Working KidsFollow

I don't normally agree with gbaji, but on this particular issue he's kind of right. I have sympathy for struggling Americans who are trying to make ends meet, but to suggest that there are absolutely no opportunities for them to get out of their plight is disingenuous at best.

It's anecdotal and my experience isn't representative of the entire population, but I was a high school dropout, having been kicked out of my house when I was 14 after I came out of the closet. It was a rough life, being an emancipated adult working at a restaurant as a dishwasher and trying to get by.

However, I am now 35, with a college education, sitting on a mountain of technical certifications, in charge of a hardware department, and it all started with a 50 hours of night school training at the local votech for three hundred bucks and getting my foot in the door at a company looking for temp workers for a big project. I don't buy a lot of the sob stories people have about not being able to do ANYTHING to improve their lives. You can study a couple hours a week and spend a hundred bucks on a basic technical cert, and then get out of that McDonald's job and into some temp work with minimal effort, and no need for a steady work schedule.

In fact, with the internet and the amount of free information at one's disposal (and everyone has access to a library) it's easier than ever to self-educate.

That's not to say I agree with the spirit of this thread and the attempt to pay workers less and justify it with the notion that adding kids will somehow magically fix our economic woes, because that's just stupid... but we can't just take a position that there is a certain subset of people who have absolutely no chance in this world and base all of our economic strategies around that.


Edited, Dec 5th 2013 10:03am by Torrence

Why all the extremes? Can't there be very limited and difficult to exploit opportunities? And, yes, there are people in the world who want to do the bare minimum in life. There are people out there who will never lift a finger they don't have to lift. Not every person wallowing in poverty is an innocent soul who really wants to work but just can't because the man keeps them down. Some people are just bums with no initiative or drive (holds true for every level but bums with million dollar parents tend to fare better). But this isn't about them. There's also people out there who do want to work and their situation, however self-imposed in the past, makes it very difficult to get out of now. Work schedules, lack of transportation, child care, school schedules, etc can make it hard to get that first step up to getting your shit organized to a point where you can handle it all. You don't need to label it as "absolutely none" and then say "See, you could have gone to the library so obviously you had opportunities so it's all your fault!"

I agree 100%. However, and this is a big one, minimum wage does nothing to address the "reasonable amount of effort" part. Minimum wage sets a bar for the lowest of the bums, and makes it hard for those that put forth the actual effort to get anywhere in such a low paying job. In this case, I'd normally agree with the right wing that regulating "reasonable effort" is not the purpose of the government, were it not for the chronic and blatant history of worker exploitation. Conceptually, I'd say what is actually needed is a system that regulates employee evaluations to ensure that productive employees are rewarded accordingly, but pragmatically, I don't see how that's possible without overdoing the big government thing.

Well, you know, if the government owned all the businesses...

There's no need to regulate reasonable amount of effort. If the employee isn't doing their job it's the employer's right to fire them. That being said ANY job should pay enough for a decent living with full time hours. If you are capable of getting a job that pays better good for you, if you aren't or are not willing to put in the extra effort required then minimum wage it is BUT if we say an average work week should be 37.5 hours then those hours should pay for all basic necessities and a small amount of additional emergency money at the very least. Current minimum wage in the US does not even come close to that (at least the numbers I've seen).

Low minimum wage leads to higher taxes as government programs have to be put in place to cover the shortfall in people's income. This means that people putting in the extra effort (or not as the case may be) to make more money are subsidizing those worker's pay, you're effectively paying these corporations to rip off their employees while also purchasing their products. It's a retarded system and it needs to be fixed.

...Said the child working in textile manufacturing. Nyuknyuknyuk.

Half of it is true, there is a vicious cycle of poverty. Poor people overwhelmingly stay poor. A few people don't.

If you want to know why I feel the need to say this, it's because your phrasing is very misleading. 'The post he responded to suggested that the English aren't a superior race and that the square root of three is five. That is simply not true.'

The post he was responding to alluded that there is a vicious cycle of poverty and there is no way for people to climb out of that hole once they are in it. That is simply not true

You meant to say "It happened not to be true for me", right? Because what you are expressing here is LUCK. You were in a situation where you had opportunities in succession that worked out and allowed you to succeed. You almost certainly didn't just "try" harder than someone else or perform better. Lottery winners have class mobility, too. They probably shouldn't be used for an argument saying wealth stratification isn't an issue. "Look, Jumbo went from middle class to very wealthy in one day!"

I miss the good ole days when you could simply buy a good, lightly used child with good teeth to work in the mine. Simplier times those were.

I do not see a need to change the status quo. I already have stuff sold to me by a mildly slow teenagers. I am not sure I can handle 12 year old trying to do the same. By the way, does any of the bills limit the types of jobs the kids can do? ( tldr )

On a serious note, can't we just pay kids under the table like we used to, or do we want them to learn the importance of not cheating the IRS?





Edited, Dec 5th 2013 10:29pm by angrymnk

It was good luck? No, it wasn't. I work(ed) hard to get where I am from literally nothing, similar to many other Americans in my situation. I didn't just happen to be offered a free course and a job out of nowhere in a field I had absolutely no skill in, I sought those opportunities and made them happen after living on the streets and struggling for years.

So maybe what you meant to say was I hit a run of BAD luck but didn't let it crush my spirit? I didn't cry about how tough it was to get by on a restaurant worker's wage?

And you better believe I didn't survive corporate layoffs by not "trying harder" than the ones who were let go. I'm not a pretty girl, so no one was hiring me for my rack. Employers will always keep the ones who produce the best work and trim from the ones who don't 'try as hard'.

Should Obama be making unemployment more of a priority? Ok, I'll grant that should ALWAYS be a priority, but let's not pretend that people are only successful because of "luck" and so no one should ever bother trying.

Really?

Don't be so easy.