I think the thing that shocks me the most is that the punishment from the Department of Labor is a very mild slap-on-the-wrist. A small fine and a promise not to do it any more. This should basically be the end of that company entirely. Instead they just have to point the finger at some low-level managers, fire them, and keep on rolling. I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor. The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
If Hyundai/Kia drops them, that would at least be a much bigger penalty than the DOL imposed.
> The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
Minors can totally consent to labor; it's pretty common too (see: child actors). The issue with children working in factories is a (1) safety and (2) exploitation issue, not a consent issue—in fact even adult parents (who can presumably consent) aren't allowed to get exemptions for their children in some high-risk situations either. There are lots of exemptions for child labor though, especially in areas where safety and exploitation risks are deemed to be lower. Worth reading: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/youthlabor/exemptionsflsa
Edit to clarify (since some people seem to be reading this different): this isn't my opinion, support, or opposition on what I believe children can or should consent to; I'm just discussing labor laws here.
Can you cite the part where the law says that a minor can consent to labor? Every mention of "consent" in the link you gave only mentions "consent by the [minor's] parent or guardian" or similar phrasing.
It's different across states. You can find a list (probably non-exhaustive) of where parental consent is required here, like the night before a school day in some states for example: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/child-labor
This is the opposite of what you claimed. Can you find a single instance of a state where parental consent is not required? i.e. the child can consent for themselves as you claimed?
> In Texas, minors aged 14 and older can work without parental consent. If an employer chooses to do so, he or she may require the youth to submit a “Certificate of Age” form.
> Now minors [in New Jersey] will no longer need parental consent or anything from the school district to secure a work permit. Instead, the state Labor Department will create a centralized database for teens to register for work permits, which will be accessible to employers when interviewing potential employees.
Instead of posting more links I will just summarize what I am finding... Instead of parental consent most states require a work permit which is more formal documentation than just a parent saying ok. Obtaining a work permit includes a review process, and require the submission of various materials which sometimes includes written permission from a parent, for some age groups.
If you want something more explicit than "whatever is not prohibited is implicitly allowed", a search phrase that'll get you there is "work without parental consent". If you Google that, you'll immediately find examples in agriculture, Texas, etc.
> This is the opposite of what you claimed. Can you find a single instance of a state where parental consent is not required? i.e. the child can consent for themselves as you claimed?
Very unluikely in the US, but it also varies by Industry; when I cooked and interviewed for dishwashers/prep/line cooks I often had more than one 18 year old kid from the rural US say they had 4+ years of experience.
I'd ask them to describe how that was possible and they'd cite having exemption that allowed them to begin working from 13 onward. They often had extreme poverty circumstances and were from states like Montana, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio or Missouri whose parent's had been disabled or injured (addiction was a big one) or something along those lines, so rather than just put them and their siblings into foster care this was the best possible solution were parent's kept custody and a child could work on school days before the age of 16 under a basic work permit.
In farming it's even younger than that, the youngest I've seen being pre-K, and yes this is in the EU and in even in Switzerland. They admittedly couldn't' do much but perhaps like feed the animals or attach the the suction to the utters of a cow or sheep (both of which could easily maim their small bodies) or put seeds in a starer plant or water the plants, wrap electrical posts, harvesting fruit/veg etc...
I still laugh thinking about being in a convoy of tractors heading into the the citys city center in Bern that had cows in-tow headed to the Swiss Alps and was behind a few 12 year old kids with a coupe of seasons under their belts.
I come from a family of restaurateurs in CA, where it was typical to see the kids help out in the kitchen peeling/cutting vegetables, carrying products, manning a register or simply washing dishes or bussing tables at very young ages (think 10 onward) but this was high contentious and likely illegal, practice.
But every time I went to my grantparents home their were hardly any pictures of my grandparents, aunts or uncles and cousins where they, even as children, weren't doing the aforementioned in at least half of their pictures.
Also, it's worth noting that all of these pearl-clutching FAANG workers like to pretend their aren't minors working at Foxxcon making the iphones, or sweatshops in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc... making name brand clothing items that they wear.
The sad truth is child labour laws are only applicable to those who can't afford the legal team to make it anything more than just a fine.
This isn't whataboutism, but it goes to show that their is a heterodoxy when it comes to exploiting the poor and young alike in both the East and West. Sadly, I fear this will remain the norm and will likely increase in my lifetime before it gets better since things like labour laws and unions mean less as Megacorps consolidate and acquire more small businesses and increase market share.
> what in the world does this have to do with faang employees?
Hypocrisy, gross negligence? I guess from all but Netflix they have all close affiliation to these practices and business models, than not.
Again, what I'm underscoring is that this is wide-spread and isn't limited to just an isolated few, but rather a systemic issue, one in which a certain sector sits atop of the wealth distribution model which makes them complicit of this very issue.
ok... as luck would have it, i'm not in the "FAANG worker" category, but i am in the "VC-funded-startup worker" category, so I was just checking to see if my sorry ass is on the line to get faulted for exploited children.
an exemption from a child labor prohibition doesn't equal consent
the Department of Labor has an exemption for children working in their parents business because that's the only way they could get the prohibitions passed, since children cannot speak for themselves on the matter after recognizing that children can't legally consent to anything which is why there are prohibitions on the matter.
what you are writing is a wild distortion of the concept of consent, that many people consider dangerous to harbor.
there is legal consent restrictions (ie. even if someone says okay, its not valid), as well as societal consent recognitions such as when power dynamics are not in someone's favor and some extremes of that we don't allow to happen.
even for things they are allowed to do autonomously, there are age restrictions on that.
I'm not sure what resource to share on understanding the topic of consent and mapping that to daily interactions that are seen as normal but shouldn't be. I can see the need for it.
> The point of saying children can't consent, is that they can't do it alone.
Yes they can, for some jobs. Not every job. I don't have a full list of which ones allow it and which ones don't, but it's not difficult to infer this if you look up the relevant laws and regulations, since they sometimes explicitly mention things like "minors working until 11 p.m. on nights before a school day are required to have written parental permission" [1], for instance.
I read an article in the New York Times maybe around ten years ago where some researchers called some labor departments to report child labor (it wasn't actually happening that they knew of; the point was to see how they would respond). They were basically uninterested and didn't follow up.
This is apparently a common response. Check out Reveal’s major investigative series on the punitive and profit-driven rehab industry which depends on unpaid labor. The government has done virtually nothing about it for 50 years.
Unless there is enough behind it to become a viral news story (a photo, video, a document) there is little incentive for these authorities to act.
For this reason, ensuring the freedom of whistleblowers, Wikileaks and others is so important. Without that, it becomes much easier for the authorities - which we trust our rights to - to do nothing and get away with it
SL Alabama told Reuters in a statement that a staffing agency had furnished some employees to the plant who were not old enough to work there. SL said it had cooperated with regulators, terminated its relationship with the staffing firm, agreed to fines and other corrective actions, and replaced the president of the facility.
It sounds like JK USA will rightfully be destroyed by this. If it really was just a handful of kids employed by a sub sub contractor I don't see why everyone in the whole factory should lose their livelihoods. The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
> The parents need some counseling and a stern scaring too but I wouldn't push too hard on a family desperate enough to send their kids to a factory.
