this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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What’s wrong with teenagers working a few hours a week? I think that’s a good thing. Where I live, it’s rare for, say, a 17 year old to not work at all.
I'm not sure a 17 year old working a few hours a week is what they're thinking of.
Ok the tone of the article is mostly fuzzy, but it seems the publication did explicitly as for a "defense of child labor" article, which they then published with an Oliver Twist photo. 🤔
I'm all for it... As long as they get paid as much as their adult peers!
It's a bad idea to get kids socialized, thinking low pay is ever acceptable.
There should also be mandatory training about wage theft and how serious a crime it is for an employer to expect anyone to show up early or stay late without paying for that extra time. Have a great big award ceremony for the kids that reported employers who were caught pulling that shit! Make the employer pay them an amount equivalent to all the lost wages times three.
You want people to have more kids? Have the state give parents tax benefits (or just checks!) for each child's earnings until they're 25 or so.
I don't think it's inherently bad to pay kids less than adults, provided they're not supplementing their parents' wages. Ideally a part time job after school would be pure disposable income.
But the potential for abuse is way too high because humans are awful. There would need to be a stupid complex network of regulations and inspectors to do it right.
This is how all regulations work (for the most part). Also note that there's no such thing as "too much" or "too little" regulation. There's just bad regulations and good regulations.
Examples of good regulation:
Examples of bad regulation:
Note: I work for a huge bank and our executives bitch about the cost of compliance all the time. Make them bitch more. Of all the things that need regulation, banking is of the greatest need. Never trust any financial system or transaction that isn't heavily regulated! There's an infinite number of ways to get screwed via banking and if it weren't for regulations they would screw you and everyone else as much as they possibly could. History is full of examples.
What I meant was that it would require so much that there wouldn't be a way to effectively enforce it, especially since we already don't do that for wage theft for adults.
Although I guess the process for kids providing parents income already exists for stuff line FAFSA
A 17yo isn't not a kid.
Is it is not a kid, what do you mean? And what is your point exactly?
I think the point is that the term "child labor" could be broadly interpreted as anywhere from teenagers having part time jobs to little kids slaving away in Victorian workhouses. There's obviously a lot of differences between those extremes and I think most people tend to think of something closer to the latter when they hear "child labor."