Serious question: if compensation is actually decreasing where are people getting justification on rolling back child labor laws? Now adults have to compete with children?? Isn’t that just going to make it worse???
Yes and no. Most children share homes with adults. I went on calls with my dad (he's a plumber) since I was 7 and helped him more and more as I became adolescent. Similarly, my current daughter sometimes helps me with coding jobs. It helps our home. So I guess child labor helps families and hurts single people, because it means families can grow additional workers.
Do you think there are labor laws preventing daughters from helping their dad with coding jobs? We are talking here about children participating in the labor market, not apprenticing with their parents in a casual way.
I think they were talking about states trying to get more teenagers working to help with the “labor crisis.” I had a similar upbringing to what you described, but idk if that’s what they meant.
I've done all of that except the butchery part (because that wouldn't make sense). She is homeschooled, and working with me on software projects is part of her homeschooling. Sometimes if the project is fun it could take all evening (like when we make videos demoing stuff for documentation).
As a kid, I went into dirty crawlspaces, helped my dad weld, and went on roofs, which for a little boy was pretty much the coolest thing imaginable. Whenever we were with a client who had a pool, my dad would ask the client if I could jump in, and they always said yes. I learned so much about technology from working on air conditioners. The process of troubleshooting, how machines work, and tons about sales and how to work with customers. My dad was also aggressive about SEO once that became a thing, but even before then, he did all kinds of marketing stuff himself.
I'm a freelancer today and wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been "forced to skip school for long evenings in the butchery", to put it into a phraseology that more matches your own. I think people have an idea of kids working based on school textbooks, which is sometimes (but not usually) accurate. When school textbooks teach the history of laws, it's always in this naive, doe-eyed kind of way.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and child labor is everywhere, and to be honest, none of it seems as dreary as school does. Imagine as a kid being forced to do an office job where you sit down and do nothing for 6 hours, surrounded by friends who you cannot speak to, skipping play hours so you can study textbooks that teach a completely made up version of your country's history.
It's the burden of the person putting forward a proposition to prove it, or at least provide some kind of argument or evidence. It's not the burden of everyone else to disprove it. Think about what that world looks like.
How would one contribute to the conversation better than stating what is plainly true: child labor laws are being repealed because Capital owners want them to be and pay politicians to make it so. Is it more useful to engage with whatever sophistry is used to justify their repeal as if it was legitimate or well-reasoned?
I think it was a point well made. It’s not an outlandish or niche idea. It’s lacking neither in plenty of readily available academic source material nor major cultural works. The only thing which would make it a claim so extraordinary that it begs special citation is on the presumption that capital’s appetite for child labor decreases along with regulatory structures limiting it. But that’s self evidently untrue. The only thing limiting that appetite has been regulation, and the appetite has both informed deregulation advocacy and taken advantage when such advocacy succeeds.
But all of that should be taken as read, unless a reader is inclined to disregard a vast wealth of relatively uncontroversial documentation of labor history.
It's not quite snarky, it's more reductionist. He's making two assertions: (1) Capitalism tends to shift power to those with capital, and (2) those with capital tend to benefit from cheap child labor. Will you argue against his central points, or will you dismiss them based on how they were delivered?
Unless you define capitalism as “things I don’t like” then
1) broad individual freedoms have advanced the most in capitalist countries and those freedoms have not seen monitonic decrease since some founding date, rather have seem back and forth swings with a general trend towards more individual freedom in long time scales
2) child labor laws were enacted first in capitalist countries and continue to be stronger in capitalist countries
I don’t see any rebuttal to these that don’t boil down to defining capitalism narrowly enough to exclude countries/economies that the commenter likes more and instead they would define as some brand of socialism.
Capitalism I’m defining here broadly as an economy characterized primarily by individual ownership of resources and production.
1- it calls a spade a spade: we already have theories of how Capitalism works, and none of the other replies named it. Giving a name to the problem is the first step in fighting it.
2- it explicitly calls out: "it makes them money", which is also factual and not explicitly mentioned by the other comments. They mention a "perceived labor shortage", but it doesn't clarify the fact that fighting that gets more money in the pocket of some people
Of course, the grandparent comment should've been a bit clearer in how this makes people money. I think the answer is twofold:
1- it increases the reserve army of labor
2- the minimum wage is often lower for younger people (the excuse is that this is training for them)
Yes, they love child labor for material reasons, not villainous ones: it generally costs less money or puts downward pressure on the price of competing labor.
Socialists will attribute any societal problem to capitalism. Of course, capitalist critics online will never mention that capitalism drives down labor demand by incentivizing technological innovation.
“Societal problem” is doing a lot of work in your comment. Politicians repealing child labor laws so that corporations don’t have to pay more money for workers is not a “societal problem,” but one resulting from the naked reality of the wage relation.
> Of course, capitalist critics online will never mention that capitalism drives down labor demand by incentivizing technological innovation.
I’d be delighted to concede that if it were true. To the extent capitalism does relieve demand for labor, it perpetually creates more demand however artificially, often explicitly on the arbitrary basis of labor itself as duty. To the extent it has yielded to a constant or increased demand for labor, it’s been a result of resistance to capitalism.
Ok so why has the average work day been dropping since the industrial revolution began.
If you respond with: well unions fought for it:
I'd say, that's partially true, but it wouldve only been possible if production efficiency grew, which it has been continuously over the past 300 years... because capitalism is the strongest driver of technological innovation.
Secondly, this whole thing about artificial demand is bunk because you aren't forced to consume it in the first place. You are free to live the life of a 19th century man, and you really don't have to work very hard for it, because producing 19th century level goods is very very cheap.
