And are the deplorable conditions suddenly a-ok the day they turn 18?

Child labor is somewhat orthogonal to deplorable conditions. Child actors can easily fit the definition.

There’s also an unfortunate cultural bias where people may view for example Amish children skipping school to take in a harvest as perfectly acceptable when kids in developing economies doing the same things are suddenly not.

It's a symptom of a larger disease. Focus on the disease, not the symptom.

You lost me, how do Child Actors fit into your analogy? Or do you mean curtail bias?

Fever is a symptom. Viral pneumonia is a disease.

Child labor is a symptom. Unchecked hypercapitalism is a disease.

Child labor existed long before capitalism. If anything the correlation goes in the other direction with capitalism reducing child labor over time due to it’s dependence on an educated workforce.

> capitalism reducing child labor over time due to it’s dependence on an educated workforce.

Dependence on an educated workforce is orthogonal to the economic system. Rather it's a corollary of scientific and technological advancement.

Feudalism isn’t dependent on an educated workforce and historically the two could not coexist.

Hardly, feudalism runs into span of control issues. Its rise and fall around the world coincides with a specific mix of agricultural practice and at most light industry.

Thus not all economic systems are compatible with an educated workforce which means they aren’t orthogonal.

While your first statement is true, I'm not sure it follows that there's a reverse correlation.

In fact, I think (having actually changed my response a couple of times while thinking it through) that unless you go back far enough that you're talking about genuine subsistence agriculture, the reasons for child labor are very similar in both cases: The wealthy and powerful take so much of the output of the laborers that without children working as well, there wouldn't be enough money to put food on the table. (Or simply enough food to put on the table.)

We produce enough, as a society, to provide for everyone. Feeding the world in 2023 is a distribution problem. Children are put to work not because it's necessary, but because the few at the top have taken, and continue to gatekeep, so much from the rest of us that too many families don't have a choice.

That's not really different between 2023 and 1023, from where I sit.

There’s still a massive carveout in US child labor law for farming. In 2023 Families making well into six figures are using young teens not because they can’t afford to pay someone, but for more practical reason and the view it’s useful training. For related reasons family businesses also have more flexibility. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/child-labor

What has changed is not just the levels of automation involved, but also the percentage of people working as farmers. A Doctor, Lawyer, Programmer, etc simply can’t leverage their kids nearly as effectively.

The proximate reason can be "because we've always done it this way," or "because it's easy", but I'm not sure that changes the root cause.

Ultimately, it comes down to "this is something that could be done better by a trained adult, but we don't have the same access to trained adults that we do to children, in part because of the massive economic inequalities our society experiences today."

No, the proximate cause is earths rotation and thus plants are vastly less flexible than factories.

I need someone for to do a seasonal jobs for a few weeks and then nothing until next year is fine if it’s a niche job like say selling Christmas trees. However, when every farm for thousands of miles all needs that same labor for those same short window you get a massive labor shortage. Worse modern farming is mechanized so you can simply put people picked off the streets behind the wheels of 100’s of thousands of dollar pieces of equipment.

There’s a similar exception in US immigration for migrant foreign workers to pick fruits and vegetables, but again the minimum threshold for competence in other types of farm labor is higher.

> Child actors can easily fit the definition.

Yes, and they often work under deplorable conditions. Psychological/emotional abuse is still abuse (not to mention the forced dieting, the rampant molestation/rape, and other very physical abuses).

But that highlights what makes child labor more worthy of scrutiny. Adult actors face those same conditions, and it's unacceptable that they do, but at least they have the mental maturity to cope with them and the social/legal autonomy to do something about them. Child actors lack any of that; they end up scarred for life over a career they had little choice in pursuing.

> often work under deplorable conditions

Often isn’t always.