I started mowing lawns at 12. Pretty heavy machinery; massive spinning blade, could lose an arm! Luckily I had that opportunity, I was able to make money and pay for clothes. Learn responsibility, self-respect, etc.
I do think child labor laws are there to protect children. However, we don’t know the circumstances and I think in most cases child labor laws do more harm than good. Here are some important details:
> In a separate statement on Tuesday, Alabama’s state DOL said it had levied around $35,000 in total in civil penalties on SL Alabama and JK USA, a temporary labor recruiting firm. JK USA employed five minors between the ages of 13 and 16 at the plant, the state DOL said.
To me, it could be as simple as a few guys brought their kids who wanted to make an extra buck. They could have just been picking up metal scraps. We don’t know. What I can say is in high school I knew multiple people whos family worked in metal works and the kids would help out and get paid. Some kids were as young as 10, but everyone was safe and it appeared to be in everyone’s interest
(a) No individual under 16 years of age shall be employed, except in agricultural service, and except as otherwise provided in this chapter. Any individual 14 or 15 years of age may be employed outside school hours and during school vacation periods, so long as the individual is not employed in, about, or in connection with, any manufacturing or mechanical establishment, cannery, mill, workshop, warehouse, or machine shop or in any occupation or place of employment otherwise prohibited by law. The presence of any individual under 18 years of age in any restricted business establishment or restricted occupation shall be prima facie evidence of his or her employment in the business establishment or occupation.
(b)(1) This section does not apply to an individual 14 years of age or 15 years of age when both of the following are true:
a. The individual is enrolled in either a youth pre-apprenticeship program, youth industry-registry apprenticeship program, or similar program in which employment and work-based learning are an integral part of the course of study.
b. The program the individual is enrolled in is registered by the Alabama Office of Apprenticeship.
(2) This section does not apply to employment procured by an individual 14 years of age or 15 years of age when the employment is supervised through the Alabama Department of Education and approved by the Alabama Department of Labor.
--------------------------------------------
Doesn't sound like those rules were followed. And I assume that the restrictions is mostly because heavy equipment like metal presses lack fail safes like a lawn mower does.
Most sane countries in the world allow adolescents to work some time when school is not on or when doing an apprenticeship. Most don’t legally consider a kid mowing lawns for a stipend labour.
There is a pretty major difference between that and doing work for an auto supplier while being staffed by a temp agency.
Did you also not register for school because you were mowing lawns the entire time? Or is that maybe not quite the same thing as what's described here?
From the original reuters report (linked from the article):
> The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren't going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people's account in an interview with Reuters.
[...]
> Pedro Tzi's children, who have now enrolled for the upcoming school term, were among a larger cohort of underage workers who found jobs at the Hyundai-owned supplier over the past few years, according to interviews with a dozen former and current plant employees and labor recruiters.
> Several of these minors, they said, have foregone schooling in order to work long shifts at the plant,
> The story of the children came to light following the February 3 disappearance of a 14-year-old Guatemalan migrant child in Alabama, the news service stated.
> According to Reuters, the child and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked for the plant. After the publicity generated by the February disappearance case, SMART reportedly dismissed several underage workers, according to former employees.
> The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren't going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people's account in an interview with Reuters.
> Police in the Tzi family's adopted hometown of Enterprise also told Reuters that the girl and her siblings had worked at SMART. The police, who helped locate the missing girl, at the time of their search identified her by name in a public alert.
----
Trafficked isn't the right word to use for the work (her disappearance may have been a case of attempted child trafficking - I haven't found anything yet on the specifics of the disappearance and it is likely more difficult because she is a minor). There are, however, issues with undocumented and poorly documented workers and their children not getting the proper public and social services (school for children being part of the public services).
We still allow slave labor in general in the US[1] and farm labor for 13 year olds. That’s not to defend this practice but to point out it’s not as big an ethical leap for someone already observing situations close to this and rationalizing it as just pushing the envelope a bit in their mind.
[1]see the text of the 13th amendment and how private prisons operate if you are one of the 10000 today whose just learning this
I think there are many things wrong with the prison system in America. But calling it slave labor doesn't seem accurate. Under an assumption that the individuals are guilty of the crime and that the sentencing is applicable the inmates are paying off a debt to the society that they wronged.
There is plenty of room to be upset about bad sentencing guidelines and a system that wrongly convicts alongside the privatization of prisons. But slave labor is not I think an accurate summation.
>Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
>Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The above is the exact text of the 13th amendment outlawing slavery. It allows for a single exception to this, allowing slave labor when it is a punishment for a convicted criminal. Calling it anything other than slave labor seems to the inaccurate description to me. I find most Americans are squeamish to call it what it is because we've developed this national narrative that slavery is one of the worst things a society can allow(which I agree with) and that we fought a war to abolish it entirely(which I do not agree with).
>...the inmates are paying off a debt to the society that they wronged.
The imprisonment is paying off a debt to society. If they were entirely focused on infrastructure work, I could consider it paying off a debt to society. Producing all these consumer and luxury items for sale at profit does not fit under "paying a debt to society".[1]
Welcome to current year. Its all good as long as the children been exploited are not the children of the people who vote for you. Its all green as long as the coal or oil burning is being done away from your borders.
> Welcome to current year. Its all good as long as the children been exploited are not the children of the people who vote for you.
That's been happening forever, not just the current year. Child labor sweatshops were a major source of industrial productivity for centuries the world over until relatively recently.
Charles Dickens' novels turned it into an adjective in English bearing his name that described (among other things) the indifference of those in power to child labor.
That's not an English idiom that I've ever heard or read before. The lack of a "the" before "current" suggests it's a translation from a language that does not make compulsory use of articles. Perhaps it's an idiom in that language.
I've only ever read this on Hacker News, in the form "Welcome to $current_year!", where $ is the scalar sigil in the Perl programming language, indicating that it's a variable, and should be substituted by the reader as necessary.
There’s a reason why industry likes to pursue business in places like Alabama with awful infrastructure and education.
Expenses for things like conversion of documentation to pictures instead of text (the workers are functionally illiterate) are one time, but you can pay someone $13/hr instead of $25/hr in a less regressive place.
When I worked with some NASA engineers from Alabama, I had trouble taking them seriously due to their accent! They were the ones getting stuff done, though. Statistically, Alabama ranks significantly better than California for both child and adult literacy. Are you perhaps a bit biased in your opinion of people from the south?
Split across racial lines, AL has lower literacy than CA among each of Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks.
But because the literacy rate among whites is higher than Hispanics and Blacks, and Alabama is much more White than CA, AL's overall literacy rate is higher.
Alabama is over 25% black, which doesn't do them any favors from a simpson's paradox perspective. CA is 40% hispanic, and hispanics fall in between whites and blacks on literacy, so I'd expect this to more or less come out in the wash.
The state is like 47th or 48th in education consistently. People are poorer, they live shorter lives, and lack access to basic services like hospitals.
Lot of southern areas have massive differences depending on location. I life in an area that any hipster would love. Much of the rest of the state is hillbilly as can be.
OFF: But octonion just made a post, that I (and other people?) can see? I don't understand.