I apologize for being glib but… your response sounds more like it was written by Marx than anything I could have written. It’s exactly his premise. Capitalism was a prerequisite for Marxist socialism precisely because of its productive qualities. Marxist Socialism was specifically conceived to address the way that disproportionately benefits a class of owners versus the class of workers who implement capitalism’s efficiencies.
I'd be happier if more socialists actually read Marx. However, to your point. Marx thought that once our production ramped up enough, we could have everything we needed and overthrow our capital demons. He also thought that there was a ceiling to production innovation and that profits would eventually dry up due to competition.
But its been 150 years and none of that is true, we're still getting better at doing things, and human appetite for consumption hasn't really slowed down. Some part of that is hierarchical, some people just want to be better than others and so their consumption is relative. This is where a lot of artificial scarcity is manufactured. But we still continue to solve very real problems, much of which is fueled by a capitalism.
> But its been 150 years and none of that is true, we're still getting better at doing things, and human appetite for consumption hasn't really slowed down.
Citation needed.
There have been several innovations since Marx's days, creating new products and services. And the population kept growing and growing.
We're almost 8 billion people now. That by itself increases demand and opens new market (of course, improvements in logistics, shipping and communications are also what allows for actually opening new markets in countries previously underserved).
"Software is eating the world", was true enough.
But all services have been digitalized (not only private, but also the public administration), so I think that Software already ate the whole world.
In a few decades, the population will also stop growing, and that will inevitably cause problems to those who have to try to find new markets to grow their production.
So, the tendency of rate of profit to fall does not prevent the rise of companies like Google and Netflix. But even they have stopped growing as much as they did before, because they expanded to half of the world already, and now to increase profits they have to (for example): substantially increase advertisement in YouTube and crack down on password sharing for Netflix.
Another component in their fight for profits, is reducing labor costs: we just started to see that happen with generalized layoffs in the tech sector (of course, that was just a small blips, there's a lot more to come in the next few decades).
"Solve very real problems" is noble and a nice thought... But not all problems can be solved in a way that generates profits. The ceiling is not something that we will hit suddenly with a shock. The gradual trickle of innovations will continue
So the argument is that since this criticism came from presumably a socialist, which we have no evidence for, we should not consider the criticism on its own merit?
I literally responded to the parent argument though. And yes I do assume vocal critics of capitalism online to be socialist, I'm happy for parent to prove me wrong :)
Is this due to the fact that the unemployment rate only considers people as “unemployed” if they are actively looking for work? If more people who were taking a long-term break from the workforce (e.g. stay-at-home parent, retired, “funemployed,” etc.) are trying to jump back into the workforce, the unemployment rate can rise even as the economy adds jobs.
Basically the BLS performs two surveys, one of employers (which supplies the job numbers) and one of households (which supplies unemployment rate and number of employed people). Obviously, surveys have margins of errors (which is partly cleaned up via future revisions) and they don't measure the exact same thing. It's not that unusual for them to produce conflicting reports but in this case both numbers -- payrolls and unemployment -- rose much more than all the economists had forecast, right in the middle of a very key period, when the Feb has some very difficult decisions to make regarding interest rates.
If you want to dig deeper, start reading up on the seasonal adjustments and statistical models (specifically, Birth/Death model), there's a lot of ways to break down and to interpret (or re-interpret) the BLS data.
This is one of those fluky months in the household survey. All the negative number in employment can be accounted for by 1) government wage/salary worker and 2) unincorporated self employed. There is pretty obviously some huge error in there, especially 2) down 4.1% MoM. Self employed are not counted in the employer report
In the household report private non farm employment was up 395k. In the employer report private nonfarm payrolls were up 339k
Still, "within a percent" is misleading in this context. The number is within one percentage point, however, the entire range of the dataset since 1970 has been within 60 to 67%. Therefore, "a percent" difference is 14% of the range. For 2 decades between 1988 and 2008 the entire range was steady between 65.8 and 67.2 or so. The ensuing "great recession" only dropped the rate by about 3 percentage points.
The difference between a reliable cloud service with 99.9% uptime and one with 99% uptime is also "within a percent" -- but the less reliable service has 10x more interruptions.
According to the BLS, the previously published data for Q4 2022 showed real nonfarm wages rising +0.7% annualized (wages growing faster than inflation), but this has now been revised to -4.7% annualized (wages shrinking vs inflation). In fact, the revised figures show that wages decreased by 0.7% even in nominal terms, whereas they previously estimated that wages had been growing 4.9%.
Revised figures for 2023 Q1 show that nonfarm real hourly compensation decreased -1.7%, whereas the previously published figures showed -0.3%.
Corporate profits down ~5% last quarter. 10 million job openings at the moment. We are at full employment. Lots of pain for capital ahead, not so much for the labor market (structural demographics). Gotta squeeze enterprises more, who have been juicing profits with pricing power (“greedflation”).
I mean, it could be still true if you expect that only the economy outlier super rich driving up the costs against those that can barely scrape together enough for a meal.
An interesting observation would be to know the grocery cost growth per area / supermarket chain to see if there's a wider increase in prices between affluent and poor neighbourhoods.
"Facts" and "reality" have never been a serious, or any sort of, problem for those folks. They believe in trickle-down and the reason people are poor is because they go to StarBucks too much.
I'm talking about those that "claim that wages are driving inflation", not the current administration. If they are also doing so, I will happily retract my statement and focus my ire more broadly.
Note that nonfarm payroll is still seasonally adjusted - 156105k vs. 156306k adjusted.
The FRED series for NFP with and without sesonality: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15LPE
Its been the same with the jobs numbers for the last couple of months, I don't know why they even publish the numbers with such a big margin for error.
Perhaps the preliminary numbers are 'estimated' high or low for political purposes - ie. to grab the right headlines or to push markets in the right direction.
Then the real figures can be quietly corrected later.
