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America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor laws
- hollywood_court 3y agoI’m in Alabama and it seems like we’re actively working to make the education system worse so we can use the kids to replace the immigrant laborers who are leaving.
- dinkumthinkum 3y agoThat’s not true. In what way could that be true? I think people forget there are these things called parents. This is not sone kind of forced labor or dawn of industrial age coal mine situation or something like that. There’s nothing wrong with kids doing some work under the guidance of their parents. As far as the “education system,” this is largely a function of parents as well.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoChildren being maimed in factory labor is unfortunate but it's the fault of their parents. We merely created the crushing economic pressure that made it necessary for their children to work and removed the legal obstacles to the factory hiring them. Ultimately this is a matter of personal responsibility, like every other bad thing we caused to happen.
- stuaxo 3y agoThere have always been parents, including when kids worked in mines or up chimneys.
- dinkumthinkum 3y agoThe situation in the US now is very different from the dawn of the industrial age. You really parents are going to have to ship their kids off to coal mines and Soviet style factories? People can downvote all they want but they are not living in reality if they think that.
- bobmcnamara 3y agoI'm from the Midwest. Poor folks ship their kids off to clean the pork plants and slaughterhouses on the night shift. Cargill and JBS were some of the worst. It was easy to tell in school, they were dead tired and stunk of bleach. > The situation in the US now is very different from the dawn of the industrial age. Different for many, and different for you, but not for all.
- busterarm 3y agoPeople act like we left this all behind hundreds of years ago but child labor didn't really end as standard practice even in densely urban environments until the Great Depression...
- red-iron-pine 3y agoI believe it. A kid died about a year ago while working in a poultry plant. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children-documentary-rcna129405 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children...
- bobmcnamara 3y agoEvery time its heartbreaking. I'm glad they're covering this in the news at least though.
- nl 3y ago> The situation in the US now is very different from the dawn of the industrial age. You really parents are going to have to ship their kids off to coal mines and Soviet style factories? Genuine question: why do you think they wouldn't? These days of course they are called Amazon warehouses or non-union car factories or industrial slaughterhouses but the point is still the same.
- patcon 3y agoYeah, but there are modern equivalents of that period's parental negligence and collective failure. We have contemporary versions of the exploitation of mines and factories. If mines and factories were what we recognize (from today's perspective) as abuse in that industrial economy, what do you suspect are the current places that might need protection in the today's economy?
- hollywood_court 3y agoI can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic and trolling or if you really believe that. Please look at any number of recent news headlines regarding Alabama and how our education systems and libraries and such are regressing. It’s becoming dangerous for educators even teach basic reproductive safety to our students.
- dinkumthinkum 3y ago[flagged]
- djbusby 3y agoThis site al.com has some articles about events down south that might be of interest.
- Frost1x 3y agoLabor can be forced through many different mechanisms. What matters ultimately is just how much flexibility one has to not work or how many necessary things needed for surviving depends on actively working. Everything else are just levels of choice of flexibility within working, but you still for all functional purposes need to work. There’s a whole lot of illusion of choice we like to give people anymore.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y agoI already shared this link once but you should read it to. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-labor-laws-violations https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-lab...
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoI'm so fucking glad I'm not a kid right now. We're trying to make the education system somehow worse than the dumpster fire it was when I was little, we have people campaigning on making sure kids don't get free lunches for...reasons?... and now we have people trying to ensure they can be exploited so the 0.1% class can make an extra 0.1% this year. Screech about bootstraps all you want, it's awfully hard to pull yourself up by them if you don't have shoes at all. This isn't politics, this is thunder-dome-ism.
- busterarm 3y agoIf you can't even afford shoes, it's likely you're dropping out of school to go work and you need less restrictions so that you can get more hours and better opportunities. If I need someone for an 8 hour shift and laws only allow me to hire you for 6, then I'm going to hire someone else instead of you.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThis is the HN classic pro-sweatshop labor argument but aimed at americans? An interesting variant I guess.
- dinkumthinkum 3y agoWhere is the sweatshop from these changes in laws? This is beyond hyperbolic. This is not about sweatshops.
- throwup238 3y agoYou think the desirable employers are the ones that need bodies so badly they’ll hire children? Don’t kid yourself, they’ll be lucky if they work in sweatshops and not in abattoirs.