OFF2: I wish for a functionality that could make my own post gray/collapsed, if it is offtopic. I must risk points, and being actually banned (or just don't be offtopic) this way.
edit: I am just asking for some explanation about how things work, e.g. why GP said "you are shadowbanned", and what's happening, really.
This is a really bigoted comment that generalizes a whole state.
If it would be racist for any random country, eg. 'Mexico' or 'Nigeria', why is it ok for an American state?
Precisely. I've found that people from Alabama are actually more literate and intelligent than your most common worker from a blue state, it just depends on which aspects of life you find more important.
This isn’t a red v blue issue, and we don’t need to reply with tit for tat shaming of the “other side”, it’s a shame that any state has child labor or illiteracy. I have known a lot of smart people from all over, no state or country is better than another. The differences we have are cultural, not ability.
(This comment is in response to this whole train wreck of a thread.)
Even though I agree with the thrust of your argument, I'd just like to point out that this is provably inaccurate, depending on which quantifiable axis you're referring to as "better" (i.e., test scores, IQ, lead in the water, whatever.) But, if you're just saying "better" == "humanity", then, sure, I agree with that too.
Alabama isn't bad because of its infrastructure or education. Here's a hint: if you condition on demographic characteristics (i.e. split state populations into obvious demographic categorizations), educational disparity across states is almost eliminated.
Isn’t that a pretty good reason why it’s bad? Alabama is massively failing an entire demographic segment of their society, not even a small segment but something like 40% of it. That does seem like a massive infrastructure and education failure. Unless there is a deeper implication here that I’m missing.
> Alabama is massively failing an entire demographic segment of their society
No, you misunderstand. That demographic segment has bad outcomes everywhere. Nothing about Alabama is worse once you condition on demographics. The state just looks bad because of demos.
> I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor.
I don't see where any children were "imported". Instead it seems like some 13-16 year olds got jobs. (Note, none of the children were 12). You brought up consent (which later responses delve into 'parental consent') and I have no clue what the parents thought.
Still, they did violate child labor laws and should be punished. I agree with that principle.
The consequences didn't seem that mild. They paid a fine of $7,000 per minor. They agreed to destroy any products the children were involved in producing. They implemented new methods to prevent this in the future. They fired the third party staffing agency that found the children (and which I would agree should have other consequences). And, far from "firing low-level managers", the president of the factory was fired.
>I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor.
Is there anything to suggest that they were actually trafficking humans? I think it is far more likely that they were illegal immigrants already in the States.
I did a paper route and opened a store before school. I loved the work - the above is crazy talk. Plenty of kids delivered papers near me. Now I make mid 6 figures. I learned a ton opening that store that has served me through life even though the actual work is totally different.
But it failed, because kids don't consent to school. They don't have to go to school, but the decision is completely on parents. And when parents decide to homeschool or unschool, kids have no say either.
OK, so, following GPs argument, would that justify making kids work without asking them if they wanted to?
The point is that allowing kids to work is clearly not as egregious as forcing them to attend prison-style schools, and yet we punish the former and support the latter.
There is no argument that you could followning from what OP said. I have never seen anyone argue that kids consent to school. It does not exist. I did heard about some homeschool parents claiming their kids wanted it that way, but even that came from homeschooled kids unhappy with that decision (meaning biased narrator and heavily self selected group). Homeschool parents I heard talking said they think it is best for kids.
> forcing them to attend prison-style schools
That is not true for most kids. If your parents pay for one of those camps for troubled teenagers, then it is prison like. If you commit crime then yes, your school will be prison. If you have enough behavioral issues to end up in one of those special schools, it gets closer to prison.
But no, schools are not prison like for overwhelming majority of kids. Going further, majority of kids has neutral or positive attitude toward schools. Some hate it, but they are minority.
That's nonsensical and blends legal consent and practical capacity for decisions. Most 12 year olds can tell you if they like orange juice with breakfast when asked if they want some. An affirmation is a consent.
I think parents point was that being 18 doesn't demonstrate said capacity either. Some kids are mature enough to make important decisions at 15, some kids can't make a good decision if their life depends on it at 25, so the blanket statements one way or another are obviously bad.
We chose an age that made sense to us, because the law needs an objective anchor point, not a philosophical one. However, just because the age makes sense to us legally and socially, doesn't mean it's enshrined in natural law, and we shouldn't necessarily view it as such.
15 year old brains are not fully developed. No 15 year old, however brilliant, has the capacity to consent. Though I agree 18 is an arbitrary cut off and it should be higher.
Edit: Below I am replying to the reply to this comment here because apparently 5 posts in an hour and a half is enough to trigger rate limiting for me.
Yes, that is too young to make that decision. You can throw any hypothetical, emotional situation at this and the answer will be the same.
All 15 year olds have the capacity to consent depending on the consequences of what they are consenting to. Should they be trusted to make life and death decisions for themselves? No. Should they be trusted to decide their lunch food? Mostly, yes.
Do I think some 15 year olds are perfectly capable of deciding to work? yes. However, I think it's prudent for us to ignore those few and assume not, simply because there is no universal test for competence, and the vast majority are not.
Imagine you are 15 and your parents are struggling and you getting a full time job in the summer and part time job in during school would keep your younger siblings fed. That's "too young" to make that decision?
I don't think this is as clear-cut as you write. I'm not sure what the law is in other countries, but in Poland, minors can make transactions, i.e., purchase stuff. This assumes that minors can consent to certain things. The burden of making sure that the transaction is fair is on the adult, and the type and value of the transaction must be adequate for the minor's age. 7yo can buy bubble gum, 12yo can purchase a book, and 17yo can purchase $60+ game. However, if an adult sells $400 laptop to 12yo, the parents of that 12yo can demand the seller to return the money to them without returning the product (ideally, they would return it), or return damaged product. The rationale is that 12yo cannot correctly handle such a valuable item, and the seller should've known better. I'm pretty sure the 12yo would not even need a receipt for the laptop - after all, the seller might not have given it to them (of course, some kind of proof would be needed).
I assume similar laws exist in other countries, and hence societies recognize the capacity of minors to consent to some things.
This is just wrong. There are lots of interesting discussions about how consent for people under the age of majority works, in which situations consent applies, and so on.
In Alabama, for example, anyone over the age too 14 can consent to medical treatment.
No, you are explicitly wrong – regardless of how much you might wish otherwise.
It's fascinating that you then took this directly in what I can only assume is the current trendy anti-trans direction, given that this specific bit of law has been in place since 1975 and has obvious applications in lots of areas – maybe like ensuring that young people aren't denied medical treatment due to abusive parents.
To the casual eye those are two distinct issues. Child labour is like a child protection thing, and labour protection is like a commie socialism thing.
I’m no expert, but these things are historically intertwined. The fact that we even have laws against child labour is a product of 1930s labour organizing.
Part of the problem is that if the DOL goes after every underage worker in the economy, the biggest offenders by far would be family businesses and restaurants.
It's all well and good to make parents send their kids to school. But at a certain point the punishments can exacerbate child poverty.
Working in a family business is protected. Even working as a 13-16 year old in some jobs is allowed as long as it’s outside of school hours. We allow for a gradual introduction into working for children instead of a hard line at 18.
What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
> Working in a family business is protected. Even working as a 13-16 year old in some jobs is allowed as long as it’s outside of school hours. We allow for a gradual introduction into working for children instead of a hard line at 18.
