12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

We're not going to agree that $7.25 is a living wage.

In 1970 it was the equivalent of $12 today meanwhile house prices across the US exploded.

> So if a person on Africa can live on much less, why does an American deserve more? If anything, if the world was fair then the American minimum wage would be lower, with that money diverted to people in underdeveloped places like Africa instead.

I just don't understand when you see two disparate groups the desire not to raise the lower one up, but hold back the better off group. You can make both groups better off at the same time.

Labor advocacy matters. Things will regress if laborers don't constantly push for better. The discontent we see in society is imo in large part due to the decoupling of wage gains and productivity gains that started under Reagan.

And yeah, everyone deserves better because we can afford better thanks to massively higher productivity. The whole point of higher productivity is that everyone should benefit.

In practice, the American minimum wage being higher diverts more money to people in underdeveloped places like Africa. Both because it directly makes them more price-competitive in low-end, easily offshorable, labor, and because distribution downward from capital to labor in the US for the jobs that can’t be offshored increases consumption and imports.

Rivers caught fire and the air was toxic for generations too. Historical precedent isn't particularly compelling IMO.

> I don't think we were stealing jobs from adults.

If they weren't going to find involuntary workers (kids, prison slaves - the correct term as of course slavery is permitted in the US as punishment for a crime under the 14th amendment) - they would have had to raise the amount they were paying voluntary workers until someone took the job. Or it wouldn't get done.

This is how leverage in employment works. To have a free market for labor and accurate pricing, you need to have voluntary participation. Involuntary participation puts all the pricing power in the hands of capital.

> They started flying in seasonal workers from Puerto Rico and then Jamaica.

This doesn't have to be a permitted practice re: Jamaica. In a very real way it's the job of DOL and USCIS to prevent it. After all, they already do labor conditions and prevailing wage determinations for specialty workers. Why not farm workers? And there simply aren't enough people in Puerto Rico to change the balance of power.

It's like comparing a home woodshop to a factory job.

[...]

> He worked alongside other kids with one of North Carolina's most valuable crops. Some of them worked in the summer and went to school the rest of the year, like him. Some didn't go to school at all.

----

How are people in this comments section characterizing this as if it's character building? "We learned some things about entrepreneurship." Is it setting kids up for success if they don't go to school?

You're phrasing this like it's immensely satisfying work; the people in the article quoted are saying they had a different experience than you. Can we at the very least agree that working on a farm year-round and not going to school at all is probably not setting up a child to be a successful entrepreneur?

I think the issue is not the formative experience of labour but the lifting of restrictions on 'dangerous jobs'.

The motivation behind this is not to enable children autonomy but to maintain the cost of labour low specifically to prop up the slaughterhouse/meat packing industry, and other 'dirty' job industries with labour 'shortages' i.e. we don't want to raise salaries shortages.

Exposing kids to toxic cleaning agents, hazards, and general heavy machinery is a recipe for accidents and is simply not OK more so when it is quite obviously greed driven.

You didn't work the fields. You had your own small business you owned and managed. Congrats, sounds like you did a great job, set your own schedule, learned loads and enjoyed yourself.

This is real world project based learning - I applaud and support it.

It is absolutely nothing like being employed as a child, by a profit making enterprise. That's being subject to an employment contract without the cognitive comprehension or legal protections of an adult.

Being an employee means being a productive tool of an enterprise - employees are protected from exploitation to the precise amount they have the economic power and social status to protect themselves. We're not talking about kids running a fruit stand, or even helping their parents with some hours in a shop here. We're talking about hard manual labour, for someone else, likely for a pittance.

It's like comparing playing doctors and nurses to child marriage. One is natural unforced experimentation between kids, the other is exploitation of children by adults.

If the laborers own the business, sure. But .. when they do not, they are simply exploited for someone else’s profit.

Let me ask another way:

What is stopping the field/process owner from hiring an adult with minimum wages and attractive benefit packages?

I don't mind my kids doing the former at a young age. The latter - hell no.

In my state it’s illegal for people under 18 to do hazardous work for this reason. I don’t know if tobacco picking would count as hazardous but other jobs with exposure to chemicals do.

At the same time, I'm looking at the surrounding context here on HN, and the majority of weird comments I'm seeing here are not saying, "the broader issues being explored here are part of a larger debate that's often mis-characterized" -- they're saying "this kind of labor is good actually."

For sure, if we talk about a broader debate, there is a real risk of conversations about child labor forcing kids out of what would be beneficial activities because of reactionary responses. And for sure, that's something people should be cautious about during coverage. But there are a number of comments here that are kind of staggering to me to read and that really don't look like they're defending summer jobs of the kind that are mentioned in your article, and so maybe better I think is to point out that what's happening in this article should not be lumped together into a debate about summer jobs. It should be treated as an entirely separate debate and there should be clearer lines drawn there.

I mean, you bring up detransitioning, but even within trans communities themselves I don't think best way to handle that kind of thing is pretending that detransitioners don't exist, it's to point out that caring for them and protecting them is something that needs to happen in addition to caring for trans kids. And that's something that the actual trans community (at least, the specific parts I'm familiar with) is honestly somewhat decent at, although it could always be better. There's a pushback against the combining of detransitioners into a singular narrative used to oppress other people, but (I think most trans people would agree) that detransitioners are still valid and should be listened to and cared for. The narrative is not an excuse to stop caring about them.

in what way is what I said wrong? downvoters are just unhappy that their beloved big daddy government did a baddie

> I don't know what's right and I'm thankful I don't have to make the decisions.

If you are in the USA, I think you ought to have an opinion on child labour. It's a basic point of labour law.

My vote counts in the UK, where from age 14 children can work for up to five hours on a non-school day, with a one hour break, and only between 7am and 7pm. They cannot work on anything hazardous. We don't have any significant toxic crops, but I think tobacco would count as hazardous. These rules seem to fix all the major problems in the article, while still allowing the "character building" half the commenters seek.

Whether your 12 or 13-18, I doubt their voting preferences would be considerably different in this regard.

I'd get it if there were some great alternative that teens were missing out on because they worked, but from my experience there was plenty of time to work, go to school, and still smoke weed everyday. Granted I didn't do 10-hour days 5-6 days a week all summer like the guy in the article, but normal 40-50hr/week full-time summer jobs was nothing.