I spent my summers from ages 14-18 picking shade tobacco (for cigar wrappers) in Connecticut's Tobacco Valley. I'm not sure if it was state law but you couldn't start until you were 14. This was during summer vacation when school was out - but it used to be such an important local industry that if the crop was late they would delay the start of the school year so kids could keep picking. Boys and girls could both work but it was completely segregated - boys worked in the field, and girls worked in the sheds sewing the leaves onto lathes to hang to dry. They used to rent the old big yellow school buses from the local school district to pick us up in the morning, and there were even separate bus routes for boys and girls. I remember coming home with my fingers totally covered in black sap from the leaves but don't think I ever felt the effects of nicotine. They were long hot days and it was even hotter under the tents - they grow shade tobacco under cover. If it rained they sent us all home! But it was a fun time hanging out with other kids and even competing to see who could pick the fastest. Still, when I went to college I remember telling myself that my objective was to get a degree so I wouldn't ever have to work outside again.
If not, this is a harmful labor practice because you were undercutting the wages of full adult workers.
In the same way that prison labor and undocumented workers undercut pay of adult workers, so too do child laborers.
Neither are really able to report labor and safety violations, neither are able to decide not to work, and neither are paid a proper living wage. Neither are in a position to unionize. This is not a free market, and it hurts everyone in the economy. It feels more like a regression to feudalism.
I’d say if we mandated a living wage this problem would likely sort itself out.
[edit] It's a question of balance of power between employer and employee. Hiring the powerless hurts everyone, even if you personally had a good experience in retrospect. If you want to teach kids, you can do so at a non-profit instead of Philip Morris.
I don't think anyone had any illusions about "teaching" us anything other than the value of hard work. We made minimum wage, no benefits (what does that even mean for a kid, we all had health insurance through our parents). I was able to save up for a few summers and buy myself a new computer (a 486SX!), which ultimately led me to where I am today.
Seasonal agricultural work like this has been done by kids for generations. There's a short time where you need a flexible workforce and then you don't need them the rest of the year. And our hours were totally variable based on the crop and the weather. Some weeks there just wasn't anything to pick and we'd have to wait. You couldn't count on this income as an adult trying to pay the bills or raise a family. There were adults working there of course but they had different jobs (like driving tractors) and more steady income. I don't think we were stealing jobs from adults.
In the end the number of kids willing to work in the fields went down and these days they don't even bother trying to hire locals. They started flying in seasonal workers from Puerto Rico and then Jamaica. You can save up enough money in a few months to go home and live off of for a while (plus any other seasonal work you can find).
> Seasonal agricultural work like this has been done by kids for generations.
Rivers caught fire and the air was toxic for generations too. Historical precedent isn't particularly compelling IMO.
> I don't think we were stealing jobs from adults.
If they weren't going to find involuntary workers (kids, prison slaves - the correct term as of course slavery is permitted in the US as punishment for a crime under the 14th amendment) - they would have had to raise the amount they were paying voluntary workers until someone took the job. Or it wouldn't get done.
This is how leverage in employment works. To have a free market for labor and accurate pricing, you need to have voluntary participation. Involuntary participation puts all the pricing power in the hands of capital.
> They started flying in seasonal workers from Puerto Rico and then Jamaica.
This doesn't have to be a permitted practice re: Jamaica. In a very real way it's the job of DOL and USCIS to prevent it. After all, they already do labor conditions and prevailing wage determinations for specialty workers. Why not farm workers? And there simply aren't enough people in Puerto Rico to change the balance of power.
Yeah school is a dead end for many kids ....it's just a forced babysitting thing.. the establishment of course wants kids in school so they can brainwash them ...oops, I mean "educate" them
>I’d say if we mandated a living wage this problem would likely sort itself out.
The minimum wage is already a "living wage"; people's expectations just keep getting higher and higher. Someone on the minimum wage is eating much better than somebody in Africa, and can afford much better accommodation (clean water, a roof over their head, albeit maybe a shared room). So if a person on Africa can live on much less, why does an American deserve more? If anything, if the world was fair then the American minimum wage would be lower, with that money diverted to people in underdeveloped places like Africa instead.
We're not going to agree that $7.25 is a living wage.
In 1970 it was the equivalent of $12 today meanwhile house prices across the US exploded.
