child work (was Christian love)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Jul 6 10:22:37 PDT 2001



>At 11:44 AM 7/6/01 -0400, kelley opined:
>>a lot of kids work. if your kid didn't that's your problem. you should have
>>put him to work for you, helping you maintain the home and take care of
>>sibling and relatives, etc. my kid was "working" by the time he could peel
>>an egg, sweep a floor, push a vacuum, sort his clothes and peel a carrot.
>>
> >making [kids work] a law is idiotic.
>
>why?
>
>wojtek

Because child labor brings down the wages of adults. Child laborers who willingly work for pittances because they are in the main supported by their parents are like the semi-proletarianized peons who make less wage demands than the fully proletarianized because they still have access to land that allows subsistence agriculture. Let children work to produce use values for themselves (e.g., reading), not surplus values (e.g., flipping burgers, selling clothes at malls).

If children are to live fully independently of their parents, that's another story.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list