In 1839 Prussia was the first country to pass laws restricting child labor in factories and setting the number of hours a child could work.[3] Though the reasons behind why these laws were passed were to expand working conditions for adults, it did lead to laws being passed across Europe.
The “International Labor Organization” also seems responsible for a bunch of subsequent anti-child-labor activism. Although I’m not sure how much one would expect them to represent the economic interests of adult workers—it’s a U.N. agency apparently with an interesting tripartite governing structure, only one part of which nominally represents workers.
Of course, the meme of “protect children against horrible factory conditions” probably has enough staying power (it’s literally “think of the children”) that it doesn’t particularly need special interests to promote it. But it would be interesting to know how much it is in fact being promoted by adult laborers who are very conscious of the downward pressure child labor would impose on their wages.
Anyway, at least for intellectual/office labor (such as programming), as long as the hours aren’t crazy, if a company can find a use for kids’ labor I see no serious argument for preventing it. And, really, it would likely be highly educational.
Looking it up… In the U.S., federally at least, it seems that 16-year-olds “can be employed for unlimited hours in any occupation other than those declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor”, which seems reasonable; but for 15 and under, it outlaws work during school hours, which pretty much coincide with office hours and therefore cripples most options. And under-14s have a somewhat bizarre list of carve-outs:
If you are under the age of 14, you are only allowed to do the following jobs:
Deliver newspapers to customers
Babysit on a casual basis
Work as an actor or performer in movies, TV, radio, or theater
Work as a homeworker gathering evergreens and making evergreen wreaths; and
Work for a business owned entirely by your parents as long as you are not employed in mining, manufacturing, or any of the 17 hazardous occupations.
Whenever someone says “We have laws for X because of [principles]”, my response is generally, “No, we have laws for X because a ruling body of politicians passed them at some point, and no ruling body of politicians has repealed them yet. If you think [principles] are the dominating factor in what laws get passed, you will go wrong quite often.” This is a decent example.
Societies evolve. Regardless of why the law was originally created, laws that follow principles are easier to keep going than laws that violate them. In a functional society most of the surviving laws will follow principles even if they were created for other reasons. While this won’t be true of every single law, it’s a huge influence.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles. Jobs that are inherently part time, high status, small scale, or involve parents, and are not dangerous, are much more likely to be good for, or at least not harmful to, the children. You could describe that a “bizarre list”, but I’d call that a “list of jobs where the incentives are relatively good”.
This is true, but (a) I think many people think they’re a lot closer to being absolutely determined by principles than is accurate, and (b) this is very especially so for school stuff. Today’s school is the result of a many-generational tug-of-war between many disparate parties, some with more power than others; and the thing they’re pulling is a bureaucracy that is plenty old enough to be expected to follow Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Some people think that “the point” of schools is to teach kids. Others think… well, I’ll list the hypotheses that have come up in this thread alone:
educating the kids in math, history, etc.
putting the kids in a place where they’ll learn social skills
sorting the kids (“signaling”) by conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness
sorting the kids by social class
babysitting the kids
Others I’ve heard elsewhere:
promoting cross-generational upward mobility (the opposite of a prior claim)
making kids into obedient little factory workers
religious indoctrination (not recently, but centuries ago)
ideological indoctrination
I could go on. But even with all of the above, from what I’ve seen of school, in many cases the dominating concern seems to be:
the convenience of those who run the school
To the extent that the external tug-of-war cancels out, school administrators are free to optimize for their own interests at the expense of any of school’s nominal goals (whatever you think they might be). And they often do. Some administrators, and especially teachers, are idealistic, but the system has a reputation for burning that away.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles.
Does being a child star in Hollywood strike you as a safe, healthy environment? More so than other jobs not on that list, such as doing paperwork in an office?
Or do you think that the upsides of being a child star outweigh the dangers? Then can you think of other jobs where the upsides outweigh the dangers, but aren’t on that list?
I think what happened had a lot more to do with “people liking the existence of child actors” and/or “the lobbying power of Hollywood directors (who don’t have good substitutes for child actors)” than with “people faithfully implementing an explicit set of principles with coherent tradeoffs”. (Come to think of it, with AI deepfakes and stuff, maybe adults will be good substitutes for child actors; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if people then tried to ban real child actors.)
“Incentives are relatively good” doesn’t mean “bad things can’t happen”. Of course it’s still possible for bad things to happen.
I would, however, point out that it’s hard to have a factory full of 10000 child actors, and hard to make significantly more money by ensuring the child actors have bad working conditions. And while there are jokes about out of work actors, an actor who does have a job is likely to be paid more than a factory worker. And there are laws about child actors which discourage some kinds of exploitation.
