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Comment by dmbche | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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

My understanding is that “The Jungle” spurred a huge improvement in safety regulations. Why do you think the conditions are still bad?

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.

> Why do you think the conditions are still bad?

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.

Source?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816... - "Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From “The Jungle” Into the Surrounding Community"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34231439/ - "The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review "

Along with improvements in factory safety, child labor laws came about in the aftermath of the era Sinclair wrote about.

Why do you think rolling back any of those hard-won regulations is a good idea?

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.

John Oliver covered this two years ago: https://youtu.be/IhO1FcjDMV4

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.

https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=meatpacking

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.

Don’t worry, the TV said regulation is bad!

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.

Problem is maybe those sending their kids to meat packing factory read 1 book every 2 decade…

Hehe, yeah. Poor people are stupid.

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.

It's mainly harmful to your career due to the prejudices of other people. And that is a good reason to stay away!

What kind of reality denialism is this?

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.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system

Lets call a spade a spade, it's a slaughterhouse. Packing is a very small part of what is going on there.

I wonder if the new term is the industry pushing for a euphemism as a PR move?

They don't care

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.

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.

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 many things that are simpler, more enforceable, and more restrictive on freedoms than necessary.

"Restrictive on freedoms"?

It's not in the Constitution that kids have a right to work on dangerous construction sites.

These aren't adults we're talking about here.

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.

That includes benign jobs like hanging/finishing drywall

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.

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."

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/workersunder18

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.

What does this have to do with not being able to work as a programmer earlier than 23?

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.

Before the fifties kids did all sorts of “grown up work” including dangerous ones.

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.

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?"

No, the question is why government is trying to make children to work instead of having company to pay for labour they require to run the business.

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.

>Even teenage birth rates are now much lower then in the 50ties.

Republican Congresspeople see this as a negative.

Point taken, but I do not, I see it as positive.

But yeah, even beyond abortion, seeing conservative pundits fretting over "young people do not have enough unmarried sex" was fascinating last years.

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.

Sounds like a great opportunity for an apprenticing program for trade work, not child labor.

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.

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.

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.

Crime and drug dealing is a better career opportunity for young people than low-wage jobs.

> Want your kids to work forced overtime attaching dead chickens to hooks in a fridge?

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.

Not as a kid.

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.

You don't get the point.

I'm comfortable (more or less) with a lot of things in society that I wouldn't want children to be doing. I don't think that argument makes sense.

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.

However the levels of suffering is magnified by animal agriculture especially because it takes a large amount of crops for feed

> 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

As for fertilizer, the usage is lower without animal agriculture even compared to best case usage of manure

> Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

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?

> If you’re comfortable with eating meat you should be comfortable with seeing how it’s made.

Pretty sure that can get covered by a field trip , or even a video.

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).

At some boy scout (leadership?) thing we did that with a chicken. I assume that would be hilariously in the "nope. not going to happen." camp today.

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

>If you’re comfortable with eating meat you should be comfortable with seeing how it’s made

In the same way that if you're comfortable defecating you should be comfortable with having a sewage treatment plant in your back yard ?

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!

We are so bringing climbing boys back to disrupt the chimney sweeping industry!

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