Teens aged 14 and above are already able to work relatively long hours under current child labour laws, so why are you speaking as if teens in the US are forbidden from any type of work? https://www.oshaeducationcenter.com/articles/child-labor-law....
Aside from the fact that most kids can’t tell when they’re being exploited, why should kids be the stopgap for corporations that not even adults want
According to the rules of the “free market”, these jobs should either provide better conditions or working conditions or both in order to attract talent, because the issue is not an oversupply of capable workers, it’s less.
Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers is valuable even if the work itself requires little skill.
And there we have it. "I don't view your work as being valuable enough to justify you being able to obtain basic needs for yourself (like food and shelter), let alone a family. Now give me my frappe."
Funny how we will still call such employees "essential" when it's time to force them to work in shitty and potentially dangerous conditions.
>a job he may have been happy to have as a first job or for supplemental income
You are contradicting yourself here. Those two conditions don't occur at the same time.
Can you read the article first before typing out your next comment? Those jobs have always hired teens without these imminent changes to child labour laws. You are defending something that hasn't changed, and isn't relevant to what people are concerned about as reported in the article link in this thread.
Except, obviously, this work is worth kicking wage, because we want to eat meat.
They are not, that's why minimum wage has lagged behind livable wage standards in the United States and Canada for decades, because minimum wages aren't livable wagges.
>the work will either just not get done or it will be automated
But I thought the free market runs itself? If an employee is bad they'd be gone in an eyeblink, so if a job is bad, why should it be allowed continued existence? Unemployment is at historical lows which is part of the reason why these awful jobs with awful pay can't be filled.
>Experience showing up to work, following instructions, getting along with bosses and coworkers
There are plenty of adults who work in """high value jobs""" failing all of that every, single, day. Some of them are here in this very thread advocating for child labour despite not having a single minute of experience working in any of these jobs that are about to exploit children.
You can learn this anywhere... in fact, I think there's a place where children can go that they're supposed to be on time, listen to staff, follow instructions, and get along with others. It's called school, dummy.
Could be several different reasons that all boil down to supply/demand and leverage.
In the article, it's claimed that many businesses can't afford to pay more, which is fairly believable for small businesses and for industries with global price pressures. The workers can't find better jobs, so they take whatever they can get.
"why don't those who do them deserve to make ends meet?"
They do, but society can't get it together to balance interests in a way that works for everyone (if that's even possible). Also, $15/hr should be fairly doable in a rural area.
That's what we should call a "Low value" business, which is actually what many businesses and entire industries are in the real world. Restaurants say they can't find workers, when the truth is pay and work conditions cannot attract workers. They say they can't afford to pay higher salaries, the response is "then raise prices". They say "then we'll lose our customers". Good! The business is not valuable enough and that means customers have to do without.
There is absolutely no need to continue with low value economic activity.
I'd like to correct that with "they believe they don't have an alternative." Almost all of them can get a better job, and that's why they are leaving bad employers and bad industries. Information is traveling faster than ever right now, and people are waking up. Gone are the generations of older people recommending a young person to take a shit job. Instead they are getting advice from the middle generations who have already been burned to stay far away from these jobs. Even people at the bottom have mobility and will go where better opportunities are found.
> Of course stuff like farm work and grocery stores are low paying, so it's not like they're just going to disappear.
Farm work has been massively automated with tractors and harvesters, those jobs have mostly disappeared. Today but a tiny percentage of the work force are employed in farming, when before it was the majority of the population. Grocery stores have changed as well. When before there were clerks handing goods over the counter, now people grab their products from shelves.
Aside from the fact that most kids can’t tell when they’re being exploited, why should kids be the stopgap for corporations that not even adults want
According to the rules of the “free market”, these jobs should either provide better conditions or working conditions or both in order to attract talent, because there’s plenty of workers— they just don’t want to work for the lack of return.
Pick up and drop off laundry? Sign me up! For $50? Umm. Maybe I'll pass.
Of course you see this effect where middle class people in developing countries have far more full-time help than all but the wealthiest do in the US and Western Europe.
I suspect that in the coming years, we'll see far more self-service, automation, and some services that are pretty commonplace today becoming much more of a luxury.