51–60 of 130 posts
> Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop. Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor! The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual fu…
> Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop. Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor! The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual fu…
This is the bollocks. I have a farm. Kids have been out helping me since they were about 5 or 6, and around I've never herd of some formal wage system in a family farm for kids. They do it because you're contributing. Having farm labor laws for 'family farms' that go beyond family is utter lies and incredibly repugnant as they are essentially twisting things to allow people to use child labor.
As an Australian I dont understand what has happened to the moral compass in USA. Its like while the rural parts say they are a Christian nation, the reality to an outsider like me seems they follow money as their deity more than anything.
> Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop. Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor! The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual fu…
12 year olds are generally prepubescent children. This isn't like a sixteen year old working to save for a car, or even a fourteen year old gaining a little independence and exercise working a few hours after school. This is child labour. It's indefensible.
It was hard work, but a great experience. There were some 10-12 hour days when we were planting, and it got pretty busy during harvest season. We had days off and typically during the busy part of the season we wouldn't spend more than 4 hours working. Our parents also worked just as hard as we did.
It was great because there was no set schedule and we learned some things about entrepreneurship. I was proud of the work we put in and what we were able to achieve. The last season we ran the farm, we made about $12,000 in today's money.
I don't think this form of child labor should be discouraged, but rather encouraged.
> Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop. Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor! The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual fu…
You do need to read slightly further to see the issue with tobacco plants: > All the while, nicotine — a substance he's barely old enough to legally purchase now — seeped into his skin. For all tobacco workers, but especially kids, that can cause nicotine poisoning, or green tobacco sickness, whose symptoms include nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness.
children under 18 can’t vote for better labor laws either, they should be able to vote
Do you think they would vote against be allowed to work? I always wanted jobs as a teen so I could do stuff- I wanted to be independent as do most teens I'd imagine.
Sometime after the mobile internet happened kids stopped working. They stopped driving cars and that was a big motivator for work. There was a lot of money flying around and parents just started handing spending money to their kids.
Now I read articles post-COVID that sound shocked that fast food chains are advertising jobs to 14 year olds. If you’re much under 40, this might seem like some terrifying Charles Dickens stuff.
> Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. This is the problem, not the age of the child or the crop. Spending an occasional weekend working a few hours in a field sounds perfectly fine and character-building for a 12-year-old. More 12 year olds should be getting outside and tasting manual labor! The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual fu…
12 year olds are generally prepubescent children. This isn't like a sixteen year old working to save for a car, or even a fourteen year old gaining a little independence and exercise working a few hours after school. This is child labour. It's indefensible.
My friends worked in their family store from an even younger age.
Full-time manual labor is of course not good and will disproportionately affect poor families who need the extra income.
There’s a big stupid online/news debate the past few months about teen employment, and I mean it’s long on noise and short on facts about what laws have been changing (mostly very procedural paperwork changes), what laws there are, where teens are actually working, and what the impact of jobs are on teens. And we’ve studied things like this, and it’s a travesty that the studies don’t come up more. https://www.ncbi.nl…
> Today, Castellano is a sophomore at Tufts University. But when he worked, he felt "this sense that working in those fields was going to be the rest of my life, that I had nothing else going for me."
This article isn't really about the debate about whether it's OK for a teenager to have a part-time gig at a gas station on the odd weekend, or even whether it's OK for a teenager to work part-time after school, or even about a debate about whether it's OK for a teen to work a full-time summer job. The article is about whether it's OK for a pre-teen to have a full time job doing manual labor in a dangerous environment all day with longer hours than most adults work. I don't think there's a way to phrase that as character building or educational or instilling work ethic or granting a feeling of satisfaction.
> He worked alongside other kids with one of North Carolina's most valuable crops. Some of them worked in the summer and went to school the rest of the year, like him. Some didn't go to school at all.
The context here isn't about aiding child development. If you have a full-time job as a kid that means you can't go to school, something is wrong. That is not for the kid's benefit, that's not something that's aiding development or helping set you up for success in the future. It is not doing you any favors as a child. Particularly not if you're working a job that's prone to giving people nicotine poisoning.