> So if a person on Africa can live on much less, why does an American deserve more? If anything, if the world was fair then the American minimum wage would be lower, with that money diverted to people in underdeveloped places like Africa instead.
I just don't understand when you see two disparate groups the desire not to raise the lower one up, but hold back the better off group. You can make both groups better off at the same time.
Labor advocacy matters. Things will regress if laborers don't constantly push for better. The discontent we see in society is imo in large part due to the decoupling of wage gains and productivity gains that started under Reagan.
And yeah, everyone deserves better because we can afford better thanks to massively higher productivity. The whole point of higher productivity is that everyone should benefit.
>I just don't understand when you see two disparate groups the desire not to raise the lower one up, but hold back the better off group. You can make both groups better off at the same time
No you can't. Wealth transfers move wealth between people, they don't create wealth. If it did then raising the minimum wage to $100 would make everyone wealthy, but economics/physics doesn't work like that. And in the same manner that mandating a $100 minimum wage would make everyone worse off due to heavily distorting the market, mandating a $20 minimum wage makes everyone worse off to a smaller degree.
>The whole point of higher productivity is that everyone should benefit
Productivity comes from investment in tools and technology; from _capital_. If you take a modern worker back in time 100 years they won't be as productive as today, because they don't have access to the same tools, equipment, technology etc. That's why the people who make such investments deserve to reap the rewards of what they sowed. If we take all that and give it to workers who've done nothing but show up, then nobody has incentive to invest in further increasing productivity and productivity growth stagnates.
Really what you're saying is people are entitled to the fruits of other people's efforts just for virtue of being born, which is an incredibly entitled way of looking at things.
> If anything, if the world was fair then the American minimum wage would be lower, with that money diverted to people in underdeveloped places like Africa instead.
In practice, the American minimum wage being higher diverts more money to people in underdeveloped places like Africa. Both because it directly makes them more price-competitive in low-end, easily offshorable, labor, and because distribution downward from capital to labor in the US for the jobs that can’t be offshored increases consumption and imports.
Few things are more educational than hard work. I did my time on an assembly line and worked like crazy through college so I didn't have to do that for a living.
> 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 full time job. Sending 12 year olds out to earn a living clearly isn’t right.
As an Iowa kid, I detasseled corn every summer from when I was 12 to 16. 10 hour days, 5 or 6 days a week, in the Iowa heat and humidity. Not saying every ag job for kids is like mine or José Velásquez Castellano's, but it's not that cruel. I'm not sure if I was supplementing my family's income or not, but I sure was paying for things that other more well-off kids had their parents pay for. I'm not arguing for "child labor" but if you grew up in an agricultural community none of this seems that shocking.
You missed out on career opportunities typical upper middle class inner city/suburban kids had access to. Outside of software engineering and a few other specific verticals, most high earning careers would require some sort of preparation from high school. There is a massive opportunity cost for kids when it comes to working in the fields.
People wonder how some public figures can just fail upwards, this sort of success requires preparation and grooming at an early age. The Gates and Zuckerbergs of the world did not get where they are through hard physical labor in their teenage years.
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 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.
> I don't think this form of child labor should be discouraged, but rather encouraged.
I think the issue is not the formative experience of labour but the lifting of restrictions on 'dangerous jobs'.
The motivation behind this is not to enable children autonomy but to maintain the cost of labour low specifically to prop up the slaughterhouse/meat packing industry, and other 'dirty' job industries with labour 'shortages' i.e. we don't want to raise salaries shortages.
Exposing kids to toxic cleaning agents, hazards, and general heavy machinery is a recipe for accidents and is simply not OK more so when it is quite obviously greed driven.
> 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?
> The issue is when this starts being less of a learning experience and more of an actual full time job. Sending 12 year olds out to earn a living clearly isn’t right.
You are straw manning. Nobody here wants kids working full time.
The comment I'm replying to literally does not say that, you're referencing an upstream comment by a different person. Did you mean to reply in a different thread?
I didn't take hahamrfunnyguy's comment in the way you seem to be taking it, but I'd be happy to learn that they don't support full-time labor for 12 year olds.
Lots of people in the comments are wilfully eliding the distinction between their fond memories of working for a few hours to save for candy and videogames, and the child exploitation being described in the article.
