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12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

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Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#61

Post by triceratops »

flatline wrote: post #59
dbspin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I started working part time in the summers when I was 12, it was a great experience. My daughter is 12 now and I wish she could have that experience instead of a handful of summer camps and a lot of time at home watching youtube which is the current plan. There are simply no other options available. My friends worked in their family store from an even younger age. Full-time manual labor is of course not good and will…

Depends on the work. Manning the cash register at the family store or restaurant isn't the same as working in fields and factories.

I don't mind my kids doing the former at a young age. The latter - hell no.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#62

Post by jackvalentine »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #55
Symbiote wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like a work safety issue, not a child labour issue.

The two aren’t unrelated - kids can’t advocate for themselves like an adult can.

In my state it’s illegal for people under 18 to do hazardous work for this reason. I don’t know if tobacco picking would count as hazardous but other jobs with exposure to chemicals do.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#63

Post by sclarisse »

danShumway wrote: post #60
sclarisse wrote: post #6

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…

I don't think that's a fair critique of this article at all. > 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 i…

If you’re presenting this big article with an attention getting headline, in the middle of this big debate that’s filled with misinformation and rhetoric reaching fantastical heights about “forced birth for cheap child labor,” it is part of that ongoing trash fire, it is very likely to feed that misinformation, and it is unlikely to become a targeted intervention that addresses the actual problems.

I could say the same about some Jesse Singal articles in the Atlantic, whose text in isolation might be perfectly defensible treatments of the issues around detransitioning, but mostly serve as excuses for narrow minded people to confirm their biases and build new ones.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#64

Post by DrThunder »

dbspin wrote: post #15
jl6 wrote: post #8

> 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.

I don't agree at all. Children should not be forced to work but it would do many of them a lot of good to learn how to work. Most of them actually like to be helpful. Anyone that's grown up on or near a farm learns quickly what it takes to actually produce something.

As opposed to handing them a tablet while they're a toddler and raising them that way, the "working" child is going to be far more grounded and just overall a better individual.

All the kids I grew up with were out helping load hay bails, driving tractors, trucks, feeding cattle, getting chicken eggs etc. at a very young age.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#65

Post by pixl97 »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #53

"efforts to tighten agricultural child labor laws have repeatedly failed because of opposition from Republicans in Congress and farm lobbying groups. They argue that such changes would hurt family farms and make it harder to teach kids about farming." 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…

> what has happened to the moral compass in USA.

We never had a great moral compass here, we have sold the idea that we do to everyone else though.

This said, we seem to have another big push to drag us back to pre-1850s with child labor and company scrip. But this is something that the capital class has always tried. There was never a point in history where they didn't want to effectively attempt to enslave people here, only times in history that they are more or less effective in achieving it.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#66

Post by redeeman »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #50

In comparison, the EU legislation on teenage working (it's a quick and easy reading): https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/employ... First sentence: "You cannot employ young people under the age of 15"

and to put context into EU, lets also remember that this is the same legislative body that until a few years ago would have farmers scrap perfectly good cucumbers if their bend is too big. the EU is utterly out of control, and legislates EVERYTHING, most often poorly. They would also tell you how fast you're allowed to vacuum your livingroom.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#67

Post by danShumway »

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #54
dbspin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am one of those twelve-year-olds that worked in the fields to save money for an education. We actually started when I was about 10 or 11. My sister and I grew pumpkins to sell at our roadside farm stand and grew vegetables that were sold to a local grocery chain through a program run by 4H/Cooperative Extension. It was hard work, but a great experience. There were some 10-12 hour days when we were planting, and it…

> 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."

[...]

> 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.

----

How are people in this comments section characterizing this as if it's character building? "We learned some things about entrepreneurship." Is it setting kids up for success if they don't go to school?

You're phrasing this like it's immensely satisfying work; the people in the article quoted are saying they had a different experience than you. Can we at the very least agree that working on a farm year-round and not going to school at all is probably not setting up a child to be a successful entrepreneur?

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#68

Post by theandrewbailey »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #41
nverno wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not for me to say how they'd vote, if they're working they should be able to vote for someone to represent their interests.

They should be able to vote with their feet and not work, or work somewhere else.

Re: 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

#69

Post by arcticbull »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #55
Symbiote wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like a work safety issue, not a child labour issue.

It’s both, children can’t report workplace issues because they don’t know what they’re looking for, and nobody would believe them anyways.
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