companies of 2-10 employees. They are not advertising every week for new employees and keeping their resumes on hand for when someone quits their company. The larger companies, while still having problems recruiting, are able to keep their companies at 100 or 200 plumbers or electricans. Maybe the large companies are not growing as fast as they can, but they still have a lot of workers.
Most of the construction companies don't need to look for work at all. Because of the extreme shortage of employees, they all have way more work than they can do.
Child labor would put a dent in what construction companies need. Construction companies can't find 18-22 year olds to do the jobs. Why would a child do it? And not many parents would allow it, not even low-income households. Construction is dangerous as fuck.
Also, it is EXTREMELY physically demanding. So many people walk off the job after the very first day and just say "fuck it," just because of the physical demands - not even talking about accidents or safety. It's like being at the gym all day, working out for 8 hours straight, every day. Some construction workers must eat 8,000 calories per day to deal with the calorie burn. So you are eating 400% more food and you pay for that extra food, or your parents do.
You can see the danger of construction by looking at workers comp insurance rates for different industries. The workers comp rates are based on your payroll. Companies pay $x per $100 of payroll. So for instance, the average workers comp rate across all industries is $2.25 per $100 of payroll. So if your company's monthly payroll is $100,000 per month, then your workers comp payments will be $2,250 per month.
But it changes by job. So since office work is very little chance of injury, it costs 28 to 99 cents per $100 of payroll. Very inexpensive. An doctors office cotss $1.22 to $3.68 - maybe because a greater chance of getting a disease or moving an overweight patient or whatever - more risk than sitting at a desk, right? A garbage industry worker costs $6.19 to $23.63. Tree trimming and masonry is $12-$43. Carpentry is $15-$50. Roofing is one of the most expensive at $23-$87.
The more you have to pay in workers comp, the more dangerous the occupation is. Roofing is one of the highest, because people fall off roofs, off ladders, they carry heavy shingles and hurt their backs. So roofing companies are going to have to pay a lot more than office jobs.
FYI it goes by worker - an office admin person working in a roofing company still gets office worker comp rate.
But construction is extremely unsafe which you can see just by looking at workers comp costs.
One other thing that affects the cost of workers comp insurance is how many claims a company has. Just like auto insurance, the more accidents and traffic tickets you have, the more you will pay, until it is devastatingly high. It's the exact same with workers comp. If a company has a lot of workplace accidents, their rate skyrockets, sometimes until the company must go out of business. The reason for the rate increase is because the company has lax safety procedures, on the whole, right? Makes sense. Well, if you have 14-17 year olds, you're going to have a LOT more accidents because kids that age don't know what they are doing. And you put them in dangerous situations.
Think of it this way - if you are a homeowner, would you hire your next door neighbor's kid to help you with re-shingling your roof, or any other dangerous or mildly dangerous type of work??? Hell no. Why should we allow a company to do that? And even if you hire the neighbor kid to mow your lawn, that is vastly different than hiring a kid to commercially mow lawns for a business.
No way should anyone under 18-years-old be allowe to work in dangerous industries. Mandate that by federal law. If you want to get training for young workers, you can have them go out with estimators or foremen or do office work to understand and train them in the business. But no actual physical work as the tradesman.
To the people concerned about kids depressing the wages of adults, are you also concerned about low wage immigration?
Is immigration also capitalism showing its evil hand and do you oppose it because it negatively affects workers? (btw this was Bernie Sanders position until two minutes ago when his views "evolved" and aligned with the rest of the party)
If America practised capitalism they would accept the free labour market and start paying people more. Businesses that can't survive paying the market rate to compete for labour should go out of business.
This development isn't really against the free market - this will temporarily solve the labor shortage by flooding the market with a lot of supply, but it's very much temporary and it's only a matter of time before wages for teenagers reach some equilibrium.
Both your examples are working in business your family owned. Do you really imagine these positive experiences will hold true for kids employed by companies they have no connections with?