In response to a comment saying that all 12 year olds should be banned from working:
> This is child labour. It's indefensible.
People are pointing out that working at that age can be safe and beneficial. Nobody is claiming that kids should work full time, and people don't feel the need to add that disclaimer because its not a reasonable position they would need to defend against.
> I enjoyed milk as a kid
> Oh, so you think people should be forced to drink milk? You want every other beverage banned? You are willfully eliding important clarifications.
"My sister and I grew pumpkins to sell at our roadside farm stand"
You didn't work the fields. You had your own small business you owned and managed. Congrats, sounds like you did a great job, set your own schedule, learned loads and enjoyed yourself.
This is real world project based learning - I applaud and support it.
It is absolutely nothing like being employed as a child, by a profit making enterprise. That's being subject to an employment contract without the cognitive comprehension or legal protections of an adult.
Being an employee means being a productive tool of an enterprise - employees are protected from exploitation to the precise amount they have the economic power and social status to protect themselves. We're not talking about kids running a fruit stand, or even helping their parents with some hours in a shop here. We're talking about hard manual labour, for someone else, likely for a pittance.
It's like comparing playing doctors and nurses to child marriage. One is natural unforced experimentation between kids, the other is exploitation of children by adults.
I don’t know why you are downvoted but - related: The Jungle is a fantastic book, everyone who’s ever held a job should read. It is completely related to every reply here and the article in question as well.
I worked in strawberry fields during summer months at about 12 years old or younger. I actually enjoyed it and loved the money I made to be able to buy some Nintendo games or candies. More kids should be learning some job skills early and get out of the house.
Hobby work for luxuries isn't comparable to full time work for survival. Did you read the article? Did you "wake up at 4AM?" to pick strawberries? Did you work "a full adult schedule"? Were you working in 90 degree heat? Did you have "this sense that working in those fields was going to be the rest of my life, that I had nothing else going for me." Did you have "trouble getting the money [you were] owed for [your] labor." Did you experience nicotine poisoning?
It's like comparing a home woodshop to a factory job.
Job skills include showing up on time and following directions without mouthing off. Those skills must be learned, they aren't instinctual. Middle class people take those skills for granted but some members of the persistent underclass who grew up on public assistance literally never learned those basics and are now essentially unemployable.
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.
I think you need to read the article. You're comparing some hours helping with an adult activity with full time employment as a child, in dangerous conditions as vulnerable survival work.
No I'm not, I specifically said they shouldn't be forced to work... as in put to labor in a factory or something. Picking tobacco for extra money isn't being forced into employment. I think you need to read my comment again.
I was a paid rec sports referee at 13 for the younger kids league, and I worked unpaid for the family business before that. There's no way I could have, or should have, done that full-time. A few hours on the weekends or the odd weeknight was a good experience. My wife grew up on a farm, so she was doing age-appropriate farm work at an even younger age, and she also thinks it was a good experience. There's a difference between child labor and a child doing age-appropriate work.
It’s completely fine to do some work at that age, get a little pocket money, and learn what work is first hand. It’s not ok to do that instead of everything else. Part time work can be beneficial, full time work is child labor.
Children can certainly be abused for labor, but they can also get a lot out of it, and it's at least defensible in that case. I worked in construction for my father at that age. I was well looked after, was able to do actually useful work to help him, learned things and got paid. If I had been prevented from doing that by child labor laws it would have been a loss for everyone involved.
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 disproportionately affect poor families who need the extra income.
I wouldn't have a problem with a kid of mine "working in fields", provided the hours are reasonable. Picking strawberries, outside, with friends their same age, a few hours at a time, would be great for them. I would go as far to say that its fun.
I would prefer that over them having to interact with a bunch of asshole strangers, alone, trapped inside all day.
No problem if it's the family farm, or a trusted neighbor's. Plenty of kids grow up raising their own pigs and growing carrots and whatnot.
Hell no if it's paid employment on some stranger's farm, or an industrial feedlot.
Reasonable hours is something that goes without saying. Study, chores, play, work - in that order - is how kids should be taught to prioritize their time. They're your children, not your free labor.
Not sure where I grew up has anything to do with it other than that my examples didn't take into account some rural edge cases (family farms constitute a tiny sliver of all farming). The context of the work, and how dangerous it is, is what's important.
