In 18th century London children were disposable labor: like cheaper, less durable horses. Children as young as 5 would work in match factories, dipping matchsticks into boiling sulfur by hand. Their lungs dissolved after a while, but then the factory owner didn’t pay their parents much for them anyway.
Young children were the best chimney sweeps, too. London chimneys were a fucking mess, of course, built up rapidly and with no building codes. Little children could crawl around inside them more easily to clean them. Sometimes a child would get irretrievably stuck, but them it was easy enough to light the furnace to burn them out.
Western culture decide a long fucking time ago that the job of children is to educate themselves so they can be productive members of society. As our society gets more technological, the base level of education required to participate grows higher. This type of bullshit is going _the wrong direction_.
And let’s be clear — this is purely a play for corporate profits. There is no other motivation; everything else people say about it is bullshit.
Let's admit it: The real issue, here, is that after fighting so hard to push out migrant labour, there's now a cheap labour shortage, and instead of fixing the migrant labour system to be fair, equitable, transparent, and sustainable, they're opting for child labour instead because, hey, at least they're good, red-blooded American child labourers.
The primary defensible part of the narrative for cracking down on migrant labor was that it was lowering wages across the board. So wages going up should be celebrated as a good thing, and the same people pushing for immigration reform should be fighting these changes. Alas.
There was that famous Unicef report about the child labor sweatshop in Bangladesh that closed down and most of the children went to work in the sex trade.
Regardless of how common that actually is, it seems pretty logical to me that if people are desperate enough for work, it's only because all of their other options were worse.
So while I think laws played an important part in ending chimney sweeps and the like, they only worked because enough middle class people started having fewer kids and enough resources to provide them education.
To put it another way, the need for chimney sweeping didn't magically disappear. First we had to build better chimneys.
Even before Westerners hear of the deplorable conditions in the third world sweatshop and demand the international corporation do better, locals are lined up down the street and around the corner hoping for a job because they beat you half as much and pay you twice as much as local employers.
It's 2023, people, and I can't believe we're even having this debate. Seriously? Farmers working with their kids and teenagers learning trades is a clear violation of child labor laws. Kids need to be playing Fortnite and learning about baby sharks. And teenagers need to learn to spend their entire waking life indoors studying compliance with authority and status games, so corporations can have a steady supply of standardized and malleable human resources to draw from.
This isn't up for discussion. Period. Let that sink in: our society is allowing this local exploitation to continue, when that's the international market's job.
It's about time we take a stand against this blatant disregard for the law. I mean, it's plain and simple: we need to protect our children from being forced into labor by their families and local community members so that corporations can do it several years later, no questions asked. Do better, farmers and tradesmen – it's your responsibility to ensure your kids have a safe and happy childhood, locked inside public schools during business hours, not one filled with hands-on labor and universally in-demand skills.
No contest. When you involve your kids in farm or trade work, you're robbing them of their opportunity to be exploited down the line by Fortune 500 companies, and that's just unacceptable.
Hands down, we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen in our own backyards. Full stop. It's high time we demand change, and make sure our children's rights are protected, no ifs, ands, or buts. They deserve the right to have a futile white-collar unionization fight with megafirms so that they can truly be a part of our global economy. To do anything else is retrograde barbarism. Period.
Young children were the best chimney sweeps, too. London chimneys were a fucking mess, of course, built up rapidly and with no building codes. Little children could crawl around inside them more easily to clean them. Sometimes a child would get irretrievably stuck, but them it was easy enough to light the furnace to burn them out.
Western culture decide a long fucking time ago that the job of children is to educate themselves so they can be productive members of society. As our society gets more technological, the base level of education required to participate grows higher. This type of bullshit is going _the wrong direction_.
And let’s be clear — this is purely a play for corporate profits. There is no other motivation; everything else people say about it is bullshit.