TV Tuesdays 17: Child labor laws are ruining this country

Ron Swanson was right

Welcome to the 17th TV Tuesday!

Since it came out that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. illegally employed more than 100 children in dangerous slaughterhouse jobs in 13 locations across eight states, people have been discussing child labor.

I have but one thing to add to the discourse:

(This is perhaps the TV Tuesday with the least actual TV thus far.)

Just kidding! As per ushe, I have way more to say.

My main point is that child labor isn’t the problem.

Just as pressure to get into good schools isn’t the problem behind teen anxiety and self-harm.

In both cases, economic precarity is the disease. Intensive parenting is primary symptom among highbrow parents and child labor is the primary symptom among lowbrow parents.

Don’t get me wrong. Parental pressure that’s so intense there’s been a 126% increase in hospitalizations involving children self-harming between 2009 and 2019 is not good. Childhood slaughterhouse injuries are also suboptimal. These are extremely worrisome symptoms, for sure. But just treating the symptoms not only won’t cure the underlying disease, may make it worse.

Criminalizing homelessness doesn’t solve homelessness and creates new problems along the way. Permanent supportive housing, by contrast, is often cheaper for cities than homelessness enforcement and ER visits and far more humane.

I simply fail to see how the same would not true of merely banning child labor. Making it easier for parents to not feel they have to send their kids into a slaughterhouse sure seems more effective and humane than imprisoning parents and sending their kids into foster care.

Interestingly, building more housing would feed these two birds with one scone.

It just seems kind of wrong and stupid to think that these people are choosing homelessness/to send their kids to slaughterhouses because they’re lazy and bad. I’m not precluding laziness/badness. But it seems like, at most, part of the story rather than the whole explanation. It seems much more likely that most people are trying to do the best they can with the resources available to them and that these people have fewer resources than the people who don’t end up homeless and/or with their kids in slaughterhouses. And, guess what? We can solve the mystery of choice vs circumstance by giving everyone everything they need to avoid homelessness and child slaughterhouse workers and then see who still chooses homelessness and dangerous child labor.

One more thing about this that’s interesting to me is that it kind of highlights an example of how authoritarianism shows up on the right versus the left. The left opposes criminalizing homelessness but supports criminalizing child labor, with the right taking the opposite position. It would be easy to say well the left wing is maybe misguided but at least has good intentions while the right is just doing the bidding of big business but I’d be curious to see what the left has to say once the kids have their union cards.

Anyway my babies, all this to say stop putting people in jail for being poor and implement a functional social safety net and build more housing.

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