Comment by malfist

Comment by malfist a day ago

I grew up around that area, and this story has serious stench of PR crafted mythical origin story. Oneida Baptist Institute is a prestigious private school, not one of those child abuse mills, we've had a governor and a state rep attend that school.

Child labor is super common around these parts, especially on family farms. I grew up working on my family's tobacco farm just like pretty much everyone else. My uncle was even nice enough one summer to give me $20 a week for weeding and bug removal from a 5 acre farm. I thought it was so much money. I remember saving up to buy those bargain bin "300 Games" type CDs at Walmart.

mkoubaa a day ago

I resent the conflation of child abuse and child labor. There's actually a healthy dose of labor for kids that we've all but disallowed from polite conversation

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malfist a day ago

I wasn't attempting to create that conflation in my post, if you read that, I wasn't clear enough.
I personally think it's fine for children to work on their family's business as long as it doesn't impact their schooling or normal childhood activities. It is a fine line to walk, I don't believe I missed out on anything like after school activities, but that was largely because there aren't too many of those opportunities deep in the mountains in Kentucky. I say it's a fine line, because it's easy to see a scenario where children are put to work in, say a family restaurant, and prevented from doing after school activities like sports or clubs, and miss out on part of the well rounding of an education.
I certainly don't support children working for third parties that then profit off of their labor. In those cases, there is no way to align the incentives to protect the child.

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delusional a day ago

Labor in the sense that it's abuse is exploitative. It's extractive. Child labor seeks to use the children for the profit of the adults running the operation. There's certainly _work_ that children can grow from doing. There's certainly work that looks like labor that children grow from doing. They just actually have to grow from doing it, and that must be the motivation. If you start making money off of children, then your care for the limits of the "healthy dose" starts diminishing real fast.

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- zoeysmithe a day ago
  
  Yep this, children are the most vulnerable class. If the capitalist system had the power it had in the past, we'd just throw them into factories at age 6 or 7 again and damn them to the terrible life of a factory worker with no rights so some adult can have slightly more.
  
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