There are a lot of 12 year olds looking for chances to earn extra money. It gives a sense of indepedence and satisfaction for getting something you worked hard for. 12-year olds are more capable and curious than you think.
I think 12 year olds are incredibly capable and curious. I also know that the only thing preventing them from being exploited in the labour market like adults are the scant legal protects that exist to prevent them from being treated as adult employees. Please read the original article to see why - since it provides and example of an industry where these protections don't exist.
Wrong. It's not only defensible, it's beneficial. Picking up work when I was 10 allowed me to buy my first game console. It also was a time to learn how much things cost. Sure, parents could have bought me a game, but realizing how many hours were put in to buy the game made them less attractive.
Please read the original article. You're comparing voluntarily part time work to save for a luxury, to being compelled to work - i.e.: having an adult job, and a deeply unpleasant and dangerous one at that.
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 applies to many adults too. People don’t automatically become familiar with labor law when they turn 18, nor is labor law a part of public school curriculum.
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.
12 is a little young I think. They should be outside playing, not outside working. Getting a scrape on the knee will build character enough for a child.
> 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!
Leave it to HN for the top comment to defend child labor. WTF?
The exception for kids to work on farms used to be for small family run farms where the kids would inherit the farm one day, so they'd be building equity. Bad enough, but understandable for the time.
Today? For commercial mega farms? Fuck that shit. That's blatant wage suppression.
I'm from North Carolina, but never picked tobacco. Another problem I heard was that you absorb nicotine through your skin when picking tobacco, so it can make you sick if you aren't a tobacco user. It was used as an excuse to allow kids to smoke some cigarettes in order to get a tolerance for nicotine. This was back when there was an outside smoking area in high schools for students to smoke in.
There's a big difference between helping your dad in the shop and working in a field for a (basically) nameless entity.
I don't think anyone really has a problem with the kid who is "working" at his dad's convenience store, though I do feel for the kids working in chinese restaurants.
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.
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 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.
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.
Okay, fair, that is a critique that I do somewhat agree with.
At the same time, I'm looking at the surrounding context here on HN, and the majority of weird comments I'm seeing here are not saying, "the broader issues being explored here are part of a larger debate that's often mis-characterized" -- they're saying "this kind of labor is good actually."
For sure, if we talk about a broader debate, there is a real risk of conversations about child labor forcing kids out of what would be beneficial activities because of reactionary responses. And for sure, that's something people should be cautious about during coverage. But there are a number of comments here that are kind of staggering to me to read and that really don't look like they're defending summer jobs of the kind that are mentioned in your article, and so maybe better I think is to point out that what's happening in this article should not be lumped together into a debate about summer jobs. It should be treated as an entirely separate debate and there should be clearer lines drawn there.
I mean, you bring up detransitioning, but even within trans communities themselves I don't think best way to handle that kind of thing is pretending that detransitioners don't exist, it's to point out that caring for them and protecting them is something that needs to happen in addition to caring for trans kids. And that's something that the actual trans community (at least, the specific parts I'm familiar with) is honestly somewhat decent at, although it could always be better. There's a pushback against the combining of detransitioners into a singular narrative used to oppress other people, but (I think most trans people would agree) that detransitioners are still valid and should be listened to and cared for. The narrative is not an excuse to stop caring about them.
"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 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.
(USAn here) As others have mentioned, it’s not really that something “has happened” — the country isn’t a monolith and there have always been folks that kick and scream as they are dragged into the future.
The European immigrants that settled those areas (often after violently displacing whoever was already living there) have relied on cheap labor since they arrived. Their influence on the USA’s moral compass is almost as old as the country itself, and includes literally going to war with the rest of the country to preserve slavery. They lost the war but that faction of USA politics never really died out, just shifted bit by bit into its current form.
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.
There are several things in the article I feel people should be discussing.
> He sometimes had trouble getting the money he was owed for his labor. At the start of his days, he says, he'd write his name and the hours he'd worked in a notebook and "hope that notebook wouldn't get lost" — which would mean he wouldn't get paid.
Unpaid labor. Wage theft is common between adults, how is a child suppose to defend their hours?
> 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.
If adults struggle to avoid this, how is a child suppose to?
