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From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum secu
by colechristensen 3y ago
From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum security prison followed by often several hours of more work to do at home.
Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.
Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.
>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."
It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.
- otikik 3y agoI am sorry you had such a horrible experience at school. I’m not denying that what you say can happen, but for contrast, my 7yo son enjoys his school greatly and even misses it during holidays.
- randomdata 3y agoIs there something to suggest that school was a horrible experience for him? My only takeaway is that it is work that is pushed upon children, which is undeniably true. In a similar vein to your anecdote, and pertinent the larger topic, I greatly enjoyed harvest when I was 7 and always missed it when it was over. That's why I became a farmer in adulthood – and I still feel the same way about it. Work (even paid work) doesn't mean unenjoyable.
- insanitybit 3y ago> Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Yes, these are very significant differences. Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc. School disgusts me, personally, but it's not even close to child labor.
- randomdata 3y ago> Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc. Is that not also the case for the kids in the article harvesting cocoa? According to the article, they harvested a total of 140 pounds of cocoa for the year. According to Wikipedia, a typical worker can harvest around 150-175 pounds of cocoa in one day. Even if they are horribly inefficient compared to a typical worker, perhaps in large part because they are having fun and playing at the same time, we're still only talking a handful of days of work each year. You can only drag out the harvest for so long. What do they do the rest of the time?
- lapphi 3y agoAre you likening child labor to the public education system? That is absolutely preposterous and I’m not sorry if you’re offended.
- beebeepka 3y agoNot OP but I'd rather work than attend school.
- KPGv2 3y agoIt's utterly wild that you would equate back-breaking manual labor with doing multiplication tables. It speaks to how very little back-breaking manual labor you've done in your life.