(9 minute read)
Some background.
Having worked with 14-year-old kids in a factory I probably have a different perspective than most of our society. The majority of my working life was spent in factories. I started taking odd jobs when I was eleven, the first of which was digging the foundations for a house. Yes, my parents let me. The allowance of $1 a week just wasn’t cutting it. I graduated to being a paperboy. For youngsters that have no idea what that is; I delivered newspapers by hand to people. Next, I lied about my age and started working in a grocery store in a nearby bigger city at the age of 14.
Not until after I got out of the Army and took a job at a factory that did piece work did I work where underage kids were employed (and a woman). This was in the 70s.
Growing up I would help my grandparents with their garden when I visited our hometown. They had BIG gardens. I used a hand plow. Sometimes I would work for my uncle and aunt in the hay fields. I wasn’t big enough to buck bales so I would drag them to the loaders when they stacked them on the truck. I’d do the same when they unloaded. (Square bales.) I did buck bales when I got older.
I understand work.
Harder to get out than in.
When we finished up with loading the truck with hay bales, we would head back to the barn to unload the bales. This was during the time when I could only drag the bales to them across the bed of the truck. I would set between them on the ride back. I will use the names of Festus 1 and Festus 2 in order to protect their identities.
The two Festuses (?) decided it would be funny to get me to take a chew of tobacco. It didn’t work out quite as they intended. I had refused to open my mouth when they tried to get me to take a bite. Finally, they held my nose and when I tried to breathe through my mouth a little they got a chunk in. Great fun. They laughed quite a bit about doing it.
As we got close to the farm, they decided that I had better spit it out so my aunt and uncle wouldn’t find out what they had done. BTW it’s a lot easier to get something into an 11-year-old kid than out. Out can be really messy especially with a kid already covered in sweat, dirt and hay. After a few minutes of trying to talk me into doing it for my own good because I didn’t want to get into trouble for taking a chew (I laughed as best I could at that one) they realized that they had a problem on their hands.
We entered into negotiations. Through the slime and drool of tobacco juice I said, “two dollars.” After all, there were two of them. Long story short. It cost them $2 to get me to spit it out. I got the cash up front and made them swear not to take it back. They were honorable cousins, so they didn’t. They were, after all, dealing with a child.
I profited from tobacco.
Situations wanted.
On my first day at the factory where the kids worked the foreman was showing me the layout of the plant since there were a number of different machines that I would be working at. As we were walking around, I happened to notice a kid working and asked the foreman, “Who’s the kid?” I thought that he might be one of the owner’s kids. The response was curt. “He’s not a kid.” End of convo. I remember thinking to myself at the time, that’s a kid.
We also walked by a woman working at one of the menial jobs in the factory. She was the only one in the area. The guy was proud to tell me that she was the only woman working on the factory floor and that she would never work at a machine that I, a new hire, was being shown on my first day. He said that they gave her the job as a favor because her husband was in Vietnam and she needed the money.
A favor.
I learned after a few days that the kid that I thought was a kid was indeed a kid and was 14 years old. The story was that he was from a broken home and needed the money. So, they were doing him a favor.
Another favor.
Way of the world.
Did I mention that the people that owned the plant were super-duper conservative and rich? Doesn’t come as a surprise, does it?
One day after working there a couple of months I noticed that the kid was gone. When the foreman was making the rounds, I casually asked him, “What happened to the kid?” Turned out that I was right about him being 14 after all! When they “discovered” that he was underage they had to let him go. The foreman was sad about that. They had, after all, been doing the kid a favor.
A few days later another kid that wasn’t a kid showed up to work. This was a pattern. A kid would go to work. Another favor. They would work the dog shit out of him. The kids had no recourse. If they said anything they would lose their favor of job. If other workers complained about kids working then the bosses were all OMG it’s a kid and let them go. Then do the same thing all over again. Either way after a couple of months they would discover that he was … a kid and have to let him go. Kids and the woman working the menial jobs. She got sick.
They let her go.
Dog eat dog.
It was the worst factory that I have ever worked in. Piece work is horrible. A good portion of the plant was related so they got the gravy jobs. Jobs where people could make “bonus” by making over a designated quantity of product where it was achievable. If you went to the bathroom the time had to be clocked. It was cutthroat working conditions for anyone not a part of the clique.
Work orders were placed in boxes beside the various machines. The sequence was not supposed to be tampered with. It was. Some how the upcoming orders where easy bonus could be made moved to a shift where a worker that was connected would get the order.
I ended up on a machine where the guy on the opposite shift (first) wasn’t a family member or friend of the bosses. He would sabotage the machine by changing settings, loosening, over-tightening or doing just whatever he could to screw up running product to slow me down. It would take me 15 minutes at the start of my shift going over the machine just to find what he had messed up. Time was money. Once he actually caused the machine to break, shutting us both down. I finally had to come in very early in the morning and catch the guy in the parking lot to have a “talk” with him. Only time in my life that I had to threaten a co-worker with physical violence.
I came in early once and got the machine set up for a particularly hard run. It was a product that was hard to set up, load, run and make any bonus on. I had got with the forklift driver to keep me set up with the raw material that I needed loaded and my helper, a good young man, said that he was with me. (We split any bonus our machine earned.) When the shift started, I turned the machine on and didn’t turn it off until lunch break. On again after lunch and not turned off until the end of shift. We didn’t make any bonus. The foreman had watched the whole thing from his office above the factory floor. He never said anything about it either. Their system was rigged. He knew it.
They profited from it.
The point.
The point is that there’s a long history of kids working in this country from the very beginning. There were kids working in mines and all sorts of dangerous hard jobs. Kids died. Things changed and gradually fewer kids were used and abused.
But kids working never went away. Farm kids. Paperboys. Yardwork. Odd jobs. Fast food. Family businesses. Grocery stores. (Not so much now). They’re cheap or even free labor.
I was that kind of labor. After my dad had several heart attacks and wasn’t able to work any longer my parents were able to scrape together enough money to buy a little laundromat in order to have a little more income. We kids would help them out with opening, closing and cleaning. They were open early because I would open it up a four in the morning when I got up to throw my papers. People could wash their clothes REAL early. So yes we took advantage of being able to provide free child labor. So, yes from personal experience there needs to be some legal child labor. Kids still need to be able to mow for fun and profit. BTW I had a friend whose kid lost part of his hand to a lawnmower. Nothing is ever completely safe.
Labor laws got kids out of being worked to death in mines and other dangerous occupations. Laws were necessary to accomplish this. It took laws to stop people from exploiting children just as it’s taking laws now to stop child marriage like I talked about in my last post. Where do Neo-Republican Fascists (NRFs) come out on labor laws protecting children?
Take a guess.
Put them to work!
It seems like NRFs just lean to doing things with 14- or 15-year-olds.[1] They’re doing this while child labor violations are on the upswing. We don’t need kids back in factories.[2] They don’t belong there. They don’t belong in meatpacking plants either.[3] Kids shouldn’t be working as hard as adults.[4] Fascists aren’t so big on the nuclear family and education that they want kids home at night with mom and dad studying. What’s more they don’t want businesses to be held accountable. They want a dog-eat-dog world. In some cases, the Dems are helping them. That’s NRFs idea of bipartisan working together.
Not what we need.
[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immigration-hyundai/
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-dhs-investigating-human-trafficking-children-slaughterhouses-rcna66081
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html
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