Teen Employment Isn’t Exploitation, But It Might Keep You From Becoming A Helple

[Ptarmigan]

Teen Employment Isn’t Exploitation, But It Might Keep You From Becoming A Helpless Adult
https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/14/teen-employment-isnt-exploitation-but-it-might-keep-you-from-becoming-an-unhappy-helpless-adult/

More than once, I’ve­ 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 – I wasn’t 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, “We’re #1 and #2.”) This was the mid-’90s 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.

Of course, the nature of my job 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’s 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.

I worked as a teenager and never thought it was exploitative.

It’s hard to understate how novel and alien the idea of unemployed teenagers is in human history. In his book “The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance,” Ben Sasse notes, “As 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.”

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.

This stance against teens working at McDonald’s produces an odd contradiction here on one side of the political spectrum – 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’t know better.

[Eupher]

It's real simple.

When you work (yes, even as a teenager), you get paid. When you work efficiently and with enthusiasm, you build a reputation for others to emulate. When you outgrow that job and move to the next, you retain your skills that you've learned -- especially the bit about working with enthusiasm and efficiency. Pretty soon, all that becomes a habit that you take with you through the rest of your working career.

You continue to get paid and most of the time, you get paid more and more because you assume responsibility and accountability.

That's the way it works. Shielding teenagers from work is yet another draft of wind blowing through the House of Cards that we continue to build.

[Texacon]

I started cutting grass at the age of 12. Edging meant using a pair of clippers because there were no weed eaters.

At 14 I started hauling hay. Good money during the summer and extremely physical.

At 15 I started pressing pants in a manufacturing plant until I had an accident.

At 16 I was milking cows, building fence, and mucking stalls.

At 17 I went to basic training.

I didn’t do those things because I wanted to. I did those things because if I wanted something I had to earn it. None of those things hurt me and I hope this I worked for saw value in what I did.

This no work mentality is absolute bullshit.

My work ethic comes from those early years and has served me well.

KC