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Serious question: if compensation is actually decreasing where are people getting justification on rolling back child labor laws? Now adults have to compete wit
by SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
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???
- jeremyjh 3y agoIt will make things better for the people purchasing the legislation.
- berbec 3y agoBest investment out there: buy a politician.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoCapitalism means a society ruled by Capital owners, who happen to love child labor. That’s the justification. It makes them money, so it’s good!
- colechristensen 3y agoThis kind of knee jerk snarky comment doesn’t really contribute to the conversation at all. If you want to make that point, make it better.
- raphaelj 3y agoUnless you can prove them wrong, the parent's is still right: these child labor laws have been revoked to benefit a minority's financial interests.
- karaterobot 3y agoIt's the burden of the person putting forward a proposition to prove it, or at least provide some kind of argument or evidence. It's not the burden of everyone else to disprove it. Think about what that world looks like.
- kbelder 3y ago>these child labor laws have been revoked to benefit a minority's financial interests. The children's?
- berdario 3y agoOf course it contributes to the conversation: 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)
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYes, they love child labor for material reasons, not villainous ones: it generally costs less money or puts downward pressure on the price of competing labor.
- adasdasdas 3y agoSocialists will attribute any societal problem to capitalism. Of course, capitalist critics online will never mention that capitalism drives down labor demand by incentivizing technological innovation.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago“Societal problem” is doing a lot of work in your comment. Politicians repealing child labor laws so that corporations don’t have to pay more money for workers is not a “societal problem,” but one resulting from the naked reality of the wage relation.
- effable 3y agoSo the argument is that since this criticism came from presumably a socialist, which we have no evidence for, we should not consider the criticism on its own merit?
- 3y ago
- Buttons840 3y agoIt's not quite snarky, it's more reductionist. He's making two assertions: (1) Capitalism tends to shift power to those with capital, and (2) those with capital tend to benefit from cheap child labor. Will you argue against his central points, or will you dismiss them based on how they were delivered?
- colechristensen 3y agoUnless you define capitalism as “things I don’t like” then 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.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoHow would one contribute to the conversation better than stating what is plainly true: child labor laws are being repealed because Capital owners want them to be and pay politicians to make it so. Is it more useful to engage with whatever sophistry is used to justify their repeal as if it was legitimate or well-reasoned?
- eyelidlessness 3y agoI think it was a point well made. It’s not an outlandish or niche idea. It’s lacking neither in plenty of readily available academic source material nor major cultural works. The only thing which would make it a claim so extraordinary that it begs special citation is on the presumption that capital’s appetite for child labor decreases along with regulatory structures limiting it. But that’s self evidently untrue. The only thing limiting that appetite has been regulation, and the appetite has both informed deregulation advocacy and taken advantage when such advocacy succeeds. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- the_jesus_villa 3y ago>Now adults have to compete with children?? 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.
- tnel77 3y agoI think they were talking about states trying to get more teenagers working to help with the “labor crisis.” I had a similar upbringing to what you described, but idk if that’s what they meant.
- jeremyjh 3y agoDo you think there are labor laws preventing daughters from helping their dad with coding jobs? We are talking here about children participating in the labor market, not apprenticing with their parents in a casual way.
- chrismcb 3y agoChild labor laws are different for family members.
- the_jesus_villa 3y agoI'm discussing child labor, not child labor laws!
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoYou never forced your daughter to work all evening, skipping school hours, or in a butchery, which is what I’m talking about.
- the_jesus_villa 3y agoI've done all of that except the butchery part (because that wouldn't make sense). She is homeschooled, and working with me on software projects is part of her homeschooling. Sometimes if the project is fun it could take all evening (like when we make videos demoing stuff for documentation). 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.