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Then when they’re 15, they can rape them, but marry them when they get pregnant (because plenty of conservatives support that), they won’t be able to abort their rapists child, and with a bit of luck the GOP will also make divorce harder (that’s also something they want) so that their young wives will never be able to escape them and because conservatives will ensure marital rape continues to go unpunished.
It’s honestly right in everyone’s face and yet mentioning it people will act like it’s some sort of fringe conspiracy. No, motherfucker. It’s their policy. They’re open about it and they leave a paper trail.
https://19thnews.org/2023/07/explaining-child-marriage-laws-united-states/
Child marrage is legal in the vast majority of states.
Obviously. Also children are generally more easily exploitable.
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Got to have someone to exploit, why not naive kids. --these sickos
It’s probably because it’s a bar in a town of like 300 people.
My wife bartended at 16 in a town in Wisconsin with 300 people.
Does she look back fondly on that experience?
Like, if you ask her, would she say she preferred doing that over normal 16 yr old things like studying, hanging with friends, or doing sports?
My guess is that it would be a bittersweet or poor memory for her, and that given the choice she would have preferred to not have to work at a bar at 16.
Note: IM NOT SAYING she shouldn’t have had a job if she wanted one. Having a job as a teen teaches you a lot of things and prepares you for a “real job” in a low risk environment.
Myself, I worked at a pool first teaching lessons, then becoming a lifeguard when I was old enough. I was on the swim team so I was already there for 2-3 hours per day during the week, and hung around most of the day all summer anyway, so getting paid to do stuff I was already comfortable doing was not a stretch.
I gained valuable skills, I know CPR, Rescue breathing, first aid skills, how to deal with neck/back injuries, etc. I also had fun working in an environment where I could have friends and peers all going thru the same life experiences.
I am just concerned that this kind of environment doesn’t exist in a bar in Wisconsin.
She did those things too. It was a small town.
She worked 2 nights a week and made extra cash, plus got bartending experience. Really not a big deal.
Teens working isn’t inherently exploitation. Some people don’t mind 8hrs/week as a teenager. On the other hand, I did. No fuckin way I was working.
Where’s the author been the last 6 years? The only time the GOP surprises me is when they do something that benefits people more than corporations.
Do you have any examples of that?
Edit: I meant examples of Republicans actually doing something to help regular people. The implication being that they don’t usually do that. Sorry if I was being unclear.
Examples of them helping people? Or are you asking them to site sources on them not helping people? Genuine question, your comment can be read both ways
Based on their other comments I’m pretty sure that was a [citation needed] on there being any examples of the GOP actually helping people.
thats not an example of GOP helping people
Oh, I thought we were talking about the other way around.
How about something other than the current debate in this thread?
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not an example of GOP helping people over corporations
You shouldn’t have a job at the age of 14, let alone have one in a bar. I’m not sure who’s worse- the self serving gop or parents that would allow their kids to work in that environment
You have to remember that the people promoting this sort of thing never in a million years think it would affect themselves or their loved ones. They are 100% convinced it will be used to “punish” people, just not themselves.
You see it literally every time republicans implement things like abortion bans, detainment camps, child labor etc. And republicans start crying in the media and say stupid shit like “He’s not hurting the right ones”…
Look I started working before I was 14 and I turned out perfectly dysfunctional!
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14-year-olds often aren’t even in high school yet. That is too young to be working a real job.
many 14 year olds in the UK are two years away from finishing school.
Nothing wrong at all with them learning to turn up on time, get on with co-workers, budget their wages etc. Stand them in great stead for 2 years later when they are into the real world. 16 year old looking for work after leaving school stands a much better chance if they already have work experience
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Sorry, why should a middle schooler be doing physical labor? This sounds like nightmare capitalism.
Sure, if you ignore all of human history it sounds like nightmare capitalism.
You mean all of human history when we had things like slavery and women as property? Yeah, we should keep doing that stuff too, right?
No, you’re making up things to be angry at. Children working existed before capitalism.
Your argument is really “we did it before, so it’s fine”? We did a ton of things before that aren’t ok. Historical usage of a thing doesn’t make it ok.
No. Children working existed before capitalism, you’re grasping straws coming up with that conclusion of what I said.
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Weird, because UNICEF seems to disagree. But hey, they don’t work in benefits and taxation, so what would they know about child mental and physical health?