Fun fact, tax breaks encourage this as long as you report the income, then some of the parents' income can be offset by the income that the child "earns" as that is tax deductible. Of course this is not financial advice and consult your own tax professional.
> What is not protected is working in an industrial factory all day. Hell I had a job at target when I was 17 and I was allowed to do anything other than operate the trash compactor as that was heavy machinery. A sweep of factories and other heavy industry for child labor is not going to exacerbate child poverty
Much of the labor lately in grocery and fast food has been underage or young workers.
I work on ESG consulting and part of the speech we give is "... ESG is not only environmental, there's other important areas to improve like making sure there's no kids working on your company, blah blah" kind of like a joke and it then triggers more jokes from the other side like "Oh you got us, time to change our plans" etc ... and then we never talk about the subject again because who is going to actually do that, right? Right?!
Well, color me amazed, TIL there's child labor happening in the US.
I worked from 12 in a fairly industrial business and mostly appreciated the experience because I was in poverty. Meanwhile the school I was actually forced to go to was abusive.
Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.
The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.
Forbidding child labor isn't enough on its own, it should come with enough social support for families that they don't need to send their kids working. A non-coercive education system would also be fantastic :-)
Good point about education. Child labor is ugly when it either forces children to do something they don't want to, or it's too hard on them, or it deceives them into thinking it's the best choice they got, or robs them of the opportunity to grow and develop their talents freely. If I squint a little, a coercive education system does the same.
Sincerely: how do you know that? Child labor is illegal, so I don't know how many families would feel a need for their children to work if it were legal.
If child labor were not illegal, you still wouldn't know how many families would feel that need (as opposed to acting on plain greed), so your question is unanswerable. Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?
You've only shown that my question is not answerable by simply legalizing child labor, not that my question is unanswerable full stop.
> Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?
Sadly, I don't know how to phrase questions in a way that invites discussion; I only know how to ask questions that I want to know the answer to. But here's my question, restated, in case it helps:
@lupire said that support systems in "the entire civilized world" are successful at making it so that no family needs to have their kids work. By what measure do we know that these support systems are successful at this job?
I think your question has two problems: first, it mentions need. It presupposes that we can accurately know the inner motivations of every parent in each country. Second, you're asking for the efficacy of the support systems specifically (since you discarded the influence of prohibition laws with your child labor is illegal comment). But no policy exists in isolation, so you cannot measure the effect of those systems in isolation.
In general, I can think of three different policies that all work to reduce child labor:
- a general ban on child labor, which obviously is a stick mechanism to prevent child labor
- compulsory education, which is another stick mechanism to make sure children do not work all day
- child benefit payments, which is a carrot mechanism to make sure parents have the means to feed and clothe their children
Then there's indirect policies like unemployment benefits, health insurance, and child abuse laws that also help parents to stay afloat and keep children out of labor. But the only measures we have are child labor incidence rate and school attendance rate. Neither of those measurements specifically measure the need for children to supplement the family income, nor do they measure the effects of the carrot policies alone.
So that's why I said your question is unanswerable: you're asking for the effects of specific policies on the decisions of parents, while the statistics will only give you the effects of the complete policy on the outcome of those parental decisions.
(edit: see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incidence-of-child-labour... for example. If you can find a way to compare the child labor policies of e.g. Argentina, Mexico, Serbia, Peru, and Nigeria and correlate them with this graph, maybe you'll be able to get closer to an answer to your question)
That is an oxymoron given how "education" is currently defined in the US. The only way this could be achieved is if the whole system is torn down to absolute zero and rebuilt as something entirely different. That is, of course, not possible.
It is extremely unusual for this kind of labor abuse to be carried out by American companies. As the articles note, these are Korean-owned and Korean-operated companies.
FTA: "Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13."
There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world, so that the company can put the all important "Made in USA" label on the product. There's at least one all-Chinese factory outside of Las Vegas. There was a Chinese-run industrial marijuana farming operation shut down in Arizona last year.
And this is not unique to the United States. There are similar operations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
Lots of newspaper articles about it over the last ten years or so.
It's probably pretty common in American-owned industries known to use human trafficking, but trafficking exploits populations our society isn't concerned enough about to proactively monitor. The agency Hyundai used for workers is not Korean– it's Guatemalan– and it likely supplies farms, food processing plants, and other businesses that need lots of low end labor. Check out the Frontline documentary on human trafficking in food processing plants. The worst offender was an egg processor based in Maine.
A friend who worked for a union that organized poultry plant workers said some of these plants– all large, American companies with names you see in every grocery store— essentially ignored labor laws entirely. One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees.
"One actually had a jail cell in the factory used as a disciplinary measure for misbehaving employees."
This seems like a fairly easy thing for the media (or the union) to expose - so is there any evidence this is true? Seems more likely to be union FUD if the union doesn't expose the evidence
Public evidence? No. Do you have public evidence of everything your proven trustworthy friends tell you? Luckily, my anecdote isn't supporting a legal action or news story.
He said the union absolutely used it to pressure management into a more favorable stance towards Unionization, and the plant is now unionized.
I have a hobby, thanks. It involves trying to learn more about the world, making reasonable judgements about authenticity of what I hear, and asking in good faith for more evidence when what is provided is insufficient - "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
> There are hundreds of foreign owned and operated factories in America that are run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world,
That doesn't make it ok, does it? What you're describing sounds a lot like the conditions that migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia are working in.
The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil, no matter who operates them and where the workers are from.
In fact, no country caring about human rights should. I'm from Germany and in the early Covid phase in 2020 it became clear that there are a lot of east European workers in our slaughterhouses, with them living in very tightly packed quarters (for which they had to pay exaggerated prices to their employers) leading to a massive spread of the disease. At the time, many politicians cried that something will have to change, but of course nothing happened and the whole thing was forgotten as quickly as it had come to light.
>The US shouldn't tolerate such conditions for workers in factories on its soil //
Nor for any company the USA law has reach over. Y'all stop copyright all around the World, but that protects executive wages so it's pretty clear where the morals lie here.
If there's anyone involved in a company, and that person can reasonable be expected to know human trafficking, or forced child labour are happening under the auspices of that company, any where in the World, if those people are in reach of Western countries extradition agreements then they should be prosecuted. The companies should be fined a minimum of a years [recent average] profit, and all execs fined a minimum of a years wage.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted the thrust of your argument. The way you pointed out this was a Korean-run factory and that it was 'extremely unusual' to be carried out by American companies sounded to me like relativizing what was (or is) going on here.
> There are multiple Chinese factories in Italy churning out "Made in Italy" leather good for the luxury market.
The one's in Milan are terrifying, and often have some mafia (often southern) and triad affiliations, an Italian movie about the Camorra briefly goes into he detail of just how dark that part of the fashion industry is. I lived in Italy during the later end of the financial crisis and it was pretty common to see hordes of Han-Chinese come to Emilia Romanaga who had fled Milan and look for work on farms and restaurants.
Seeing tons of refugees living in parks and waiting all day in the piazzas made it feel like I was living in the 21st century version of Salo, which is a fucked up sordid tale from the 20th Century.
This is the saddest part... from bribes to lobbying (legal bribes, a true WTF in it's own sense)...
