{"id":1914827,"date":"2023-04-14T11:11:38","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T15:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/teen-employment-isnt-exploitation-but-it-might-keep-you-from-becoming-a-helpless-adult\/"},"modified":"2023-04-14T11:16:13","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T15:16:13","slug":"teen-employment-isnt-exploitation-but-it-might-keep-you-from-becoming-a-helpless-adult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/teen-employment-isnt-exploitation-but-it-might-keep-you-from-becoming-a-helpless-adult\/","title":{"rendered":"Teen Employment Isn\u2019t Exploitation, But It Might Keep You From Becoming A Helpless Adult"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fteen-employment-isnt-exploitation-but-it-might-keep-you-from-becoming-a-helpless-adult%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1914827&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>More than once, I\u2019ve\u00ad been drawn into a conversation among friends and family about who had the worst job. To the extent this is a competition, I always win because when I was 19, I spent a summer working at a port-a-potty place.<\/p>\n<p>It was actually a pretty great job \u2013 I wasn\u2019t dealing with used port-a-potties, my job was to hang out in a warehouse all day riveting together new port-a-potties that were shipped to the business. They came flat-packed in boxes and I had to put them together with a rivet gun. (I also had to put vinyl signs on all the port-a-potties that said the name of the company and their slogan, \u201cWe\u2019re #1 and #2.\u201d) This was the mid-\u201990s and I was being paid $12 an hour, which was about two or three times the minimum wage, and you better believe I was happy to have that job.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-939454473\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-c2841ec25ed6b62c8696cdf77545f804 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-c2841ec25ed6b62c8696cdf77545f804\"><\/div>\n<p>Of course, the nature of my job at the place all changed my final day working there, when the owner of the company, whom I liked a great deal, came up to me and asked a favor. It\u2019s a long story, but there were about 12 portable toilets that had been sitting on the back of the lot for days. These were fancy portable toilets that had sinks, and the users of the toilets had thrown the paper towels they used to dry their hands into the toilet tanks. It turned out the paper towels were so thick they were clogging the suction hoses normally used to clean out the toilets. Unable to be cleaned, the toilets were just sitting there baking in the August sun for a week or so, and pretty soon you could smell them from the road out front.<\/p>\n<p>The owner of the business eventually had an idea for how he was going to get those port-a-potties cleaned out: He asked me to do it. It was one of those moments where you\u2019re staring at someone and trying to process information so outrageous that you\u2019re almost hovering above the scene trying to make sense of what you\u2019re being told. I didn\u2019t understand what he was asking me to do until I realized he was holding a pair of elbow-length gloves. In fairness, my boss knew it was my last day, and he told me I could refuse to do it. But everyone else was working 60-hour shifts driving trucks around, and he was desperate.<\/p>\n<p>I considered what he said carefully, and it came down to this: The man had treated me very fairly, and until this point, had paid me exceptionally well. I was grateful for the work. We shook hands. I snatched the elbow-length gloves, climbed up on the trailer, and spent the next two hours filling garbage sacks full of wet paper towels that had been marinating in human excrement for days. Afterward, I took off several layers of skin with the bar of Lava Soap that sat above the work sink, and I never saw anyone I worked with at that job again.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, for the cognoscenti out there reading all of this, I know what you\u2019re probably thinking \u2013 how could I, an otherwise capable and well-intentioned young man, have let myself be exploited like this? Voluntarily submitting to the most distasteful whims of my employer is exactly the kind of false consciousness that allows the capitalist machinery to be greased with the blood of vulnerable youth.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b982353d1876d0336f722c172eccf778 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b982353d1876d0336f722c172eccf778\"><\/div>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Real Sign<\/h2>\n<p>If it seems like that last bit is a joke, it\u2019s not much of one. I got my first hourly wage job when I was 14 and worked more strange and demanding jobs as a young man than I can possibly remember. That\u2019s a pretty common experience for my Gen X peers. As I get older, I hate to default to variations on \u201cget off my lawn\u201d and \u201cit builds character,\u201d but you can imagine my reaction to the emerging idea that teenagers working is exploitation.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, Iowa is considering an \u201cextreme child labor bill, which would allow kids as young as 14 to work in meatpacking and construction,\u201d in the <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MorePerfectUS\/status\/1643010024111763457\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">words<\/a> of \u201cMore Perfect Union,\u201d a leftist media group. In fairness, there have been some recent concerns about child labor violations, but more often than not, those are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/02\/25\/us\/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">closely tied to a larger problem of immigration<\/a> that the people complaining here don\u2019t want to address. What\u2019s more fascinating is how quickly the talking points from groups opposed to this legislation shifted away from kids working in supposedly dangerous industries to being shocked that teenagers work in\u2026 fast food.