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A 16yro with a job vs a 14 yro with a job is a HUGE difference. Those 2 years are massive in development. 14 yro’s should not have a real job yet
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This is about the U.S. based on the article and you are talking about how school works in a completely different country. In the U.S., middle school is a step between elementary and high school for kids age 12-14 who are too mature for elementary school but not mature enough to be treated with real responsibility yet.
Expecting a child, and they are children, to go out and earn a living at 14 is ridiculous. Especially when it will be a horrible entry-level low-skill miserable job that will just make them unhappy.
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“It didn’t do me any harm” is not a reason to do something. And I would say that you have no idea how it harmed your development. People make that claim about getting beaten as kids too.
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Well you didn’t learn to spell “bollocks” for starters.
So you will now quite happily send your 14 yr old daughter to go stand pulling pints in amongst a group of drunken men?
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I was abandoned by my parents, didn’t do me any harm. Guess child abandonment should be legal according to your logic.
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Teenagers maybe. 14 yro in middle school? Absolutely not.
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Yes. That’s why I said Maybe
nothing wrong with having a job at 14. I was working at 9 years old.
Markets and fair stalls at 9-10, paper round from 9 years old, by 14 i was working in cafe’s. Absolutely nothing wrong with children in jobs if they are paid fairly, arent exploited etc.
but 100% they should not be serving alcohol.
Work in a capitalist system is predicated on exploiting labour for the purpose of profit enough. You cannot have a capitalist system and have work not be exploitative.
If it wasn’t, they’d make no profit.
Conservatives have found yet another way to groom teenagers. “Oh, it’s fine. She’s used to it. She works here. Hey, you like what you see? Let me sneak you a shot…”
For conservatives, every accusation is a confession.
I’m horrified only because you’re speaking the truth.
I started working construction when I was 15. I’m in my 30s and my body is broken, but like, I gotta eat right? Obviously this 14 yr old shouldn’t be working at a bar, and this is a symptom of a larger problem, but that’s SoCiAlIsM.
Except socialism is not directing your politics, capitalism is. When you have a lot of money lobbying politicians, corruption is inevitable. It even tells you in the article.
The bills are backed by restaurant lobbying groups as part of a broader effort to loosen child labor laws “to cut labor costs and deregulate employment”, the report writes – at a time when child labor violations are on the rise across the country.
I think we are in agreement then. My socialism bit is just how the people around me see any type of regulation, regardless of their own interests.
When I see news like this I can only think that we are starting to see the end of our society as we know it. This is not progress in any way for the people, just for the powerful.
To me when progress is not directed toward the people that means we fail as a civilization. Why are humans living in complex civilizations if not to put the effort of thriving in common, getting past survival and aiming to live in comfort?
Because they can pay kids less than minimum wage.
I’ve never heard of this before, but I looked it up and it’s sort of true in Wisconsin:
From https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/er/laborstandards/workpermit/minoremployment.htm:
Minimum Wage for minors is $7.25 per hour. Employers may pay an “Opportunity Wage” of $5.90 per hour for the first 90 days of employment. On the 91st day, the wage must increase to $7.25 per hour
So yeah, for 90 days they can get away with paying less than minimum wage. For tipped jobs, the minimum wage is $2.33, and the “opportunity” tipped minimum wage is 2.13.
Everything about this is back-asswards.
That 90 days isn’t just random either. It happens to be the length of summer vacation for most kids here in the US. Perfect for exploiting them on their summer break!
Gonna go to camp this summer little Johnny and Jane? Fuck no you’re not, off to the factory with you, and here’s your six dollars (that’s like a dollar an hour!).
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You’re right, looking up the local school district and it’s 26 May 2023 through 2 Aug 2023. So more like 2 months + 1 week.
It’s been decades since I was on summer break, and I have no kids… rusty memory.
How much do you want to bet kids generally make less tips than adults too, because ‘what do they need my money for they are just a kid. Not like they need to pay rent’
I would give up my spine to see this made illegal
So the GOP finally became the comic book villain it always wanted to become. Congratulations.
Finally? Where have you been since Nixon?
I kinda zoned out that season and went on watching Thatcher: Rise of the Witch.