Criminals are going to bribe, sure, undestandable.. but people, government employees, who should be working for 'us', the taxpayers, are taking bribes... the punishment for them should be a vastly higher than for someone just offering a bribe... and somehow, (usually) nothing ever happens to them... maybe someone loses their job, but that's it.
> run like independent kingdoms, staffed with people from other countries with their own restaurants and dorms so the workers are never exposed to the outside world
I find this incredibly interesting and somewhat surprising, can you substantiate the scale of this problem a little bit more, or link 3-5 map locations?
ESG is a complete farce in implementation, or at least that's what I gathered once I learned that a tobacco company like Altria can have a 79/100 ESG score.
If there's enough "other stuff" that can bring a company who's existence causes death and disease as its main impact on society to 79/100, I don't really care about the scoring system.
I am amazed. Having worked in and around US Manufacturing plants my entire adult life, I have never once even see anyone that could be considered a child working in any plant I have ever been in, and I have been in alot of manufacturers. All of owned by American entities and people.
As Reuters reported, migrant children from Guatemala found working at SMART Alabama, LLC and SL Alabama had been hired by recruiting or staffing firms in the region. In a statement to Reuters this week, Hyundai said it had already stopped relying on at least one labor recruiting firm that had been hiring for SMART
I hope the right agencies step in to help these kids … brutal as it may be it just might be possible that the kids did not receive any assistance so this (working) was probably their only way of surviving.
Since they were reported missing to the police, I would assume that you’re right and these kids were trying to survive on their own for one reason or another.
I'd really like to know more about the "oppressive" part. Were these 12 year olds lying about their age to get a summer job? Or were these children getting pimped by a staffing firm?
I think there should be a huge divergence of punishment options based on the actual details.
I remember having a paper route when I was 10 years old. Yeah, not the same thing as a factory line job, but I wanted the job for extra money.
If these kids were forced to work, that's horrible, fine the company, punish them hard.
But if these were kids working a few 4 hour shifts a week because their parents worked there, then that's entirely different. Not legal, but not the same as exploiting some youngster against their will.
Yeah I wonder if the Dad was a manager so he put his son to work or something. They said these were "documented" citizens which I assume means they're not illegal child immigrants. The only other thing we know is that most of these factories were set up by Koreans companies, so they're probably not super small mom and pop shops. The fact they didn't go more in depth into their situation makes me wonder if it's because it goes contrary to the narrative, I know Reuters has a habit of doing that
>A Reuters investigative report in July documented children, including a 12-year-old, working at a Hyundai-controlled metal stamping plant in rural Luverne, Alabama, called SMART Alabama, LLC.
> In a statement on Wednesday, SL Alabama said it had taken "aggressive steps to remedy the situation" as soon it learned a subcontractor had provided underage workers.
It's hard to believe no one noticed 12 year olds working in manufacturing. It would be one thing if they were 17 and this were some legal technicality.
Willful violation of the law and a "oops weird" cover up. The fine will likely be a fraction of the money they saved.
They noticed because of escalating local news coverage, probably:
"Reuters first reported on July 22 that allegations surfaced about SMART’s labor practices after a Guatemalan girl reportedly working at the Hyundai-owned auto supplier went missing from her family’s Alabama home."
When our contract with the child labor ends we will put out a search for a replacement contract company. This time when we say "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP Labor on the bid we will specify we don't mean "Child labor cheap" just regular old undocumented slave labor cheap.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33253658 - swipes like that are totally not ok).
If you'd please review the site guidelines and start following them, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
People in other parts of the US joke about how the deep south is backwards and give facts like the lack of quality education as examples, but fail to realize this is intentional. The working class in the deep south may be "backwards", but it's not by choice or culture. The people in power in those states intentionally create conditions that result in a permanent underclass who have no opportunity besides selling their manual labor and well-being for whatever pittance the capitalists deem. Slavery was outlawed but exploitation wasn't.
Slavery is even legal in the EU according to European Convention on Human Rights Article 4 Paragraph 3.
I love subparagraph (d) which is a wonderful catch-all in case a legal pressure relief valve is needed in the future to justify god knows what.
Article 4 – Prohibition of slavery and forced labour
1 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.
2 No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.
3 For the purpose of this article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include:
a any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention;
b any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service;
c any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or wellbeing of the community;
d any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.
Incidentally, I was just two days ago in Montgomery, Alabama at the Equal Justice Initiative's museum documenting and memorializing the plight of enslaved people in the Americas. While not uniquely exploitative amongst all US states during the 2 century era of the legal slave trade, the post century of near complete lack of enforcement against the illegal slave trade, and the post half-century of transforming the slave trade into the prisoner-slave trade, this is true. Alabama--along with the other deep-South states--has been really bad about forced labor. I'd say it's more like 400 years of custom, with the first 150 years pre-dating the founding of the US, and the last 50 just being ignored because it's "only prisoners", with no introspection on just how those people became prisoners, or why what they did (or didn't even do) was considered a crime.
Worth noting that one of these suppliers appears to have been majority-owned by Hyundai itself. The Hyundai subsidiary apparently targeted the families of recent immigrants.
I had a friend who had a really bad home life. His mom was abusive and mentally unstable. He moved out at 15, and "child labor" was why he could rent and eat.
Nonetheless it should by far, exceedingly, not be the norm.
I myself had a job in my school at ~15 myself, it was nbd and I was happy for some spending money that my mom couldn't provide.
@dang - the title in editorialized and misleading. The actual title is: "Korean auto giant Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain"
The article only mentions Korean owned suppliers operating in the US, some directly controlled by Hyundai, which were investigated by Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies.
I think this is a relevant observation, given that it changes the emotive thrust of the headline from "foreign country has better standards than our country!" to "our country has good standards that ensure foreign investors don't end up employing child labor".
I've read the article. And honestly the thing I've read is that it's possible for a company to do child labor in the US. And that this actually happens.
No comparing, no who is better, just the blunt reality of child labor in the US
> And honestly the thing I've read is that it's possible for a company to do child labor in the US. And that this actually happens.
You are missing the part where the foreign owned company is caught by the police and investigated by the authorities, and then the crime is reported by the media.
This is exactly what you'd expect in a country where child labor is not accepted.
It's not honest to omit this part. Indeed it's a deliberate deception.
This really awful, but maybe it's also an indicator of the flattening effects of globalization?
Not so long ago, the unthinkable thing wouldn't have been child labor in the supply chain of a big company, but we all would have expected it to be an American company with Asian manufacturing. Actually relatively recently, I had an executive from an American company express to me earnestly that child sweatshop labor helps grow local economies, and therefore it was misguided to condemn the practice. But it seemed implicit, in a condescending way, that that was justifiable for other people in other places.
99% of "child labor" cases in the first world are actually completely reasonable. I'm glad I was able to break child labor laws as a kid - it was very helpful for my actual and perceived level of independence, was a great learning experience, and let me overcome meager material conditions.
I think a lot of people here had soft lives as kids and extrapolate from that experience that kids are too fragile to handle working or something.
Slight problem… you’re firing the whistleblowers at that supplier who reported the problem in the first place. This is going to discourage future whistleblowing for unethical practices.