> Seventh-graders can't buy cigarettes, and they can't work at grocery stores or fast-food chains. But they can work in tobacco.
The heart of the argument to raise the minimum age laws.
> Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, kids 12 and up can work unlimited hours outside school hours in agriculture, and the rules are even more lenient for kids who work on their families' farms. Outside that industry, workers have to be 16 to work unlimited hours. Sixteen-year-olds and 17-year-olds working in agriculture can do tasks listed by the Labor Department as hazardous, versus 18 in other industries. Agriculture's hazardous occupation orders haven't been updated in 50 years, and they don't include tobacco, despite the known risks for workers of all ages.
Yes indeed! There are so many disturbing bits in that article, but somehow in these comments it is getting conflated with a sort of character-building-by-hard-work and pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstrap narrative, which is mostly orthogonal to much of the stuff in the article.
Not a new problem. People argued in the early 70’s that you should be able to have a drink if you could vote, own the bar and have your ass shot off in the jungle. Didn’t work.
You can rest assured that Jason and Jennifer won’t be dirtying their hands out there. Just those other people.
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.
The older regulations included shape in the specifications for Class I cucumbers, Class II cucumbers, etc, as well as other measures of quality. Nothing prevented the supermarket or restaurant from buying unclassed cucumbers, though that category would include cucumbers not reaching Class I/II for other reasons (size, taste, colour/ripeness etc).
The change to the regulation removed shape from Class I and Class II, so they're more likely to be sold for the higher price, and the supermarkets can't reject vegetables for being the wrong shape.
So there was never a ban on selling vegetables of the "wrong" shape, but there were rules to categorize vegetables by shape as part of their overall quality. The EU harmonized these rules across the whole EU (that's the whole point of the Common Market), then later scrapped them and told the supermarkets they'd have to deal with the occasional knobbly carrot.
(This is my approximate understanding, I may have the numbers backwards or whatever.)
I'm sure Waitrose (choose your local above-average supermarket) can market it just fine. "Organic cucumbers traditionally grown with natural character." Job done.
Restaurants, canteens and ready-meal producers can easily buy these too.
I grew up in North Carolina in the late 1980's. There was tobacco all around and I knew many classmates that picked tobacco from at least age 14. Some people in the thread are remembering their own experiences fondly. I can't remember any of my friends saying anything positive about picking tobacco. I don't think they made much money either.
As for not being able to buy cigarettes, everyone I knew that wanted to smoke could get cigarettes. We had a lot of hotels in town and they all had cigarette vending machines where you just insert your money and get a pack. No cashier and no age verification of any kind.
I started cutting bacca when I was about 6or7 in southern Maryland my pops and I would do it,my last day cutting was 1994 Waldorf md last field was in right behind the ol John deer shop. Miss those days I'm 45 now if I could go back I would just to have time with my father... taught me a lot in my young age.
In corn country, it's common to have young kids do "detassling" at a young age. While machines can assist, there's no way to avoid having to do some of the process manually, and detassling is essential for high yields.
I grew up in NC. I worked in tobacco a few times for family friends. Many of my schoolmates' families raised tobacco. Or corn. Or soybeans. Many of these kids earned hundreds of dollars over the summer, while supporting the family business. 12 year olds didn't smoke. We bought candy cigarettes.
Farmers and their families and their employees work hard. They work long hours. People on dairy farms work 7 days a week. Cows don't take the weekend off. Crops don't care if its 100 degrees.
I mowed yards. I raked leaves. I helped harvest hay. I built fences and sheds. I helped vaccinate cattle. I helped build the new VFD building. All this as a kid. In 100 degree heat.
We didn't have air conditioning. And you were excused from class on the 1st day of deer hunting season.
This wasn't child abuse. This is living. Some people grew up with AC, color tv, video games, and summer camp. Some grow up and work.
My grandfather had to herd sheep up in the mountains at 6 years old. Incidentally he brought with him a pipe and some vanilla flavored tobacco. Currently 90 and going strong.
I'd kinda agree with your take is these kids are working in their own fields (or soon to be theirs, as transmitted from the current owner, who treats them like his own kids)
Short of that, fuck no your granpa's story has nothing to do with this.
So you're arguing 12 olds should be able to buy cigarettes?