Yea, a lot of people don't realize when they are speaking that oligarchs and robber barons commonly raise their family members up in the business and the kids are also wealthy. It has absolutely zero reflection on the average person in the company, especially as you get toward the bottom of the pay scale.
Also the entire 'family farm' thing is a trope of a bygone era. Technically my family owns a family farm. Almost everything they do is contracted out by massive agribusiness, not many are independants. The number of small family farms has evaporated and most are what we would consider mid to large size businesses via consolidation.
I understand that the experience of you and your family was broadly positive, and that's great, but it's a very privileged position and experience. Delivery driving and hotel service jobs are in particular much safer and probably better for mental health for most than jobs like meat packing as is being suggested. Additionally, by you and your family experiencing this in the regulated child labour market, you likely benefitted from higher wages than would be typical once these regulations are rolled back.
As someone who also worked fast food the second I could and not because I had to, they had very explicit rules about what I could and couldn't do.
I wasn't allowed to even step foot into the kitchen area because it had knives but most importantly, two large spinning blades to shred meat and hot stoves.
The problem isn't children working, the problem is allowing children to risk their body when they might not understand or appreciate the risk they are in with those machines.
This makes a lot of economic sense, despite the howling from the socialist mob. 14 year olds' natural agility and nimbleness are assets in meat packing and construction, where they are able to retrieve stray pieces of meat or lost tools that have fallen in or between the large machinery.
I can I get off this train to distopia? Seriously. Didn't we already go through this child labor bit not even a century ago?
I don't have kids and I still don't think that they're the solution to labor shortage. And what we do to them now will have serious repercussions when they become voting adults.
Except, this isn't about paying kids. It's about working around paying adults living wages (so they can, you know, go home and spend time with their kids instead of going to a second or third job). And it's also about increasing corporate profits by not paying adults living wages.
Because the industries mentioned in the article have trouble filling job openings due to unfavourable working conditions and unwilling to offer adequate wage that can offset those unfavourable conditions.
Invoking your own anecdote of laid-back summer jobs with total disregard of what's actually happening with these child labour law changes just shows you had a privileged childhood and you are unaware of how not everyone could afford the same privileges as you.
I don't see a lot of high school students (you can work at 16 with a work permit) working as it is. What makes them think they'll find a lot of kids under 16 who will want to work? On the otherhand, yesterday I filled up the car and the attendant who put the gas in (I live in Oregon, no self-serve) must have been about 80 years old. Pretty sure she was not well either based on the raspyness of her voice.
You can tell a 10 year old to clean the house, weed the garden or wash the dishes. But tell a 10 year old to help dad at work and suddenly it's illegal.
If getting children to work is bad, then housework should be treated the same as any other work.
Extending the logic further, if housework is work, then is the workplace a home? In a home, the parents genuinely care about the 10 year old. Like if the kid is sick, the parents will allow unlimited time off for the kid to get better. If the kid needs to spend more time on education, the parents will once again let the kid take unlimited time off from work and pursue that. And so on. In a home, the kid's future takes precedence over housework.
Work is inherently exploitative. A parent-child relationship is not (most of the time. I know exceptions exists). That's why it doesn't make any sense to compare work and housework.
> Exchanging labor for money on the market would also allow people in abusive households to escape.
Not really. Not until they're of an age where they can legally separate from their abusers (at which point they can usually work independently). Until then, they'd just be another source of income to the abuser with few independent legal rights.
These are very difficult jobs and are also quite dangerous, it's not like being a store clerk. Working in a meat packing plant can bear a toll on your mental well being.
As a child, you can't be well aware of what you're getting into, and these industries can be predatory to their employees (big surprise as to why they are understaffed), by not respecting labor laws or pushing the limits of them.
Want your kids to work forced overtime attaching dead chickens to hooks in a fridge? I don't think it's as beneficial as working as a clerk. I wouldn't even be comfortable with kids working in kitchens, since these industries are predatory as well!