Thatcher gets a lot of hate, but you can’t deny she really helped the economy as PM, by discovering vast amounts of oil in the North Sea several years before she was elected.
Well we didn’t need so much milk while she was in that job.
I didn’t know she was a geologist.
[The owner of a tavern] disputes the idea that teens could be put at special risk of sexual assault by serving alcohol. “The environment isn’t the crime … the person who sexually assaults a person has committed the crime,”
I see they’ve fully bought in to the Republican talking points theory of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.
And they conveniently forget the follow up: “people with guns kill more people than people without guns”
Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and monkeys do too…if they’ve got a gun
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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America, what is you doing? Get your legal drining age to a reasonable age first FFS.
A 14 year old can serve alcohol for seven years before they’re legally allowed to drink any? Thats fucked.
That’s your issue? Not that 14 year olds shouldn’t be working in bars, where hours interfere with school and growing brains properly, and pervs get pervier as they get drunker? Not that child labour is bad?
Can I not be upset at both? Not sure how what I said seemed like an approval of 14yo working in bars, but go off.
It’s cause the drinking age is such a benign issue compared to child labor.
It’s serves as a distraction from the main issue at hand.
I don’t think you worded it well then. You said “get a reasonable drinking age first”. The first there implies that it’s ok to have children working in bars as long as it comes after lowering the drinking age.
Is doesn’t imply that for me at all, which indicates it might be a case of translation noise.
Yes but that was the compromise because even 13 is too young for Republicans to exploit children into working
They save them for marriage
The drinking age is fine. If anything, it should be raised to 25 so that older college kids can’t buy booze for younger ones. Alcohol is a poison; let your brain finish developing first before you start abusing it. And before you call me a prude, I drink several times a week. (And smoke weed, of course.)
Like the other person said, you should be more concerned over the child labor issue. Bars already have issues with drunk assholes hitting on and groping servers; now imagine the server that is getting groped is your daughter who just barely entered high school.
State governments should instead provide incentives to business owners to pay their workers a livable wage, like tax credits and a higher minimum wage.
Furthermore, if a business cannot afford to pay it’s lowest level employees a $40K salary ($19/hr; the bare minimum needed for the average American to afford a home and all the basic necessities), then their business model is unsustainable and they should shut down.
Would you also raise the age to join the military to 25? After all, someone whose brain isn’t developed fully shouldn’t be able to make the decision to go kill people at risk to their own life.
Fuck yeah I would. Too many young people putting their lives at risk without realizing the consequences.
Nice, then that we agree on. But it gets a bit more difficult.
Would you set the smoking age to 25 as well? Probably, since it’s so unhealthy. But then do we set fast food at age 25 as well? More people die of heart issues than anything else, and that’s mainly driven by the awful diet most people live on.
Should people under 25 be able to go into any sort of debt? If not, then that means fixing the education and healthcare systems (which seems like a good thing). But what if someone goes into debt to buy an apartment or house? Or even just a car? Having debt can be really bad for mental health, and depending on where you have it physical health as well.
If we keep thinking along those lines, do we allow people under 25 to watch TV and play video games? Both activities cause people to become very sedentary, which is bad for health as well.
Do we allow people under 25 to have desk jobs? But then along the same lines, do we allow people under 25 to have physical jobs? Both can negatively impact your body in different ways, and a undeveloped brain might not consider all the risks involved.
I’m not hating on you, I just think it’s interesting to consider just how far you would take that logic.
I back NZ in their decision to ban cigarettes entirely. What a joyless drug to kill yourself with.
All of your other examples at least have some upside up em.
Land of the free with the minimum 25 year old drinking age.
Literally the only thing an American is free to do is buy an AR15.
You’re forgetting voting, driving, getting married (unless you live in the red states where you can get forcibly married as a minor), and best of all, DEBT! ;)
That’s the same for literally all of the EU and several other countries.
Id wish my country would make the legal drinking age 16 so that… oh wait it already is XD
that’s why you have different drinking age and buying alcohol in a store age. for example where i live you can drink when you’re 18 (which is considered adult for all other purposes) and buy alcohol from a store when you’re 20.
what’s the usual age when people start drinking in the US? i’m assuming it’s way younger than the actual legal drinking age
Misread your question. Many people start drinking in the US well before it’s legal. The horrible situations my friends got in to with seedy people to procure a case of shitty beer and some cigarettes were legion.