Edit: Op has no context or clear point, so its a legitimate question. Why are we comparing children and adults? Is the point that 18s should be able to buy alcohol? Or that they should be 21 to go to war?
If there is an argument contained in that wry comment, it's probably that going to war to protect overseas economic interests is even less defensible than children working in tobacco fields.
In most parts of the world you can buy alcohol when you are 18, in many parts you can buy soft alcohol (beer, wine) at 16, but you cannot drive a car at 16. Both are fine IMO, as long as you cannot drive a car AND buy alcohol at 16.
There's too many factors for drawing lines. In wealthy countries laws ensuring a higher age for employment makes more sense. In really impoverished countries where there isn't enough money for a family to feed themselves I don't really think a nine year old would prefer to starve rather than work.
I worked jobs around the neighborhood at 12 but that's obviously a lot easier than 10 hour shifts in a field (as the article suggests). I don't know what's right and I'm thankful I don't have to make the decisions.
The article is about the USA, which is a wealthy country. Unless otherwise stated, the discussion is therefore also about the USA.
> I don't know what's right and I'm thankful I don't have to make the decisions.
If you are in the USA, I think you ought to have an opinion on child labour. It's a basic point of labour law.
My vote counts in the UK, where from age 14 children can work for up to five hours on a non-school day, with a one hour break, and only between 7am and 7pm. They cannot work on anything hazardous. We don't have any significant toxic crops, but I think tobacco would count as hazardous. These rules seem to fix all the major problems in the article, while still allowing the "character building" half the commenters seek.
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.
I don’t know how old you are (over 40?) but I suspect there’s a generational gap here. In the 1990s and before, in my part of the US anyway, a teenager without a job was seen as lazy or entitled.
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.
I was a teen in the early 00s, so just prior to mobile internet really taking off. Driving was a huge motivator for us to work (rural). I suspect your right about the generational gap. Perspective also seems to differ between urban/rural.
I'd get it if there were some great alternative that teens were missing out on because they worked, but from my experience there was plenty of time to work, go to school, and still smoke weed everyday. Granted I didn't do 10-hour days 5-6 days a week all summer like the guy in the article, but normal 40-50hr/week full-time summer jobs was nothing.
I've heard that there's also a perception that the work itself has become worse since the 90s. I don't know if this is actually true, but on the retail job level I've heard it involves more micromanaging, more rude customers, more work per employee, and pay is worse when adjusted for inflation.
Suffrage isn't granted based on paying taxes. Is it anywhere? Paying taxes is simply the cost of living in a society, but I don't think that paying them should grant you a voice any more than buying a company's products gives you a vote in who their CEO is. Foreign nationals pay taxes on their income, but they aren't allowed to vote. As soon as kids are old enough to buy things from stores, they are paying sales taxes, but no one's arguing that kids should vote because of it.
Sales tax is different than federal income taxes for services like social security and the like, as not all states levy a sales tax... "No taxation without representation" was one of the better insights to come out of the American Revolution, and has never gone far enough. I'm of the mind that anyone that can prove that they're a long-term tax-paying resident should be able to vote.
I am interested in hearing more opinions about why children should specifically not be allowed to vote though, these always tend to devolve to "kids are dumb" or "aren't mature enough to make that kind of decision" but under that reasoning I don't think they should be working fields, driving cars, playing full-contact sports, etc... what kids can and can not do seems to be dictated by the economy and ruling class more than what they're actually capable of or what's good for them.
Have you seen how kids vote in their school elections? Why in the world would you want them to have any real say in anything? It’s bad enough people get to vote before they turn 30 you want to give kids who think produce is made in the back of the grocery store the ability to make decisions?
I've seen how adults vote and honestly I don't think there's a measurable improvement as people age.
Additionally, it's unfair to say "X shouldn't vote because I don't like how they'd vote" — my argument that if you're employed there are a lot of laws involved in how/what/when you're employed. If we trust someone to work a somewhat dangerous or strenuous job, then we should trust them to vote.
It's hypocritical to say that a minor can operate heavy machinery or handle dangerous materials, but they're not mature enough to vote for elected representatives.
This argument makes no sense. If you follow this thought process, you could also complain that Americans can't buy nuclear weapons, but they can work in nuclear labs.
