Serious question: if compensation is actually decreasing where are people getting justification on rolling back child labor laws? Now adults have to compete with children?? Isn’t that just going to make it worse???
Yes and no. Most children share homes with adults. I went on calls with my dad (he's a plumber) since I was 7 and helped him more and more as I became adolescent. Similarly, my current daughter sometimes helps me with coding jobs. It helps our home. So I guess child labor helps families and hurts single people, because it means families can grow additional workers.
As a kid, I went into dirty crawlspaces, helped my dad weld, and went on roofs, which for a little boy was pretty much the coolest thing imaginable. Whenever we were with a client who had a pool, my dad would ask the client if I could jump in, and they always said yes. I learned so much about technology from working on air conditioners. The process of troubleshooting, how machines work, and tons about sales and how to work with customers. My dad was also aggressive about SEO once that became a thing, but even before then, he did all kinds of marketing stuff himself.
I'm a freelancer today and wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been "forced to skip school for long evenings in the butchery", to put it into a phraseology that more matches your own. I think people have an idea of kids working based on school textbooks, which is sometimes (but not usually) accurate. When school textbooks teach the history of laws, it's always in this naive, doe-eyed kind of way.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and child labor is everywhere, and to be honest, none of it seems as dreary as school does. Imagine as a kid being forced to do an office job where you sit down and do nothing for 6 hours, surrounded by friends who you cannot speak to, skipping play hours so you can study textbooks that teach a completely made up version of your country's history.
The children's?
1- it calls a spade a spade: we already have theories of how Capitalism works, and none of the other replies named it. Giving a name to the problem is the first step in fighting it.
2- it explicitly calls out: "it makes them money", which is also factual and not explicitly mentioned by the other comments. They mention a "perceived labor shortage", but it doesn't clarify the fact that fighting that gets more money in the pocket of some people
Of course, the grandparent comment should've been a bit clearer in how this makes people money. I think the answer is twofold:
1- it increases the reserve army of labor
2- the minimum wage is often lower for younger people (the excuse is that this is training for them)
I’d be delighted to concede that if it were true. To the extent capitalism does relieve demand for labor, it perpetually creates more demand however artificially, often explicitly on the arbitrary basis of labor itself as duty. To the extent it has yielded to a constant or increased demand for labor, it’s been a result of resistance to capitalism.
If you respond with: well unions fought for it:
I'd say, that's partially true, but it wouldve only been possible if production efficiency grew, which it has been continuously over the past 300 years... because capitalism is the strongest driver of technological innovation.
Secondly, this whole thing about artificial demand is bunk because you aren't forced to consume it in the first place. You are free to live the life of a 19th century man, and you really don't have to work very hard for it, because producing 19th century level goods is very very cheap.
But its been 150 years and none of that is true, we're still getting better at doing things, and human appetite for consumption hasn't really slowed down. Some part of that is hierarchical, some people just want to be better than others and so their consumption is relative. This is where a lot of artificial scarcity is manufactured. But we still continue to solve very real problems, much of which is fueled by a capitalism.
Citation needed.
There have been several innovations since Marx's days, creating new products and services. And the population kept growing and growing.
We're almost 8 billion people now. That by itself increases demand and opens new market (of course, improvements in logistics, shipping and communications are also what allows for actually opening new markets in countries previously underserved).
"Software is eating the world", was true enough.
But all services have been digitalized (not only private, but also the public administration), so I think that Software already ate the whole world.
In a few decades, the population will also stop growing, and that will inevitably cause problems to those who have to try to find new markets to grow their production.
So, the tendency of rate of profit to fall does not prevent the rise of companies like Google and Netflix. But even they have stopped growing as much as they did before, because they expanded to half of the world already, and now to increase profits they have to (for example): substantially increase advertisement in YouTube and crack down on password sharing for Netflix.
Another component in their fight for profits, is reducing labor costs: we just started to see that happen with generalized layoffs in the tech sector (of course, that was just a small blips, there's a lot more to come in the next few decades).
"Solve very real problems" is noble and a nice thought... But not all problems can be solved in a way that generates profits. The ceiling is not something that we will hit suddenly with a shock. The gradual trickle of innovations will continue
1) broad individual freedoms have advanced the most in capitalist countries and those freedoms have not seen monitonic decrease since some founding date, rather have seem back and forth swings with a general trend towards more individual freedom in long time scales
2) child labor laws were enacted first in capitalist countries and continue to be stronger in capitalist countries
I don’t see any rebuttal to these that don’t boil down to defining capitalism narrowly enough to exclude countries/economies that the commenter likes more and instead they would define as some brand of socialism.
Capitalism I’m defining here broadly as an economy characterized primarily by individual ownership of resources and production.
But all of that should be taken as read, unless a reader is inclined to disregard a vast wealth of relatively uncontroversial documentation of labor history.