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s More Perfect Union highlighting a viral TikTok, where a man is shocked to learn that one of the people working at a Chick-fil-A is 13 years old. The kid explains his father owns the restaurant, so he\u2019s able to skirt the rule requiring him to be 14 for a work permit in most places:<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\"> <span class=\"EOlt2SJvDnbQAWwpPHoiVUxg64N5kZf01MFGuKyq7e3dCh\"><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">A viral TikTok shows a 13-year-old kid working at Chick-fil-A as a customer asks \u201cIs that even allowed?\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/dAXcEzz7wJ\">pic.twitter.com\/dAXcEzz7wJ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MorePerfectUS\/status\/1645453362169511937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 10, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/span> <\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>And here\u2019s a former Bernie Sanders delegate <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/bern_identity\/status\/1645493732240949248\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">informing us that<\/a> \u201cChick-fil-A is not alone in exploiting children for cheap labor. In Iowa, yes, that\u2019s a real sign at a McDonald\u2019s advertising to hire 14&#038;15-yos.\u201d<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-10a8df56c027f89667a3c0c825e22da8 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-10a8df56c027f89667a3c0c825e22da8\"><\/div>\n<p>What\u2019s striking here is the incredulity of these responses. (Yes, I have no trouble believing that\u2019s a real sign.) Have we reached a place where Americans are so \u2013 there\u2019s no better word for this \u2013 <em>privileged<\/em> that people can claim to be shocked and upset by the idea that 14-year-olds are working at McDonald\u2019s?<\/p>\n<p>The depressing answer here is a resounding \u201cyes.\u201d Younger generations of Americans simply haven\u2019t gone out and gotten jobs as teenagers the way previous generations have. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/mall-troubles-threaten-a-rite-of-passage-the-teen-job-1495540801\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>, between 1978 and 2016 the teen labor force participation rate in the summer fell from 72 percent to 43 percent. What\u2019s more, of the teenagers that were unemployed in the summer, less than 9 percent said they were looking for work.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to understate how novel and alien the idea of unemployed teenagers is in human history. In his book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2017\/05\/26\/senator-ben-sasses-plan-to-save-america-one-child-at-a-time\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance<\/a>,\u201d Ben Sasse notes, \u201cAs late as the 1870s, when industrialization had already begun squeezing out many apprenticeships and smaller skilled trades, it is estimated that children between the ages of 10 and 19 were still providing at least one-third of family income.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now, however, a substantial percentage of Americans have come of age without either the cultural or financial incentives to go to work as teenagers, so naturally we have a lot of people with no frame of reference who view the prospect of making kids work menial jobs as exploitative rather than formative.<\/p>\n<p>This stance against teens working at McDonald\u2019s produces an odd contradiction here on one side of the political spectrum \u2013 kids can read graphic depictions of sex acts in the school library and even permanently surgically mutilate their bodies based on their feelings, but paying them to work is exploiting inchoate children who don\u2019t know better.<\/p>\n<p>In any event, I have to applaud New York Magazine\u2019s Sarah Jones for gamely trying, and quite decisively failing, to reconcile this contradiction in a recent piece, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2023\/04\/children-are-not-property.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Children Are Not Property: The idea that underlies the right-wing campaign for \u2018parents\u2019 rights.\u2019<\/a>\u201d Jones argues that parents trying to assert control of their children\u2019s education and protect them from a predatory gender cult are motivated by fear of losing autonomy over their children. At the same time, that impulse to control their kids is the reason why red states are now passing laws making it easier for teenagers to get jobs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn each case, conservatives betray a conviction that a child is the property of parents. Because parents own their children, they can dispose of the child as they see fit,\u201d writes Jones. \u201cThey can deny them evidence-based medical care. They can put a child to work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Set aside the incendiary ideas about kids being \u201cproperty\u201d or the fact that the \u201cevidence-based medical care\u201d for kids Jones refers to is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/article\/yes-europe-is-restricting-gender-affirming-care\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">rejected by several progressive European countries<\/a>. There\u2019s an obvious problem with Jones\u2019 argument here. If parental authority is toxic \u2013 or at least the authority of parents guilty of wrongthink \u2013 who should be ultimately responsible for helping children develop into productive adults?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cChildren aren\u2019t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food,\u201d writes Jones. If parents can\u2019t be trusted, well, we can always count on the fact that Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Trust him to provide your education, health care, shelter, and food, and he will give you what you deserve \u2013 good and hard.<\/p>\n<p>In any event, Jones is at least honest about how she reached these suspect conclusions. \u201cThere is no way to control a child forever. My parents learned that much,\u201d she writes. \u201cI hid books from them and discovered different ways of thinking through literature and furtive online searching. In relatively short order, I became an atheist and a socialist\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Suffice it to say, relitigating your own unhappy childhood is a terrible basis for a political program, to say nothing of how humiliating it is to remain smug and oblivious to the fact your beliefs are defined by your self-evident immaturity.