21 to purchase in a bar or store. Kids under 21 can drink with their parents in attendance in some places. I think I remember a 16 year old could have a beer with their folks at a bar in Wisconsin, but that may have changed.
You don’t learn to be responsible around alcohol by not having any access to it and then being able to buy hard liqour right away. The stories i heard both about college drinking and highschool drinking from people who spent a year in the US were both hilarious and frightening. In Germany teenagers can buy beer and wine with 16. Hard booze and sweet drinks, where you don’t taste the alcohol are 18+. Most people are getting in touch with alcohol when they are 14-16 with their parents present. Having a glass of sparkling wine for new years, having a beer with their parents at birthdays etc.
This way people learn what they can and cannot take, how easy it is to get drunk on booze and how to look out for signs of having drunk too much. Without the criminal punishment, that the US loves to shove down peoples throat, they also feel safe to get help if someone is suspected of having alcohol poisoning.
The children yearn for the wines.
Someone told me the other day that the US/Canada and Europe should become one federal entity and that this would benefit everyone living in it. My response was that having america be the largest economic entity in that block imposing the “american values” of restoring child labour, lack of healthcare, removing abortion and the complete and total eradication of worker protections on Europeans absolutely would not benefit us. Maybe if america had a left to speak of things would change.
While I agree that a forced union would be a bad idea, it might actually help to empower our genuine leftwing movements to fight back against the extremists in the south and Appalachia. It helps to think of the US not as a single country, but as a coalition of a dozen or so vague regional groups, all fighting over one government.
The US has to build its own left it can’t just import ours, I think most of the european left would be rejected and called “tankies” too anyway in the latest red scare shit.
Frankly the idea is absurd though and the right wing in Europe would never let it happen anyway, take the UK for example, if it happened here the left would move into nationalism and we’d suddenly have every frothing at the mouth red faced gammon standing by us on the riot barricades screaming INGLIIIIIIIN as we seek to liberate the country. Which is precisely why the right wouldn’t let it happen.
While you’re correct in that the American left must be it’s own movement, I am suggesting that it cannot truly do so, due to the various groups being so geographically isolated from one another by the stranglehold conservatives have over the center of the continent. Despite all the problems that a massive multi-continent union would create, it might give prospective socialists a stronger political fulcrum with which to unseat the reigning capitalist establishment.
It won’t achieve that without unionisation efforts. And we are not capable of doing that work. Any european travelling over there would stand out like a sore thumb and get picked up as a salt by internal sniffers. The primary work that the US needs is unionisation work. One of the things that stands out to me is how much positivity for unions I see in online spaces like this one but I think that 90% of the americans in these spaces writing pro-union things are themselves not unionised or not actively working to create a union. It’s like they all expect someone else to do it for them.
This attitude of “someone will do it for me” comes from the electoralism spewed by the liberals. This obsession they have with their political involvement being ticking a box once every few years and that being the extent of it creates a mindset in which they defer any and all political power to a “representative” and expect that to be that. They all carry this mindset into everything else. It creates inaction, none of them take any responsibility for the lack of these things. Nobody else will build it for them, nobody else can, they MUST be chastised into building it themselves. They clearly already support it, but they’re not doing anything to take part in building it.
With unionisation increases and real radical leadership you would very very quickly see a landscape change in politics, as these union leaders would carry significantly more influence with the workers they represent than the local politicians. The pressure this would place on local politicians to engratiate themselves to the union leaders would be significant, you would rapidly see concessions occur.
I’m going to sidestep much of what you posted, not because I don’t think it’s a valid argument (in fact I agree with most of what you’ve written), but because I think it points to a fundamental misunderstanding of American work culture.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to assume you’re European. It is often forgotten, even by Americans, that the American government almost went full fascist in the late 1910s under President Wilson. This devastated unions and the labor movement as a whole. Conditions worsened throughout the 20th century as Walmart brand politicians successfully brainwashed millions into believing that labor unions were secret fronts for communist spies and cut any protections for unionized workers. Businesses began raising prices, cutting wages, and laying off workers whenever they tried to unionize. Fast forward to today and vast swaths of the population have been conditioned to associate unions with hard times and financial abuse.
