What's the difference between a teenager mowing the lawn for their parents and someone paid to mow a lawn?

Furthermore, when a farmer's child does chores alongside a paid laborer, what's going on?

The kid getting paid to mow neighborhood lawns has:

1. The right to say "no" without repercussions beyond "not getting paid".

2. Significant statutory protections regarding exploitative treatment.

EDIT: There's also a large body of statute defining what is and isn't okay in the family farm situation.

> 1. The right to say "no" without repercussions beyond "not getting paid".

Have you ever had parents? I realize it's outside the Overton window to do anything about it, but age-based slavery[0] is ubiquitous and the legal default in essentially (I think literally) every country on Earth. It's an even more pervasive affliction than copyright, so I find your ignorance implausible.

0: in the ownership sense; actually using them for forced labor is less common

Can you please not do this sort of nitpicky-flamey argument on HN? It's the kind of discussion we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My comment was about kids mowing neighborhood lawns, not their own.

Please try to address the argument I actually made.

I was; my comment was about the purported lack of repercussions for disobediance.

Also, you were responding to:

> a teenager mowing the lawn for their parents

which was about their (owner's) own lawn.

The full quote I was responding to is:

>>>> What's the difference between a teenager mowing the lawn for their parents and someone paid to mow a lawn?

In response to which, I said:

>>> The kid getting paid to mow neighborhood lawns has:

Selective quoting tends to change the context a bit, don't you think?

One is familial, the other is a business relationship.

So your definition of labor refers only to, for lack of a better term, "work" done in a business relationship?

Then I don't think it really applies to this situation, since just as familial relations are superseding "business" relations in your example, certainly the prison relations change the nature of the business relations drastically.

But I think this is certainly labor, but the distinction between labor and chore is not so clear. I don't think it matters to the inmates, but I found it bizarre how confident HNers are that chores and labor are intrinsically different.

I think it all comes down to how the words are typically used in everyday speech. Labor is typically associated with economic gain (or general economic activity) (or pregnancy) while chores generally aren't. I know I often hear people use the word chore when talking about errands or tasks they must perform for which they won't be compensated directly by another party (like taking out the trash as a chore).

I think we started off on the wrong foot with the comparison. Even government recognizes some difference between chores and labor, as childhood labor is illegal but it's not illegal to have your kids mow the law (afaik).

Yeah. It also like, putting away clothes was a childhood chore, but using a tractor to mow a field was also a childhood chore. I guess. It was something that had to be done anyway.

Its really just an ever so tempting argument of semantics that is at this point distracting me from the real plight of prison laborers. But that's how the internet goes.

I'm not 'vageli, but my definitions are that "labor" is a primarily economic form of activity, while "chores" aren't.

Both of them involve "work", but the objectives — the reasons the people doing the work are doing it — aren't the same.

Historically, "chores" included carrying a share of one's upkeep by doing work on a farm, cooking, etc. In many places, it still does.

If a child didn't perform their chores, they didn't get years added onto their childhood sentence.

Any argument about upkeep doesn't hold water as well, because these prisons aren't using the money for upkeep, they are making a profit

And outside those limited contexts, it runs into child labor laws.

You can't premise an argument regarding the current general case for prisoners on what's now either a historical, or an edge case for children.