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Clean Hands and Pure Hearts<\/h2>\n<p>Speaking of immaturity, the fact that large numbers of Americans made it to adulthood with a comfortable lifestyle divorced from any understanding of the effort needed to sustain it has obviously disturbing cultural and political implications. There\u2019s now a Reddit community known as \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/antiwork\/comments\/12jm6px\/life_feels_like_a_fucking_chore\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Antiwork<\/a>\u201d that has 2.5 million members \u201cfor those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs\/work-related struggles.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now I acknowledge that younger generations are being screwed economically in alarming ways. As of last month, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nar.realtor\/newsroom\/baby-boomers-overtake-millennials-as-largest-generation-of-home-buyers#:~:text=Baby%20boomers%20now%20make%20up,family%20member's%20home%20into%20homeownership.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">baby boomers were still the largest cohort of home buyers in America<\/a>. America\u2019s once-vaunted economic mobility is obviously stunted compared to the past, and fixing this may well require some drastic political solutions.<\/p>\n<p>But, while acknowledging the limits of dealing in generational generalizations, it is also hard to be sympathetic to a cohort of people that never needed jobs as teenagers, have developed toxic attitudes toward work broadly, and are now making a hard-left political turn as a result. Taken to its logical extreme, the results of trying to divorce work from the economy are self-evidently absurd. And yet the anti-work ethos is so strong that every day online, there\u2019s some bitter Zoomer sincerely proposing ideas such as \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/editorials\/meme-review\/twitter-gobsmacked-by-sex-work-as-mutual-aid-under-communism-hot-take\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sex Work As \u2018Mutual Aid\u2019 Under Communism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that one does not wake up one day at age 21 understanding the value of work and what it takes to be productive toward your personal goals. Working as a teenager, ideally a time when you still have some adult guidance at home, goes a long way toward cultivating those skills \u2014 even if the jobs most teenagers do aren\u2019t necessarily validating, aren\u2019t always well-paid, and are sometimes just bad experiences.<\/p>\n<p>Learning to overcome your circumstances by reconciling effort and achievement is a pretty necessary life skill, to say nothing of learning to accept that we are all called to varying degrees to do work that we do not want to do. The fact large numbers of Americans apparently feel work is solely about personal fulfillment, not an end in and of itself, is an ominous sign for the future.<\/p>\n<p>Some years back in Hilary Mantel\u2019s \u201cWolf Hall,\u201d a historical novel about Oliver Cromwell and his role advising Henry VIII, I stumbled across this observation: \u201cSomewhere \u2014 or Nowhere, perhaps \u2014 there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the sh-t.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, I am proud to say I have been that man doing the shoveling, even if I am not eager to do it again. If nothing else, spending a few hours sifting through piles of human excrement turned out to be far better preparation for a career in journalism than I could have imagined. <\/p>\n<p>I genuinely do sympathize with the plight of young people who are unhappy about their perceived lack of options, and I would tell them that the clich\u00e9 people like to dish out about \u201cdo what you love\u201d is generally good career advice. Just bear in mind, you\u2019ll never know the true meaning of \u201cdo what you love\u201d until you learn to love what must be done.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-62b4a97b57bd91017717c5301609fac0 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-62b4a97b57bd91017717c5301609fac0\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">\n<div class=\"article-author-description fst-italic\">   Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/heminator\">@heminator<\/a><\/b><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-tags bdr-top-black mt-30 mt-sm-60 pt-15 pt-md-45\">\n<ul class=\"list-unstyled d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center mb-0 mx-n10 p-0\">\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/antiwork\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">antiwork<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/communism\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Communism<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/employment\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">employment<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/summer-jobs\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">summer jobs<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/teenagers\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">teenagers<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/work\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">work<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More than once, I\u2019ve\u00ad been drawn into a conversation among friends and family about who had the worst job. To the extent this is a competition, I always win because when I was 19, I spent a summer working at a port-a-potty place. It was actually a pretty great job \u2013 I wasn\u2019t dealing with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274,"featured_media":1914828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[9175,5731,8191,24379,5778,9351],"class_list":["post-1914827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-adult","tag-employment","tag-exploitation","tag-helpless","tag-isnt","tag-teen"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1914827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1914828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1914827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1914827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1914827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}