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Comment by intralizee | Hacker News Reader

I believe one of Apple's higher ups has talked about child labor before. I'm not sure if it was Steve or Tim but the convo was that its impossible to handle without hurting the communities because the norm is child labor over there. So the conditions for the children are worse if they have no labor. It's really complicated and not something that you can judge from an arm chair position, you have to go over there and see it with your own eyes.

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I understand the cruelty and inhuman treatment sides of child labor. But it is not black and white. Context is important, if not crucial.

Use my own case as example. My family suffered financial hardship due to some misfortune when I was 15. I really wanted to work to help my mother. There were rarely part-time jobs in my hometown in China, then. I could quit my study and try to find a full-time job, which I gave serious thoughts. I knew several people who joined workforce around that age, either due to family financial situation like mine, or they thought they had no future in school (it was already very competitive then) and it was better to work early and accumulate working experience. In this sense, they were "child" labors. But they chose to. They were not mistreated because they were under aged. In my view, they made rational decisions to join the workforce.

One of them, a classmate's brother, returned to school after working for 3 years, when their family financial turned around.

Fortunately, our family decided to open a small business. I tried to get as much time as I could to work there to help, while study hard so that I could go to the best colleges. For two years, I didn't have much time to hang out with friends. So I was a part-time "child" labor. But it was my decision. Nobody forced me. I don't regret it a bit.

Let's face the reality. There are many kids who are just not interested in school and are not good at it. There are two options. They can either hang around and be cool, which is a good situation, considering kids of that age tend to get into troubles if their minds are not occupied. Or they can get a job, learn something from the job, develop good work ethics, etc. What do you think is the better option?

Interesting. Perhaps we should focus more on whether the labor is safe and meets reasonable time requirements than to arbitrarily impose an age cutoff.

I agree with you that attending school is not always the same as learning. Before recent western history many children became apprentices in valuable trade skills which often paid well. Maybe we should start looking at such options again.

To add to this, no on will tell you they are for child labor, but if you're going to try to eliminate it you have to provide alternatives. In the US we have free public education available to all children by law; other countries can't provide that with the resources available. Having a large unemployed population leads to other negative societal outcomes (crime, violence, etc). Basically, you can't just eliminate child labor without providing alternatives or incentives.

If you have a family of 6 (lets assume 2 parents and 4 kids) all working for 50 cents an hour.

Saying "your kids have to go to school and not work" and then paying the adults 3 dollars an hour. The family winds up making more money without the kids having to work. (in this admittedly limited example, the family makes double)

If you take the kids out of the equation without increasing the parental pay, then yes, you'll have a harder time with things, as the family just lost 66% of their income, which will mean cutting back.

So you are correct that it is complicated and "stop kids from working" isn't the FULL answer. But it doesn't mean that there aren't solutions - plenty of countries have child labor laws without falling apart.

So now the cost of labor went up 6x? Don't you see a problem in that solution? The people only have jobs because labor is so cheap.

Other countries don't have child labor laws because their job market evolved and pushed the low labor cost jobs into other countries.

I agree that labor cost is going to go up. And the whole point of this being enforced from the US side through tariffs and import regulations is so that when country A enacts child labor laws, Apple doesn't just move to country B.

And I'm aware that it's a complicated, sensitive topic. That was my point. But dismissing it entirely because solution X creates problem Y instead of finding solution Y (which probably causes problem Z, which will have a solution eventually too) is not the right answer. Saying "Well we just can't solve this problem, they get to live in squalor and there's NOTHING that can be done to help them" is ridiculous.

So the solution is to conjure up extra magic money from nowhere to make everybody wealthy and happy? If only someone had though of that sooner!

You could have made the same argument for child labor before the laws were enacted. Same for slavery. Argument ad antiquitatem is a fallacy.

Well, I believe that the best thing is to phase things out rather than go cold turkey. Otherwise you will get a backlash like the civil war that happened here in the USA.

Your command of US history is not so good -- the Emancipation Proclamation was made late in the war. The argument when the war started was about escaped saves; the Northern states were ignoring federal law and asserting state's rights to free them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850#Nul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation

Edit: and for the banned guy who called me racist, uh, you also have it backwards.

Right. The proclamation was made after the civil war started. But the war was because the North started to act as if it no longer agreed with slavery, which the South saw as a threat, since it depended so much on it. Lincoln promised that slavery would not be allowed in new territories, the south states saw the writing on the wall, and that caused the war. Yeah, the United States didn't exactly quit cold turkey before the war but close enough I think.

>>[1] The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. <<

[1]http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/faq/?referrer=http...

Not so, context matters. One of the drivers for anti child labour laws was to ensure that children were able to attend the free schooling that had been introduced. The driver was not preventing children from working per se, it was making sure they got an education. For example the long school summer holidays were a pragmatic compromise introduced to allow children to work on farms during harvest time. But if free schooling isn't available, or isn't provided up to the same age level, that motivation goes away.

Yes, that's the lie the corporate execs tell. People lured into a trap would rather live in the trap than die.

It's not impossible, for Apple with $XX Billion in profit hiding in tax shelters, to pay better than subsistence wages to their subcontracted workers (or invest in community resources for the cities where their factories are, or similar).

Wages at Foxconn and similar firms are way above subsistence levels. They're far above mean wages for industrial workers in China too, plus Apple specifically writes pay increments into their contracts with the manufacturers to attract the best workers, which is why workers prefer to work on the Apple lines to the ones for Samsung, Microsoft, etc which have laxer standards and don't pay as well.

Not trying to be Peter Theil here but why is child labor considered inhuman and cruel? Aren't they getting a chance to learn by doing as opposed to sitting in the classroom and getting to the same place in another 10 years?

"getting a chance"? They're children, they don't have a choice. It's not like they're weighing the options and deciding that school just isn't right for them. Forced labor, child or not, is inhumane and cruel.

And then obviously, you don't learn anything on an assembly line. Please put some more thought into this stuff if you ever plan on having kids.

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