This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop.
Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor!
The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual full time job. Sending 12 year olds out to earn a living clearly isn’t right.
People wonder how some public figures can just fail upwards, this sort of success requires preparation and grooming at an early age. The Gates and Zuckerbergs of the world did not get where they are through hard physical labor in their teenage years.
It's like comparing a home woodshop to a factory job.
It was hard work, but a great experience. There were some 10-12 hour days when we were planting, and it got pretty busy during harvest season. We had days off and typically during the busy part of the season we wouldn't spend more than 4 hours working. Our parents also worked just as hard as we did.
It was great because there was no set schedule and we learned some things about entrepreneurship. I was proud of the work we put in and what we were able to achieve. The last season we ran the farm, we made about $12,000 in today's money.
I don't think this form of child labor should be discouraged, but rather encouraged.
[...]
> 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.
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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?
> The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual full time job. Sending 12 year olds out to earn a living clearly isn’t right.
You are straw manning. Nobody here wants kids working full time.
In response to a comment saying that all 12 year olds should be banned from working:
> This is child labour. It's indefensible.
People are pointing out that working at that age can be safe and beneficial. Nobody is claiming that kids should work full time, and people don't feel the need to add that disclaimer because its not a reasonable position they would need to defend against.
> I enjoyed milk as a kid
> Oh, so you think people should be forced to drink milk? You want every other beverage banned? You are willfully eliding important clarifications.
The comment I'm replying to literally does not say that, you're referencing an upstream comment by a different person. Did you mean to reply in a different thread?
I didn't take hahamrfunnyguy's comment in the way you seem to be taking it, but I'd be happy to learn that they don't support full-time labor for 12 year olds.
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?
My friends worked in their family store from an even younger age.
Full-time manual labor is of course not good and will disproportionately affect poor families who need the extra income.
I don't mind my kids doing the former at a young age. The latter - hell no.
I wouldn't have a problem with a kid of mine "working in fields", provided the hours are reasonable. Picking strawberries, outside, with friends their same age, a few hours at a time, would be great for them. I would go as far to say that its fun.
I would prefer that over them having to interact with a bunch of asshole strangers, alone, trapped inside all day.
This is not the subject of the article.
Hell no if it's paid employment on some stranger's farm, or an industrial feedlot.
Reasonable hours is something that goes without saying. Study, chores, play, work - in that order - is how kids should be taught to prioritize their time. They're your children, not your free labor.
Not sure where I grew up has anything to do with it other than that my examples didn't take into account some rural edge cases (family farms constitute a tiny sliver of all farming). The context of the work, and how dangerous it is, is what's important.
As opposed to handing them a tablet while they're a toddler and raising them that way, the "working" child is going to be far more grounded and just overall a better individual.
All the kids I grew up with were out helping load hay bails, driving tractors, trucks, feeding cattle, getting chicken eggs etc. at a very young age.
> All the while, nicotine — a substance he's barely old enough to legally purchase now — seeped into his skin. For all tobacco workers, but especially kids, that can cause nicotine poisoning, or green tobacco sickness, whose symptoms include nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness.
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.
Leave it to HN for the top comment to defend child labor. WTF?
The exception for kids to work on farms used to be for small family run farms where the kids would inherit the farm one day, so they'd be building equity. Bad enough, but understandable for the time.
Today? For commercial mega farms? Fuck that shit. That's blatant wage suppression.
I don't think anyone really has a problem with the kid who is "working" at his dad's convenience store, though I do feel for the kids working in chinese restaurants.