Employee comments about jobs in that stamping plant.[1]
Some of the comments are totally generic and probably fake. The ones that say twelve hour days for five to seven days a week are probably real.
Well if this is true, seems to be another indicator of the US Race to the bottom. 40/50 years ago ,this would have been a big scandal in the US. Since a certain US president in the early 80s, seems the US has been slowly slipping into third world country territory. And the massive "defense" spending another indicator if this.
For capitalism to work in the modern era, we need to make an example out of misbehaving companies every so often. Like… destroy the company and throw the officers in prison.
I want shareholders so petrified of their stock suddenly being worth nothing that they keep the board in check who makes heads roll when this kind of bullshit is tried.
Everything less is a tacit acceptance that child labour is fine as long as you factor the cost into doing business.
I don’t condone child labor but it made me think: What if I were a 13 year old with good grades and I consented with parents and got a proper work permit. If the money I made went into good investments, that would be a whole lot of compounded money for later in life. I would do it!
Heh. Good grades? The more kids have to work during school, the worse their grades and educational outcomes are. Work permit? Do you think the factory is following proper work hour restrictions for a kid? Safety... Can a 13 year old be properly trained to be safe in a factory? Consent? Kids cannot consent because they aren't mature enough to consider everything I mentioned. Finally you're assuming the money might be invested, whereas maybe they can't even open a bank account without help. I hope the money becomes theirs. Do you think it will?
This is not the American dream, it's the American nightmare. Kids need to be kids. Learning and developing is a very difficult full time job.
Disgusting that we are trading with country that uses child labour... We really should sanction them until provably they have solved this and slavery issue.
I don't really even get who that joke is poking at -- not the US presumably; there is plenty of record of U.S. companies being indifferent to poor labor conditions without a sanctioning reaction.
Counter point: It's a good thing this factory was on US soil allowing the US DoL to do its job. Imagine how many cases of "staffing firms for a sub contractor hiring teenagers" goes unnoticed and unpunished around the world.
>Forced labor is legal in the US in one case. Where’s the outrage?
That's like saying locking people in camps is legal in the US. Technical not a lie, but a bit misleading.
Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book. We can talk about safety conditions, perverse incentives, whether the trials were fair or the punishments were just, etc. But the fact that we make a murder work 8 hours a day isn't per se some human rights abuse, in my opinion.
> Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book.
97% of federal and 94% of state convictions are not convicted through a trial. They are convicted through plea deals. Plea deals function as the shadow justice system of the U.S. where prosecutors have overwhelming coercive advantages to shape the crime and punishment. They play judge and executioner.
Yes, that’s right, most accused do not “make a plea deal”. The prosecution offers the deal to avoid a labor intensive trial.
Also, prosecution is allowed to deceive (lie) to trick the accused to accept plea deals. There is no evidence burden once the accused pleas guilty. For example, the prosecutor can legally claim they have a mountain of evidence, and once the accused pleas, there’s no requirement for the “evidence” to be provided.
https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
Yea, they can refuse the offer. For an accused that cannot afford bail, they may have 2 options: take the plea deal and start serving the sentence right away, or refuse the deal and be incarcerated for an undetermined amount of time awaiting trial.
Either case, many accused faces incarceration whether they accept the deal or not.
>But the fact that we make a murder work 8 hours a day isn't per se some human rights abuse, in my opinion.
Eh, they don't do this with the actually dangerous criminals. Too much of a risk. Slavery usually used for nonviolent crims, think drug possession charges. Much easier captive population.
> Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book
Let’s see all of the things wrong packed in that statement:
1. Most people in jail aren’t “found guilty” of a crime by a trial at all. Most are pressured by both the DAs and the state funded Public defender to accept a plea deal. 95% take a plea deal.
It's not being used as a proportionate punishment. Many incarcerated people were never even proven to have committed a crime, and in some cases never even faced trial. There's also no small number of people who were imprisoned for a crime someone else committed thanks to misbehavior on the part of prosecutors, police, or dishonest "witnesses". Sometimes those people even get executed.
The murderer working 8 hours a day in a prison is an outlier. A huge percentage of the prison population are normal people like you or me put in a bad environment being abused inhumanely because people have decided that they deserve it for some reason.
Yes, refusal to work leads to more punishments that border on human rights violations.
> they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.
I think that a lot of people skip over the "except as a punishment for crime" part in the 13th amendment. I know I did for a long time until I saw a show where the prison warden was explaining it:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Privatized incarceration facilities with incentives to keep people locked up, and influencing the CJ system to maintain profits is also an issue. There are numerous cases of businesses doing shady things to pocket more money.
It is possible to be outraged by all these things at the same time. No one has to pick between different types of exploitation and only be mad at one thing.
I agree in principle. However, as a piece of empirical evidence, you can peruse the comments in this HN post. Compare comments that express outrage for child labor and outrage for forced prison labor. Some HN readers are clearly picking to not be outraged at the latter.
I am a free market lover, and I absolutely reject the idea of forced, low or no pay prison labor
I think all prisoners who voluntarily choose to work should be paid a market wage for their labor. I also think some of that wage should be used as compensation to the victims of their crimes.
> Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers.
> After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated.
> Meghen Yeadon, a recruiter for Stoughton, found part of the solution: a Wisconsin Department of Corrections work-release program for minimum-security inmates.
> Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.
While those programs are easy to abuse, it is very important that someone released from prison has a path to an honest life. Few places will hire felons, so dumping someone on the street with no job ensures they turn to crime, it is the only way they can get food. If they have a job though you can arrange an apartment and other than a new place to sleep things seem normal and so they have a chance.
I will have to agree with the other commenter. While the natural response is to try ad protect the privacy of the accused or even the convicted by sealing the records, history is full of proof that governments that can act in secret rarely works out well for the people under the thumb of those governments.
Secret Police records, generally result in a system where people just "disappear". So while there are good intentions to sealing police records, the result of those good intentions would likely result in extreme abuse of power
I think the better course of action would be a path to have convictions expunged, and once expunged allowing for civil defamation against any entity or person that reports the individual was convicted once the record was expunged.
The time it takes to expunge a record should be determined by the courts with a max time set in statute
Fair competition is the ideal state for a market to be in, but a free market is about unrestricted competition and that can easily turn into monopolies or cabals.
Ok then, highlight all the times where a market has resulted in a monopoly with out underling government regulations limiting the ability of new entrants to the market.
That was the obvious rebuttable, and to be honest I have a hard time countering that however the obvious statement is search really a market since it is a "free" product. One has to ask what is the actual market, is it the search engine or the advertising that pays for the search? Google while dominate is not a monopoly for Online Ads, so while they command a 90-95% market share in "online searches" that is not the product they sell so traditional market dynamics are not at play so I am hard pressed to call online search a "free market" given nothing it being sold, what is being sold is the ad space on google search.
It's the very definition of a free market concept. The price the market determines for something is the fair price, to charge more or less would be unfair to someone else
You know this was common in the States too until very recently, right? That's the origin of summer break in schools. I'm guessing there are plenty of places today that will absolutely close school to support agriculture both in the States and many capitalist countries.
Source: I spend a lot of time on wheat, barley, and lentil farms in the US.
I’m saying I’m fine with forced labor being part of the consequences.