Yes, some of this is true of other jobs. But a system which evolves piecemeal without being directly designed will mostly involve jobs that are likely to turn up in real life. It won’t include all categories of safe jobs. I suspect that the number of children who are able and willing to do office paperwork for normal office wages just isn’t very big.
Adult laborers would have competition! Wiki says:
The “International Labor Organization” also seems responsible for a bunch of subsequent anti-child-labor activism. Although I’m not sure how much one would expect them to represent the economic interests of adult workers—it’s a U.N. agency apparently with an interesting tripartite governing structure, only one part of which nominally represents workers.
Of course, the meme of “protect children against horrible factory conditions” probably has enough staying power (it’s literally “think of the children”) that it doesn’t particularly need special interests to promote it. But it would be interesting to know how much it is in fact being promoted by adult laborers who are very conscious of the downward pressure child labor would impose on their wages.
Anyway, at least for intellectual/office labor (such as programming), as long as the hours aren’t crazy, if a company can find a use for kids’ labor I see no serious argument for preventing it. And, really, it would likely be highly educational.
Looking it up… In the U.S., federally at least, it seems that 16-year-olds “can be employed for unlimited hours in any occupation other than those declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor”, which seems reasonable; but for 15 and under, it outlaws work during school hours, which pretty much coincide with office hours and therefore cripples most options. And under-14s have a somewhat bizarre list of carve-outs:
Whenever someone says “We have laws for X because of [principles]”, my response is generally, “No, we have laws for X because a ruling body of politicians passed them at some point, and no ruling body of politicians has repealed them yet. If you think [principles] are the dominating factor in what laws get passed, you will go wrong quite often.” This is a decent example.
Societies evolve. Regardless of why the law was originally created, laws that follow principles are easier to keep going than laws that violate them. In a functional society most of the surviving laws will follow principles even if they were created for other reasons. While this won’t be true of every single law, it’s a huge influence.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles. Jobs that are inherently part time, high status, small scale, or involve parents, and are not dangerous, are much more likely to be good for, or at least not harmful to, the children. You could describe that a “bizarre list”, but I’d call that a “list of jobs where the incentives are relatively good”.
This is true, but (a) I think many people think they’re a lot closer to being absolutely determined by principles than is accurate, and (b) this is very especially so for school stuff. Today’s school is the result of a many-generational tug-of-war between many disparate parties, some with more power than others; and the thing they’re pulling is a bureaucracy that is plenty old enough to be expected to follow Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Some people think that “the point” of schools is to teach kids. Others think… well, I’ll list the hypotheses that have come up in this thread alone:
educating the kids in math, history, etc.
putting the kids in a place where they’ll learn social skills
sorting the kids (“signaling”) by conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness
sorting the kids by social class
babysitting the kids
Others I’ve heard elsewhere:
promoting cross-generational upward mobility (the opposite of a prior claim)
making kids into obedient little factory workers
religious indoctrination (not recently, but centuries ago)
ideological indoctrination
I could go on. But even with all of the above, from what I’ve seen of school, in many cases the dominating concern seems to be:
the convenience of those who run the school
To the extent that the external tug-of-war cancels out, school administrators are free to optimize for their own interests at the expense of any of school’s nominal goals (whatever you think they might be). And they often do. Some administrators, and especially teachers, are idealistic, but the system has a reputation for burning that away.
Does being a child star in Hollywood strike you as a safe, healthy environment? More so than other jobs not on that list, such as doing paperwork in an office?
Or do you think that the upsides of being a child star outweigh the dangers? Then can you think of other jobs where the upsides outweigh the dangers, but aren’t on that list?
I think what happened had a lot more to do with “people liking the existence of child actors” and/or “the lobbying power of Hollywood directors (who don’t have good substitutes for child actors)” than with “people faithfully implementing an explicit set of principles with coherent tradeoffs”. (Come to think of it, with AI deepfakes and stuff, maybe adults will be good substitutes for child actors; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if people then tried to ban real child actors.)
“Incentives are relatively good” doesn’t mean “bad things can’t happen”. Of course it’s still possible for bad things to happen.
I would, however, point out that it’s hard to have a factory full of 10000 child actors, and hard to make significantly more money by ensuring the child actors have bad working conditions. And while there are jokes about out of work actors, an actor who does have a job is likely to be paid more than a factory worker. And there are laws about child actors which discourage some kinds of exploitation.
Yes, some of this is true of other jobs. But a system which evolves piecemeal without being directly designed will mostly involve jobs that are likely to turn up in real life. It won’t include all categories of safe jobs. I suspect that the number of children who are able and willing to do office paperwork for normal office wages just isn’t very big.