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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?"
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
Readit News
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!
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.
I wonder if the new term is the industry pushing for a euphemism as a PR move?
You know what the true subtext is?
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.
What's benign about that? It's notoriously hard on the shoulders and back!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11036730/
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.
A blanket prohibition on construction sites just seems simpler and much more enforceable.
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.
"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."
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/workersunder18
Question is, do we have the right safety in place, are they being overworked and are they mentally mature enough.
Kids are likely okay in many opportunities but not okay in others and someone should be figuring this out.
As long as we have the right safeguards in place, I think it’s okay.
Being able to work as a kid helped me immensely.
Even teenage birth rates are now much lower then in the 50ties.
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.
I get your point. But the example doesn’t look convincing. If you’re comfortable with eating meat you should be comfortable with seeing how it’s made.
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
In the same way that if you're comfortable defecating you should be comfortable with having a sewage treatment plant in your back yard ?
Pretty sure that can get covered by a field trip , or even a video.
Even if you do grow everything yourself, people had to suffer to obtain the nitrogen and phosphorus in your fertilizer.
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.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/03/09/tech/elon-musk-texas-town...
Just imagine, not only could you lose your job for running afoul of a temperamental man child, but your family could be made homeless too!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215407
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
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.
So the mistake was letting women out of the kitchen.
Homemaker labor is still labor. Both parents working is different now in shape but not really that new.
> But for now, Republican legislators are starting to turn to teenagers.
executives & shareholders: "we would rather hire kids than pay a living wage to adults"
Teens aged 14 and above are already able to work relatively long hours under current child labour laws, so why are you speaking as if teens in the US are forbidden from any type of work? https://www.oshaeducationcenter.com/articles/child-labor-law....
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.
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.
Also what's wrong with companies having to pay living wage instead of child labour ?
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.
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.
I can find no immediate evidence that any demographers actually claim this.
But I am really interested if there are other projections with lower numbers!
What I'd love to know is why this labour shortage doesn't lead to increased wages for the workers who are not retiring.
Boomers and their offspring loved to give away extra free labor. Younger generations have learned that's a fruitless endeavor.
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.
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.
This is an extremely solipsistic take if you actually believe it.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118384
And this is what's on top of frostpunk subreddit https://old.reddit.com/r/Frostpunk/comments/11pc423/the_firs...
2) The investor class isn't allow to steal all the profits and live like modern kings.