Like if you steal a car, six months working a shitty job while locked in prison seems appropriate. The money shouldn’t go to you, it should go to defer the cost of catching, prosecuting, and housing you.
We even have “community service” which is literally forced labor for zero compensation, are people unhappy with that?
Community service typically doesn't also come with loss of liberty. As someone who has been sentenced to community service but got to stay out of incarceration because of a stupid teenager move, it's effectively a different punishment.
I think charging the same rate for labor makes sense so it’s not anti competitive business. But why should the prisoners pocket all the money when our tax dollars are housing them?
Prisoners did not choose to go to prison, therefore we can't ask them to pay for the costs of putting them in prison. Society decides that it is best to lock some people up; therefore it's also the society that should to pay the cost of keeping them locked up.
Prisons are expensive, which is one reason why we should really only lock up people when there is no other way. If someone is not a danger to society, we shouldn't lock them up.
Um, you make it sound like prisoners are just helpless beings that have no agency and are fully passively pushed into a situation. Society didn't ask the prisoners to commit crimes either, but they (mostly) did anyway. Society has no choice but to impose a very unproductive form of punishment, and needs to find a way to get something out of it.
The main reason to be against prison labor is that it creates perverse incentives to not rehabilitate prisoners (even though participation in labor may help with the rehabilitation process). There's also a risk that cheap prison labor undercuts legitimate businesses. Prisoners also can't be entrusted with anything outside menial and low-impact labor, and as a result the amount of productivity they can offer is really limited.
But requiring prisoners to work partially for their own food and shelter in itself shouldn't be that controversial, especially when they are convicted of serious crime.
Incarceration is not necessarily effective but what alternative can you propose, as a scalable form of punishment? How do you define "totally rubbish"?
We could start by not prosecuting done crimes. Why do you go to jail for possessing marijuana, prostitution, crossed a border without permission, or because you are awaiting trial? (Which is why most people are in jail.)
We start by taking these hundreds of thousands of people who really shouldn't be in jail or prison at all and ask, "what programs would help them from not doing this again? What's the root cause we can address?" And we start implementing social programs that will help support, educate, and reform folks.
Some combination of:
1) Remove a lot of drug crimes from the books and clear convictions. Many of these shouldn't be punishable at all.
2) invest in housing, food, and mental health support to catch folks before they turn to low level theft. Give them to people convicted as well. If you change their situations, many will never need to commit crimes again.
3) Levy fines, garnish wages while providing support. Restrict movement if needed by requiring folks stay in contact with a parole officer or mental health support professional.
Etc
Most "criminals" are folks who are in positions where we left them few choices as a society.
Most of what you're saying is that we should select prisoners better and avoid creating more criminals as a society. The principle I agree. However this part is completely non-sequitur, as the point of contention is whether there's something better than prison to deal with after-the-fact criminals. The only alternative you give is a very soft form of restricting movement, which is devoid of reality for many forms of crime from petty theft and embezzlement to rape and murder.
So which society are you living in? Every statistic shows that minorities get much harsher sentences, are represented by an underfunded public defenders office, are coerced to plea bargain (95%) are harassed more by police etc. The entire criminal Justice system is corrupt to the core.
Let’s not even talk about the “War on drugs” that becomes “treat drug abuse as a medical condition” when it happens in “rural communities”
Inmates are one of the largest workforce of CalFire when they need to deal with large forest fires. I don’t CalFire would be able to scale up to the task if they didn’t have this resource. Allegedly it is volunteer-based and you need to meet certain requirements and take training to participate. I’d say this kind of work is above low-impact.
This is great though ironically one of the less humane ways to utilize prison labor. To be entrusted with work like that you'd have to have a decent record for a criminal, for example serving for a less serious crime or have made good progress in rehabilitation. But the work is more grueling and dangerous than most other kinds of prison labor.
I see your point. Seems pretty subjective either way. For example, “I didn’t choose for my car to be towed so the cost should be paid by the tower.”
But to some extent maybe it’s moot because most prisoners would never be able to cover the full cost of their stay. I wonder though if there was a sort of coding-bootcamp-like profit sharing model with inmates where the gov tried to maximize their economic productivity they might end up getting trained for better and more humane jobs, trades, nursing, coding, winwin.
Sure, as long as it’s a reasonable rate for what they’re getting. I wouldn’t pay more than $300/mo to live in a tiny concrete room with shitty cafeteria food and no visitors. Maybe less.
If you're incarcerated, you've forfeited a lot of other rights too. That's by design, and I happen to have the "extreme" opinion that incarceration should be punishment[1] rather than a cushy lifestyle. I 100% support forced labor (not cruel treatment or abuse) of the incarcerated.
[1] To clarify: there should be an element of punishment (in the form of forgone rights), but there's obviously more to it.
I would generally agree. Just as some people characterize prison labor as "slavery", with all of the connotations that word holds when unqualified, I have also seen incarceration described as "kidnapping". Rather than get bogged down in the minutia of arguing about words I'd simply posit that there are moral forms of "kidnapping" and "slavery".
Locking a murderer in a jail cell is moral, I also see no issue requiring them to work.
Where I do see a massive issue is when incarceration is used by private corporations to enrich themselves rather than enriching the public or individuals whose harm is what caused the incarceration in the first place.
I don't in principle oppose private prisons, though I am wary of them in practice. I think there could exist a model where private prisons would be rewarded based on recitivism, but unfortunately such a system would be hard to create for a variety of practical considerations.
In other times it was said that a woman takes away a job a man might to, or a black man the job a white. You may want to google the "lump of labor fallacy".
Well I might be out of the loop but wasn’t “punishment” proven to be ineffective in preventing (or correcting) unwanted behavior.
No matter how harsh is the punishment there appears to always be crime. What seems to work is rehabilitation as well as inevitability of capture.
So even if it sounds unjust to try to help offenders (even murderers) If we want them to not offend and not murder _more_ we need norway style prisons rather than US ones.
Regardless of what’s effective and what is just though, having prison companies benefit from forced labor is just all ways of crazy regarding incentives and screws the market soo much, normal people now need to compete against slaves, the state / companies now have incentives to there to be _more_ prisoners which would lead to actually _more_ crime in and off itself.
And to top it off, you have big entities that can lobby (bribe) the government to change laws to the detriment of society at large. It just sooo messed up.
And its not some crazy tinfoil hat thing - we can see that “experiment” play out before our eyes - the US penal system is so proven to be so ineffective its silly.
Believe it or not, a huge number of incarcerated people would rather work (without pay) than sit around doing nothing. For the few that don't, you can certainly incentivize it without resorting to torture.
And in fact, one of the common punishments available to prison staff is to bar the prisoner from working if they are getting in fights, etc.
The prisoners wouldn’t mind working for more pay, but most of them do like it considering the options.
Another part is just accounting - if the federal government paid its employees tax free (no fed income tax) it would work out the same (salaries would drop) but the accounting would be different and people would complain.
But why not pay them? Perhaps you cannot pay market wages without a being a competitive capitalist enterprise, but surely there is a point where access to subsidized labor allows you to break even, paying them, say $3 or $5 an hour.
And perhaps you cannot pay them in cash, but why not invest the money for the duration of their incarceration, or pay a stipend to some dependent on the outside, like a wife/child? A $10k/year rate of savings is above what many people achieve outside, and a massive boost to get one's life in order once they get out.
