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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

Edit: Please read my comment in context. I’m explaining a mindset. :( I have no issues with existing federal labor laws.

It’s not strange to me. A lot of conservative people I knew growing up would think this is great.

Having a job is a moral obligation and making kids work is good for them. It’s what the Bible says: spare the rod, spoil the child.

Same goes with minimum wages laws. They are oppressive to businesses and make them pay people more than they are worth.

Anything that gets in the way of people’s freedom to do as they please (including exploiting others) is bad.

They think that the market will prevent abuses because people can just walk away and find a less exploitive job. It’s your responsibility to not be exploited.

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> Having a job is a moral obligation and making kids work is good for them.

The second part of this sentence is not obviously false to me. Kids working exploitative & dangerous jobs, yes that's bad. Kids being allowed to work in general, I think is good.

I like Simon Sarris's take on this, from:

https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-most-precious-resourc...

> I find it striking just how early, and how varied, the avenues were that allowed one to pivot off-script, to do something differently than everyone else. For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?

I happen to mostly agree.

You’re picking one sentence I used as context for the rest of my comment.

Regarding the telegram office, I’m pretty sure 13 year olds have a lot more schoolwork than they did in 1850. I frequently had days I spent all day in school and spent most of the night on homework.

Most 13-year olds in the 19th century (including Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison, both telegraph boys in their youth) had literally no schoolwork. High school wasn't a common thing then and most people only went to grade school to learn how to read and write and do basic math. Carnegie went to grade school in Scotland before his family moved to America, and Edison was only given a basic home school education by his mother.

I'm not saying that was good, but comparing 13-year olds then and today is hard. 13-year olds then were basically already adults.

Yeah. I know. I’ve read a lot about the 1800s, specifically squared-rigged warships. Midshipmen were very young. Taking children into battle on naval vessels… it was a very different time.

I absolutely agree. But I think existing laws already struck this balance. But what we're talking about now is kids cleaning the floors of slaughterhouses at night.

>The second part of this sentence is not obviously false to me.

It's systemic racism and inequality. As long as we pretend everyone has equal opportunities, then we can make simple claims as you do.

>For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy

The internet. Youtube. Udemy. MIT free courses.

Of course the claims will be about only the most positively wistful jobs of a bygone era, but strangely not "For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of dying inside a chimney?" because these jobs are they chimney kind, not the paper-boy kind.

"Having a job is a moral obligation and making kids work is good for them"

I wouldn't call myself hardcore conservative but what's wrong with this ? Would you rather have your 15 year old sit home all day playing video games or get a real life job where they could learn a few valuable skills ? Honest question and not trying to troll. As an American, I am seeing our kids being over protected and the result is a bunch of 20 year olds who have no direction and have never faced hardship to prepare for the real world.

I don’t see anything wrong with teenagers working. The issue is them working in jobs with high risk of injury. (Like industrial labor.)

There is a pretty big gap between only letting children play games all day and allowing them to participate in high risk labour unsupervised and without special protections.

You only have one childhood. Taking that away from kids to force them into working in factories or lower than minimum wage labor for the sake of appealing to some fantasy that they're learning 'real' skills is bullshit. If we wanted to do that, we'd have more protections and give kids opportunities to sign on with labor unions and get mentorship. That can actually lead to a full and well paying career unlike your laughable McDonald's comparison in another post.

The way this debate ends up is odd to me. There's no question about human trafficking or why so many unaccompanied minors have turned up and how they got here. Nothing about whether this is safe and what happens if one of these kids injures themselves. There's no question about what the cost is on local resources to put them in school and whether they are even going to school and how they are doing. There's nothing about the cost to pay for their housing and medicine versus the theoretical economic benefit, etc. No one asks what their health and safety status is or whether they owe anything to cartels. Are they paying half their meager wage to an adult? What happens to the money? Let's not ask who is watching over these minors. Let's not ask where their parents are and whether the parents are exploiting them or immigration laws.

Instead the debate turns to them working. Who benefits from this? It's not even close to being the average person in one of these states.

It's because ultimately they don't care. They've already put their feet down and they believe working is inherently good. So anything that makes more people work is good, even if it involves stuff that rollbacks worker protections.

It's so transparent. The worst part is that these jobs in question suck so badly that the only way they can find workers is by lobbying to grab people who have less labor power. Rather than properly existing as part of a free market and paying people more.

> Would you rather have your 15 year old sit home all day playing video games or get a real life job where they could learn a few valuable skills ?

The issue most people take with this is that it compares the best outcome of one version with the worst version of the other. If we want to compare the worst outcomes then we should be talking about the difference between children idling playing video games versus children being exploited in workplaces.

You can just as well say: Would you rather have parents force 12 year olds to clean slaughterhouse floors at night, to make ends meet (oh and this happens partly because child labor of course also depresses parents' wages, so let's please not blame the parents immediately), or would you have them study one day out of 10 because the games really bore them?

Videogames, 100%. As an aside, I think they positively impacted me and got me interested in computer programming to make my own. But my main point is we are talking about children being trafficked into dangerous meatpacking plants where several were injured!

The benefits of work and summer jobs aren't the stakes here, not being coerced into doing manual labor during long night shifts is. The idea of saying "at least they aren't playing videogames" is so absurd to me, it'd be like looking at a homeless person and saying "at least they aren't wasting money on uber eats!".

I worked as a child and I worked as a teen. These were safe jobs with well defined boundaries that would not interfere with my education. I don't see much of a problem with that.

This article isn't about legislation giving children a sense of direction are building their fortitude through work. For one thing, I very much doubt there is any jurisdiction with a blanket prohibition on child or youth labour when the work environment is safe and the boundaries are well defined. Child labour laws are about protecting a vulnerable population from the types of abuses that have existed historically. Those protections aren't perfect. For example: having a parent sign a form to grant permission implies parental and government oversight, but it does not guarantee it. On the other hand, it is better than nothing. The motivation of those wishing to remove those protections should be considered seriously, particularly when they tout the supposed benefits to the people they are being put into a position to exploit.

What valuable skills do you expect a kid to have in a slaughterhouse? The jobs are not safe for anyone. They only exist because lax regulation allow hiring of illegal immigrants with little or no oversight. They are the equivalent of Uber rent extraction except they damage your body instead of your vehicle.

Pretty bad take overall. I understand your sentiment. I really do. However we will always have people in exploitable situations. If it’s not poor kids it’s people running from extreme poverty in another part of the world or just falling on hard times at home.

At a certain point we have to say no one should be making less than this. As a society we likely want a floor on what human time is worth. If your business truly can’t function and that floor is reasonable which I believe it is in almost all states your business isn’t viable.

There is no free market when companies collude and form monopolies or oligopolies. Let’s stop pretending that free market rules apply in the current climate.

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