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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Much of the angst in this thread are the first-world confused sort: "Why don't they just eat cake?" Its a hard world. You don't solve child-labor by simply firing the children. There has to be a whole social net to catch unemployed children, feed them and give them schooling.

I worked all my young life, in Iowa, on a farm. One of the most dangerous jobs in America according to the actuarials. No lasting damage to me, though not all my cohort actually survived unscathed into adulthood. Heck, half my fathers' generation had nicknames like 'lefty' and 'stub'.

Should working children on farms in Iowa be banned? Had it happened when I was young, half the family farms would have gone under.

Its not some academic third-world issue. You ate that food we produced. And at the time, it wasn't going to be produced any other way.

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I really dislike the anti-"academic" viewpoint of this comment. It is a issue that has been solved countless times before and applying academic analyses are exactly what's needed to resolve this.

> Should working children on farms in Iowa be banned? Had it happened when I was young, half the family farms would have gone under.

probably yes. If you can't support a business without relying on child labour, it's not much of a business. I'm guessing this was around 20-40 years ago, during which time food production boomed across america and food prices plummeted. So yes, the food would have been produced regardless, you and your peers would have had more time to spend on education and the net personal and economic benefits would have been positive.

If you took the children out of the mines the cobalt would still get mined. The owners would find technology and process efficiencies to stay price competitive, if those don't exist then the price of mobile phones should go up.

These parents are no different to those in developed countries and would want what's best for their children, if they had the choice - so that safety net would get added.

> If you took the children out of the mines the cobalt would still get mined. The owners would find technology and process efficiencies to stay price competitive, if those don't exist then the price of mobile phones should go up.

You talked about the mine owners and the price of phones, but what about the children and their families? What would they have to do?

Go to school.

If there's no schools then there's not enough tax being drawn from the mine, so tax the mine (or cobalt exports). You do that until the point smartphones become unaffordable (which we are really, really far off).

Except that's not what happens because it's not in the West's interest and there's enough influence over dictators etc. to keep it that way.

Right. So it's not what happens. It's the DRC, it's mine cobalt or starve.

What's your point, unless you were actually agreeing with the parent?

the parent is implying that this is the way it is, the way it was and the way it always will be (and backs it up with a personal anecdote). That's not the case though - it is possible to remove a dictator, it is possible to stop wars, it is possible to change employment laws, it is possible to send children to school and it is possible to change the world for the better. And it's not a theory.

Your "let them go to school" is the equivalent of "let them eat cake": if they could go to school they probably wouldn't be working in a mine in the first place :/.

If you want to try to solve the problem through some random intervention you need to take a step back and fix whatever is preventing them from going to school, not arbitrarily taking away their jobs and then patting yourself on the back for a problem solved.

Taking away the job does solve the problem though, because the cobalt must come from somewhere, so the mine will increase prices to pay for the new labour they need. And the tax from this will pay for the schools.

The ultimate reason it doesn't happen is because people in the west don't want to pay more for their smartphone (they are not to blame though, as they won't see this picture, our politicians, corporations and planners are the groups that maintain this picture deliberately).

You are talking about a country with child soldiers and indentured service. Your perfect-sphere-of-a-market is even further from reality than in developed countries.

That's exactly what happens when you snatch up the commons and parcel it out to private and governmental actors, depriving people of the means of their own self-sustenance, thus turning them into a landless class that have to sell their labor in order to survive.

If only there were an alternative to this inevitable, natural, inexorable economic process. Too bad there isn't.

"you and your peers would have had more time to spend on education and the net personal and economic benefits would have been positive."

I think you drastically underestimate the value of work as it related to self actualization, determination and long term success as an adult.

Fortunately, we have a bit of an A/B test going on in America right now - rural youth in many parts of the country have no meaningful work and no home-economic structure into which to pour their energy and time. News headlines lead me to believe this is going poorly:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/opioid-crisis-epidemic...

> I worked all my young life, in Iowa, on a farm.

I'm sorry, but did you just compare working on a farm in Iowa to being a child slave in a war zone? What's happening in the Congo is globalization at it's worst. Millions have been slaughtered in that nation in recent years and you say it's "a hard world." That takes a lot of nerve, man.

Nope. Just illustrated how hypocricy works, where child labor is OK here in the US but evil elsewhere. Without knowing the circumstance, or the effect on children, its easy to pontificate from an armchair.

This debate seems focused entirely on ethics, but I posted the story because:

1. It's important to call out injustice and fight for what we can improve in our own communities, but it's also important to remember that this is the day to day reality for many people. We should reflect on our lives every so often and feel lucky, because it's healthy if for no other reason.

2. When we measure value and progress using dollars and technology, and we only pay attention to the things in front of us, there is collateral damage. If you're on a blind mission to make computers affordable to everyone, or to compete with hydrocarbon and fission energy on price, this is one effect.

> Should working children on farms in Iowa be banned?

Yes, especially if they're working on tobacco farms.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27350413

https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/photo-essay/2015/12/08/teen...

https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/video/2015/12/08/teens-toba...

It's a bit disingenuous to compare farm work to mining. I also grew up on a farm and helped my parents, uncles/aunts, grandparents on their farms. But I still went to school, did my homework, watched cartoons, etc.

Farm work isn't mining. Farm work isn't as toxic as mining. And I highly doubt these kids are getting an education.

> You don't solve child-labor by simply firing the children.

But that's what we did in the western world. In the US we simply passed laws making child factory/mining/etc labor illegal. Now we did this only because we were running out of jobs for adults and kicking out the kids opened up jobs for adults, but it's something that is doable at a government level.

Whether the government in congo is able to do that, whether the poverty level allows that and whether they have elementary schools to absorb unemployeed kids is another matter.

It's hard to defend child mining. It's not working on a family farm.

But, reading the article, we learn that when children are fired from one job, they go work in a worse one for less pay. Its hard to defend disruption, especially of children, especially when they then starve or work harder.

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