Is it torture when you force kids to do their chores? Surely there are ways. But regardless don’t a lot of inmates volunteer for work? How much is forced?
Your supposedly “extreme” opinion sounds like a very mainstream American opinion. If you’re implying that many people really think your opinion is extreme, I think you’re making a straw man argument.
Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation. If you fail in that goal, then you’re just putting the burden on future society, when they get back out in some years. Part of rehabilitation might include punishment, but when you start with that, rather than rehabilitation, you’ve already screwed up your national moral compass.
Probably the best way to get a prisoner ready for life after prison is to let them work, pay them a normal salary, and let them put it in a savings account.
That way they have enough money for a deposit to rent a place to live and can cover their expenses for some time until they find a job.
If you force them to work, and don't give them money, then they have no way to start a normal life after prison, will depend on money from the government in the best case, and get back to crime in the worst case.
We need to treat prisoners well. Not just because it's the morally right thing to do, but also because it's the best thing we can do if we want a society with low crime rates, where you can walk through the city at night without being scared that an ex-convict mugs you because they don't have any other options.
You can debate the relative merits of each, but rehabilitation is not the only possible goal. If you lock up a repeat violent offender for X years without rehabilitation, the other factors are still relevant.
> Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation
I would take issue with the usage of the words "the point". There can in fact be multiple ends or goals of incarceration. Whether you think retributive justice or rehabilitation should be primary or secondary would be up for debate, but I primarily mean to say that you don't necessarily have to pick one or the other in the grand scheme of things (I'd say you'd also have a sliding scale of which is more important).
Working without monetary compensation is the punishment part. But work itself is rehabilitating. I can't think of a better way to help people feel empowered and able, preparing them to be positive members of society when they're released.
Like many things, there's substantial evidence on both sides of the argument. The devil is usually in the details, and this is a case where success or failure seems to be greatly affected by the quality of the programs themselves and the people who administer them.
I don't think it's "whataboutism" to point out that we're comfortable
buying goods made with child labour so long as they're from another
country - and that sets a moral bar for when it's done closer to home.
Surely people remember those girls manufacturing Amazon and Apple
products at Foxconn, about 14 years old, who tried to kill themselves
by jumping off the roof, but Foxconn just installed nets to catch them
and bounce them back onto the production line.
EDIT: I found the entity investigaing the matter [1]. And
also another story indicating that it may have been an
internal whsitleblower who began the trail.
> I don't think it's "whataboutism" to point out that we're comfortable buying goods made with child labour so long as they're from another country
We very much are not.
Both the USA and especially the EU have stringent laws against importing goods produced using child labour. Companies put some serious efforts auditing their suppliers to ensure no child labour is used and every time they fail it becomes a major scandal (see Nike as an exemple).
Actually the reason you know Foxconn employed 14 years old is because it was a major violation of child labour law and was widely reported as such. The Chinese state wasn’t happy about that at all. I can assure they didn’t go back to the production lines.
If you're trying to paint a picture of justice and the rule of law
working all according to plan, I don't buy it.
IIRC it was an undercover documentary I watched. Not sure who the team
who made it were, and cannot find it on YouTube etc now. But I do not
recall it being a labour audit team from Apple or Amazon. Both of whom
I remember initially denied the claims, and then distanced themselves
from Foxconn (while the story blew-over) before eventually admitting
it much later [1]
Of course we all know how such inconveniences are spun: it was an
"isolated" incident. A few bad apples. Mistakes were made. The
(scapegoat) managers have been fired. Lessons learned... etc.
> I can assure they didn’t go back to the production lines.
On what basis do you make such "assurances"? Because I'm pretty sure
you are wrong. For me, a most stomach churning aspect of that whole
story was the "soft torture" of the poor kids who were not even able
to end their ordeal by suicide. The anti-suicide nets were the
company's response instead of changing the awful working conditions.
Quite beyond belief.
They were designed to catch the workers, who could then be given
"counselling" (presumably advice on what would happen to their families
if they tried that again) and then returned to work as soon as
possible.
> If you're trying to paint a picture of justice and the rule of law working all according to plan, I don't buy it.
Your original statement was that we, the collective west, are confortable buying the product of child labour as long as it happens abroad. This is clearly false. Not only are we uncomfortable doing so, we find the idea so abhorrent that we have made it illegal.
> On what basis do you make such "assurances"?
The CCP doesn’t take people flaunting Chinese laws kindly.
Also while the issue with underage interns was discovered during the probe on the suicides, they are unrelated events. The workers who killed themselves due to overworking and poor working conditions were all of legal age.
Under age workers were provided as month long interns from vocational schools. Foxconn wasn’t checking if they were of legal ages which made quite a splash.
> Your original statement was that we, the collective west, are
confortable buying the product of child labour as long as it happens
abroad. This is clearly false.
I don't think it is "clearly false". And you've offered me no contrary
evidence - although I cannot imagine what that would realistically be
or that we can resolve this difference of opinion by appealing to the
stated opinions of other groups.
But "we" in this case is undefined.
There is the "we" of PR executives, corporate lawyers and politicians,
all of whom paint a party line on how "we are uncomfortable"
And then there are the tens of millions of people who, knowing the
reality of overseas child labour (through, as you say yourself, the
widely reported news), still go out and buy an iPhone or Amazon Alexa.
As far as I know neither Apple nor Amazon's sales were significantly
hit by these revelations.
There is a vast difference between the world as we wish it to be, and
the world as it really is. I think you speak more to the former.
> I don't think it is "clearly false". And you've offered me no contrary evidence
Obviously I have. First I have pointed to you that it is illegal. Secondly I have mentioned Nike to you. After the 1996 Life magazine report and the subsequent protest, they lost millions of dollars of sales and had to work on the issue significantly in the following years to save their image.
You keep torpedoing your own argument yourself anyway by bringing up all the articles covering the issue which should show you people care.
This conversation is over as far as I’m concerned. I’m impressed by the length you are ready to go to refuse to simply admit you are wrong.
> This conversation is over as far as I’m concerned.
Well thank goodness for that. You've offered nothing of any value
except reiterating your own disagreement and sidestepped everything
I've offered you with wilful ignorance. I get it, you don't like what
I'm saying, but your arguments are pitiable. A most disappointing
exchange.
> Following the Reuters report, Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies, began investigating SMART Alabama. Authorities subsequently launched a child labor probe at another of Hyundai's regional supplier plants, Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13.
I can't tell if you're being serious, but you have two comments both casting doubt on this article so maybe you are.
The article is reporting on investigations conducted by US authorities, so I suppose you imagine that the US is acting in the interest of China to weaken its own charges against China?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hyundai-kia-auto-parts-supp...
(This links to more info.)
Wow.
I think the thing that shocks me the most is that the punishment from the Department of Labor is a very mild slap-on-the-wrist. A small fine and a promise not to do it any more. This should basically be the end of that company entirely. Instead they just have to point the finger at some low-level managers, fire them, and keep on rolling. I would think criminal charges are warranted for importing 12 and 13 year-olds for labor. The children can't consent. That's essentially child slave labor.
If Hyundai/Kia drops them, that would at least be a much bigger penalty than the DOL imposed.