[mattanimation]

this is why food is cheap people. I used to drive corn and pea combines in high school, and in the farming community it's not uncommon to have kids driving tractors as well (granted this is usually a family run farm). It's likely that the people working in the factories there knew the kids or families and made an exception to allow them to start early (still technically illegal I know). it's not child slave labor, its kids trying to make money.

[retrac]

Helping out on the family farm is in its own category, in my opinion. For one thing, the parents are probably actually supervising. So they are probably taking some measures to ensure the child is not dismembered. Most parents do have a strong interest in making sure their children aren't wounded or killed. It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.

> this is why food is cheap people

True. Though as an outsider looking in, it looks disturbing like a class, or even a caste system. Children, illegal immigrants, and workers with little to no bargaining power -- confined mostly to specific rural regions of the country -- do backbreaking labour, often in illegal and unsafe conditions, in order to provide cheap food for the ruling middle class and elites. Said middle class and elites would rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase on the price of their food, which they'd be able to afford.

I know you didn't mean that, of course. This is just me taking general aim. It's my first reaction to "this is why American food is so cheap" -- well should it be? Or are Americans just externalizing the costs of that cheap food on to others?

[LeifCarrotson]

> Helping out on the family farm is in its own category ... the parents are probably actually supervising. ... It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.

The Norman Rockwell image in popular culture of an American small family farm with kids building character helping out next to their parents produces less than 20% of US agricultural output today. The vast majority of farms (by volume, not by population) are much larger corporate operations, making over $1M/year, with the labor not reporting to Mom and Dad but to some plant supervisor.

Side note, I dispute that the "middle class and elites" would genuinely rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase in the price of food if given that choice. The problem is that this proposition assumes perfectly rational, fully-informed consumers, and that's not reality. It's impossible to know at the supermarket if a package is colored green and has a picture of a happy cow on it because it's from an environmentally responsible small family farm that treats their dairy cows with kindness or if that's just the packaging that polled well with the focus group, allowing Cargill or whoever to make even more profit. I'd personally be happy to pay a few percent more for my food if it would reduce pesticide and herbicide pollution, reduce single-use plastics, improve work conditions. But the people making those decisions have no realistic way to communicate with me (aside from the plastics I can see in the store, though too often the brown cardboard packaging is just to win my purchase and actually hides a plastic coating that makes it the worst of both worlds). The only real signal that's accurately transmitted is the price, and it should be obvious that uninformed consumers will choose the cheaper option.

[Ancapistani]

> It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.

Is it?

Would you feel differently if the kids' parents were working in the same plant, were nearby, and were comfortable with the situation?

To be clear - I don't know for certain that's the case here, but I do have enough knowledge of these plants to know that it's not at all unlikely that that is the case.

[diordiderot]

> Helping out on the family farm is in its own category, in my opinion.

Also in the DOL's opinion

[mschuster91]

> it's not child slave labor, its kids trying to make money.

It's price dumping by abusing children who're happy to have a couple dollars to spend on Fortnite characters or whatever the rage is these days.

Pay your workers fairly.

[fellowniusmonk]

As someone who was forced to drop out of school and started illegally working 80 hour weeks at 15 it's all just predatory leverage from exploitive adults no matter how they dress it up as oppurtunity.

My parents used to justify it by bringing up historical farm kids, but ostensibly that work effort is then inherited as capital by those kids.

Working for your dads VC firm or your parents restaurant, on the family farm or mowing lawns in the summer. It's all still child exploitation to some extent but at least it's family time and in some sense you are holistically learning end to end business skills. It's questionable but has some educational return. I could see how it might be fine or beneficial, I get that in those situations there is nuance. Kids working in meatpacking plants aren't Michael Dell building PCs to sell in a garage, in fact such labor precludes them from personal autonomy & early, compounding investment in self development.

In our modern times turning an adolecent into a wage slave is evil, the negative impact continues to compound over the life of that child.

Don't get me started on "teen stars" forced to start music careers playing whatever they are told. Many teens in those situations who start out at malleable but willing children become instant victims of abuse the moment they begin to assert their own tastes.

[m-ee]

These kids are not doing this to spend money on frivolous things like Fortnite. They are almost certainly migrant children who need the money because they’ve been placed with guardians who themselves are barely getting by or are exploiting the children by making them work off a debt. There was a massive nytimes expose on the issue which is driving the uptick in enforcement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-...

[Ancapistani]

Yep.

> They are almost certainly migrant children who need the money because they’ve been placed with guardians who themselves are barely getting by

s/migrant/poor, but otherwise I 100% agree.

Kids from poor families want to be able to help with money if they can. Their contributions do help, too, and I don't think that's a bad thing in most cases.

Growing up poor, realizing your parents' financial situation, working hard to contribute to it, and then busting your ass to build a live that's better than your parents... that's the American Dream that I knew growing up. It's also the story of the vast majority of successful local entrepreneurs that I know in my local area.

I don't want that to go away. I think it's an important part of our culture.

> or are exploiting the children by making them work off a debt

I'm very confident that this happens. I don't have a good feel for how often, but I doubt it's even close to the majority case. I'm sure it still happens, though, and that's something that I fully support aggressively stamping out.

[mschuster91]

> Growing up poor, realizing your parents' financial situation, working hard to contribute to it, and then busting your ass to build a live that's better than your parents..

The problem is, it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Dropping out of school at age 16 or whatever to help your parents make rent by slaving away in a supermarket stocking shelves will stunt your intellectual and career growth for decades, because without an actual education (be it trades or academia) it will be really hard to access better-paying jobs.

[Ancapistani]

> Dropping out of school at age 16 or whatever to help your parents make rent by slaving away in a supermarket stocking shelves will stunt your intellectual and career growth for decades, because without an actual education (be it trades or academia) it will be really hard to access better-paying jobs.

Compared to what we, the HN community, expects - yeah, I agree 100%.

Compared to what this community expects... it's not so clear.

We're making a lot of assumptions: that these children are dropping out of school, that the purpose of their working is to help feed their family, that they have better opportunities available to them, that the children and their parents want the same things as we do, etc.

The reality is that their parents likely never graduated high school either. There's no reason to think that these kids are choosing work over school, as opposed to doing both - which obviously would negatively impact their ability to succeed at school, but that's not the same thing as dropping out.

If these kids grow into adults who have graduated high school, they'll likely end up providing a more stable foundation for their children, so they can focus on school more than they were able to. They'll be more likely to push their kids to go to college, and to enter a field with higher qualification requirements like medicine, law, finance, or tech.

This is how immigrant communities have always worked, to the point that it's a stereotype. There's a reason second- and third-generation immigrants consistently outperform "native" groups in terms of both educational and professional attainment.

[mrguyorama]

As someone who got hurt by it, no, we should not keep around a system that saddles 10 year olds with extreme money anxiety because their parents are poor. America is stupid rich, we can easily support those families and attempt to insulate literal children from such anxieties.

It's not an important part of our society for an underclass to suffer FFS

[kneebonian]

I mean I'll just throw in there that where my wife grew up they have a week off of school for "spud harvest" where the farmers scoop up all the kids in the surrounding area and pay them to pick, sort and drive potatoes. It's a good experience for a lot of people around here and helped my wife net about $3k in high school each year.

[dirtyid]

>its kids trying to make money

I'm sympathetic to this, but kids making money should not undermine adults trying to make a living. I'm fine with underaged kids working, but they should be documented and paid 2x/3x the rate, with everything above minimum wage held until they turn 18 to be used for education or living.

[bena]

There are exceptions in the law for family run outfits and for farms specifically.