Outside of specific regions like New England, unionizing is career suicide. People who act supportive of labor protections of any kind are ostracized pushed out, and God forbid you actually to start a union. A few people tried to at my old job, and they were all “cut due to budgetary reasons” the week before the first negotiations. A few people who were friends with them got sacked too, just to make the message clear. A man at another job tried to start the conversation and he was stonewalled and mocked by our coworkers until he quit. Mix that with a near complete lack of a social safety net or unemployment benefits and it becomes nearly impossible to get any kind of workers’ movement off the ground.
That’s not to say we don’t try. My brother is studying labor law and I’m moving to a different state that has some semblance of workers rights because I refuse to give my labor to one that doesn’t. I support labor movement everywhere I work, but sometimes I would rather not risk becoming homeless.
Ultimately though I have no objections with anything you’ve said, I’m just a sad American socialist pining for better days.
While I don’t think 14 year olds should be behind the bar, I worked in a grocery store as a kid and it was really annoying to have to call over an older co-worker to ring up alcohol. It made me wonder why they even hand kids in high school on the register.
They had a kid at the register to suppress wages
The pay was low, but so were my needs, seeing as my parents covered housing, food, most clothing, and some entertainment. I basically just needed money for gas and music. I’m glad places hired kids, I just didn’t like being on the register. I spent a majority of my time elsewhere in the store.
You should have been hanging out with your friends, doing sports, doing art, doing things that only come to people under age. The thing you will pine for when you’re old is your salad days. Those days were swindled from you so someone could find cheaper labor.
Honestly have to agree. A few hours on a weekend, MAYBE. But between homework, family expectations, extracurriculars in and outside of school, and keeping up other relationships, I don’t think kids should be working much if at all until they’re 16 or 17.
These laws are also being coupled with laws that repeal restrictions on working hours for underage workers. Imagine being 14 and having to leave school at 3, go home, do homework until 5, then go to work until 1 in the morning, and come home just to go to school at 7. That’s where these laws are heading.
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In Canada we have a minimum wage and a student minimum wage. Guess which is less…
Which province? Not true in Quebec.
Ontario. It’s about a buck less.
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I earned a lot of money in high school. Now I live in Europe and the culture is very different. That sort of thing isn’t done here.
I actually don’t know how I feel about it one way or the other. It’s different, but I did like actually having a decent amount of cashflow for a teenager.
It’s important to remember that there’s kids working to earn some extra cash for themselves (what I did as a teen and it sounds like you did, too) and there’s kids from families that aren’t well off where they have to work to support their struggling families. It is exploitation of the latter that we should be worried and upset about. Most people are fine with kids working a couple hours a week, but they shouldn’t be forced (by the system) to work daily so they have a chance of getting enough food on the table.
Oh, and btw, the working a couple hours a week thing is perfectly normal for kids in many European countries, too. I worked during holidays starting when I was 14 in Germany but IIRC only once you’re 16 you can actually do many hours
I worked at CVS for a long time and they had to be 18 to sell alcohol(beer only) and to operate the cardboard compactor so I never hired anyone under 18. Mostly because of the compactor because I ain’t hearing “I can’t clean these boxes up, I’m 17”
Maybe he can’t find employees because either it sucks to work there or he’s not paying enough…both solvable with corrupting 14 year olds.
Honestly, there are a few jobs that make sense for teenagers to get some spending money, and that’s fine: things like cashiering a grocery store or sports game. With our enforced 21 year drinking limit and most places having open container laws we stigmatize alcohol more than I would like, including this. It’s not like a teenager hasn’t seen beer before.
HOWEVER, part of our strict laws include penalizing employees personally if they serve someone underage. So are we going to exempt these minors from those penalties? I suspect not…
Kids serving booze to kids is part of the genius. Get southern kids stupid drunk, turn them into alcoholics, kill their shot at getting liberalized at a college, mess up their brains and get them to vote conservative in 4 years time.
Get kids in front of drunk men to normalise hitting on kids.
Lol the only way they can get gen Z to vote conservative
When I worked at a movie theater we served alcohol, it was a pain in the ass calling a manager every time someone wanted a bottle of wine. This could lead to a poor direction, but still, it was an inconvenience.
Selling closed containers in a cashier setting could be fine in most situations.
I mean, except when the 15 year old gets 8 years in prison for selling his buddies booze when they take their girls to see Barbie.