- dinkumthinkum 3y agoWhere are the sweatshops? Are you all delusional? Have you all not heard of the fact that teenagers have worked jobs for decades? This is unbelievable.
- busterarm 3y agoMost states trying to loosen standards are just trying to get in line with federal regulations (from their already more-stringent state standards) which are mostly minor changes like allowing minors to serve alcohol or work an extra two hours a day. On the other hand, the media is constantly driving this idea home that there are no jobs for young people, so it's kind of hard to know which side of their ass they're talking out of. What I do know is if you look at the data we have since COVID, young men have been dropping out of high school and college in record numbers in order to work to support their families out of necessity. Inflation has crushed a lot of poor and middle class people. If regulators and rich liberals really want to save the children, they should get a handle on supply chains and pricing of basic necessities so that young people don't have to choose between feeding themselves/their families and their education.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoRising wages due to labor shortages is likely more effective in quality of life increases in the face of elevated prices versus allowing children to work longer and more risky jobs. But conservatives are somewhat allergic to labor having any power or wage increases, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. As long as there is enough anti-immigrant sentiment that keeps immigration subdued (versus Canada’s “open doors, citizen economics around housing and wages be damned”), the problem works itself out eventually with structural demographics and a compressing working age labor force. The world is getting old fast; bad for capitalistic heavy socioeconomic systems (which relies heavily on surplus or under compensated labor), good for people who must exist in the labor market. https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/our-world-is-growing-older.html https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/our-w... https://hbr.org/2022/11/the-global-population-is-aging-is-your-business-prepared https://hbr.org/2022/11/the-global-population-is-aging-is-yo... https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/aging-is-the-real-population-bomb-bloom-zucker https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoBut this ignores the fact that if wages rise too much, the product or service the company sells may become uneconomic. I literally have seen people complain about how "the man" is trying to keep wages down while at the same time bitching that their fast food meal costs $11 dollars. I guarantee many of these small business owners of places like restaurants are not exactly raking in the dough (in most cases a software engineer with like 5+ years of experience can make more money with less risk). I make a good living but I've noticed myself eating out less because it's tough for me to stomach a $100+ per person bill at even a reasonable (i.e. not super fancy) restaurant.
- webwielder2 3y agoBoth sides journalism prevents the headline from being “Republicans seek to weaken laws against child labor”
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoI'd accept "Republicans continue crusade against childhood innocence"
- bongodongobob 3y agoWhile I'll agree that a lot of their aims are definitely nefarious, I think the childhood innocence thing is a modern invention. Good intentions, but maybe misguided. Kids need chores, responsibilities, struggles etc. Coddling kids until they are 18 and then throwing them into the world with 0 life experience is just setting them up for failure. I had a paper route for a couple years when I was 12 and got a job at McDonalds when I was 14. A lot of this can be learned in extracurricular sports as well, but that's obviously not for everyone. Two a day football practices in summer were harder than any job I've ever had but no one says sports are bad for kids. I don't really see the difference, plus, you don't get paid for sports. Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines, but I don't see anything wrong with summer or weekend jobs, working on the family farm, etc. It's good for them and a part of learning how to be an independent adult. Kids shouldn't be infantalized and sheltered through college.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoAgreed to an extent, it's ok for high school students to go get some work experience, I did when I was that age. Giving humans a window in their lives where they can focus purely on capturing a portion of ever expanding human knowledge, and, to be honest, hang out a bit, is a good thing in my opinion though. That said, lets not lose sight of what's going on here, the DoL has been trying to crack down on 13yo kids in meat packing plants. If this is the line that we're trying to push the overton window past, I want no part of it.
- mikeytown2 3y agoAlternative source that's not paywalled https://usaherald.com/changes-to-child-labor-law-being-proposed-across-america/ https://usaherald.com/changes-to-child-labor-law-being-propo...
- xqcgrek2 3y ago[flagged]
- srameshc 3y ago2024 and we are still divided on this issue ? It must be like , "We got 99 problems but this ain't one"
- vinyl7 3y agoIt's easier for congress to rat-hole over already solved issues than it is to work to solve actual issues. It's been this way for decades now and it's exhausting. We need to find a way to solve this failure in the incentives that congress people have
- 77pt77 3y agoJust ratify the "Convention on the Rights of the Child" [1]. It's long overdue! [1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
- EvaAntonio 3y ago[dead]