US child labour violations rise as businesses defy laws to fill roles | Hacker News Reader

US child labour violations rise as businesses defy laws to fill roles

ft.com

34 pointspera14 comments

"In this labour market, it’s not too surprising . . . employers are being opportunistic and careless,” she added.

The way that's written sounds preposterous. We're in a labor market where businesses are less and less successful finding adult workers to work for inadequate wages, and... "Oopsie, we were careless and accidentally started hiring children?" Do they expect anyone to believe that?

> Packers Sanitation Services said it was “pleased to have finalised this settlement figure” and that it had a “zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18”.

Oh yea, I buy that one.

I was lucky enough to be able to get a job at 16 (only one among my peers) around 2008. At the time, my boss there said "you're going to be the last generation of teenagers in the US to have jobs". Boy was he wrong!

> Federal laws prohibit children under 14 from working in most non-agriculture jobs.

One of the weirdest things of these laws is that agricultural jobs... don't seem any less dangerous than any others?

I don’t think danger was the main consideration here, but rather necessity.

Agriculture is really labor intensive. This is also why children are out of school in the summer so they can help out with their family’s farm.

Also considered highly essential - really non-negotiable on an economics/government level - because most people need to, you know, eat.

No one is going to starve if children cannot pick strawberries.

The necessity here is for cheap food prices, which are politically popular. We care about child labor (and minimum wages), but only so much, so we exempt certain businesses. The fact that a lot of these agricultural jobs are done by minorities is also relevant.

Between something 30%+ food never making it to the table, Rising obesity rates, corn being used for Ethanol production, and the excessive consumption of beef and pork there's an incredible amount of surplus in our food supply chain.

There is a potential for surplus in the food chain, but the logistics of transporting food from where it grows to where it is consumed leads to waste. The waste we have now may be considered low compared to a hundred years ago when we couldn't preserve food to last longer than a few days.

Rising urban density leads to less room for food growing and more people to feed...think about NYC and where all the food must come from to support 20 million people every day.

Sorry I wasn't arguing for child labor. I was just explaining why it was allowed in the past when family farms were more prevalent.

> This is also why children are out of school in the summer so they can help out with their family’s farm.

This is a common myth. There's more work to do during the spring and fall than the summer.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56901/why-do-students-ge...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer...

https://archive.ph/ElBsp

in my lifetime, "illegal" workers went from What? to So What. I mean every State in the USA, most cities, many street corners.. How can anyone talk about labor economics without starting with this..

We can’t address child labor issues until we eliminate undocumented workers?

The kind of infrastructure that can verify one can easily verify the other, check one and people will demand you check both, when really you'd rather check neither and keep making lots of money.

Starting with what? We have a ton of undocumented laborers and still not enough workers overall.

Start with granting amnesty to everyone here without a criminal record and then start opening up our borders? I have to assume that’s what you mean by “start with this.”

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