A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US
A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US
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I don't understand the people down voting you. Having a job growing up taught me a lot of responsibility and how to manage my own money and act in a professional environment. Invaluable skills that you wouldn't get anywhere else, certainly not school
You can learn valuable skills like how to replace the roof of a house.
All this constant hyperbole for every single issue is exhausting. No one is defending sending 13 years olds out to replace someone's roof. We're talking about "unskilled" labor like taking orders, stocking shelves, running registers etc.
Immigrant children are already being exploited and are dying doing roofing work. You want to put children in the workforce but they would not be safe. If we had a pilot program in place and had some successful results that would be a different situation, but we have kids working 30 feet in the air with no safety gear. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/14/us/roofing-children-immigrants.html
Maybe you didn't know about this. There's kids all over the country working shitty jobs like cleaning meat packing plants at night-on their hands and knees scrubbing blood off the floor https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/09/nebraska-slaughterhouse-children-working-photos-labor-department
How do we get from where we are, to where you think we should be?
These jobs you are speaking of--washing cars, mowing lawns, even kids working in their parents' store--do you think that is the same as working for a multinational conglomerate handling food with no breaks and minimum wage?
No they're not the same. The multinational conglomerate is far better.
Chores for the neighbors and the paper route paid peanuts. Once I was old enough to work for the conglomerate (where I received food safety training) my pay after taxes more than doubled (a little more than minimum wage, which did, and does, exist), I started contributing to my future social security check, I received paid breaks, and there was a maximum amount of hours I was legally allowed to work.
Flipping burgers beats the hell out of lugging Sunday papers around the neighborhood or knocking on doors to mow lawns in the summer heat or shovel driveways in the freezing cold. Back then I counted the days until I was old enough for a "real" job.
This is what I don't understand about all the angry people in this thread. Of course it's not okay to have children working in like fucking coal mines and not regulating the hours they can work and the pay you can give them. Of course that's not cool and should be stopped. But the people doing that (and there are many) aren't usually the ones doing it out in the open in a fast food restaurant.
Right?
Learning things a little at a time, when the stakes are low/non-existent is the way to go. From early teens to partway through college when you get an off campus apartment you can learn how to apply for a job, how to interview, responsibility, managing your money, responsible credit use, professionalism, bill paying. All this over the course of years, with a support system when you make mistakes (hopefully).
I guess some people think you should just have all that dropped on you like a ton of bricks the day after you get a diploma.