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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> The age of the kids was in their system.

Oh, I missed that. I thought they meant that the company had ignored the investigators flagging that there were minors employed. Yeah that is pretty bad.

Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US. Not everyone is going to be stupid enough to keep good records like that.

> Software development is not a hazardous job

Adults shouldn't be at risk of being injured on a worksite. The standard is supposed to be no lasting damage regardless of whether children are involved or not.

The article mentions 3 injuries, but frankly I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds; the problem is the injury not which end of teenager-hood a person falls. That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.

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> Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US

The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims, it’s ridiculous to blame them regardless of whether they lied or not and in this case they didn’t. The real entity to blame is the company which allowed this to happen and got away with meager $1.5 million fine.

> I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds..That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.

It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training. That’s the whole reason the law specifically has an age limit for this type of jobs.

> The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims

Victims of what, a sudden rush of employment? Child labour laws are, at best, a statistical observation that the majority of children are better off being at school than going to work and it is safer just to insist than try and work out the edge cases.

It is appropriate that the company was fined in accordance with the law, they shouldn't have done this. But fact is that there are some kids where working at 13 will just lead to them having better outcomes than anything else. There are 3 victims here who were injured, beyond that there needs to be actual evidence before we start calling them victims. It isn't like at 17 they're victimised and then at 18 the scales fall from their eyes and everything is roses and sunshine. The line is a reasonable judgement call based on averages and estimated opportunity cost.

> It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training.

Depends on the injury I suppose, but my guess is that if they're stupid enough to have underage employees on payroll this company was probably not providing a safe workplace. I assume injuries are high across the board.

A kid probably is more likely to get injured in the workplace just by virtue of being pretty clueless and a lot more lightweight, I grant you that. But it is quite possible that these injuries say more about the workplace than the age of the injured.

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