> Imagine making the same argument for 7 year old chimney sweeps in Victorian England
That's quite an extreme example you got there, but as a former child worker myself I feel qualified to push back. I did hard physical labor at a warehouse at the age of 13. [1] This was a key opportunity in my life. With the money I earned from this hard labor I bought my first computer that helped solidify my computer science career. I could then spend a lot more time [2] on computer contract work, which meant I moved up the class system significantly with my finances.
So whenever I hear of these think of the children arguments, I think back to my own origins and how these protections are also mechanisms for preserving class hierarchy and making sure that children of less well off parents don't make any progress during their earlier years. To force the children to accept the lifestyle and means of their parents as a reality of their own lives.
That said, normalizing full time working instead of school isn't great either. I personally only worked summers (3 months of school break where I'm from) and so working didn't impede my school education. Thus I think better child labor laws would allow working when it doesn't interrupt school work. Unfortunately the child labor laws that I encounter are always blanket statements based on age.
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[1] The local child working laws didn't allow this back then already. I was lucky enough to be matched with a warehouse manager who didn't care too much about child working laws.
[2] I had already started my computer contracting work before I ever got my first computer. I used public computers to do this work, e.g. a public free internet point at the local hospital. Not ideal and very limited usage time, but when there aren't other options it's great.
From a certain POV, most great people in tech engaged in a lot of child labour. However, we should be careful with such an argument.
Yes, high walls (like minimum wage, child labour laws, etc.) prevent the most extremely poor from competing with everyone else. Those are probably worth building though, if social welfare programs exist.
The natural tendency of competitive processes is to throw away all values in pursuit of the win; in the end, someone has to set a floor.
> Imagine making the same argument for 7 year old chimney sweeps in Victorian England, and the flaw in your argument becomes more obvious.
It doesn't make it any more obvious to me. That 7 year old Victorian chimney sweep still has to eat. If society doesn't have the infrastructure to take care of them, then the other alternative is to starve, possibly to death.
Refusing to hire these workers only makes things better if doing so also results in a real pressure to provide said infrastructure. It seems unlikely that would be the case both with the chimney sweep and the rickshaw cyclist (at least in the short term).
> That 7 year old Victorian chimney sweep still has to eat. If society doesn't have the infrastructure to take care of them, then the other alternative is to starve, possibly to death.
Yet we no longer have 7 year old chimney sweeps. Refusing to hire one now is one part of the process that changes society so that the missing infrastructure that you mentioned gets provided for future potential 7 year old chimney sweeps.
I dont think refusing to hire chimney sweep children had anything at all to do with the end of child labour. I can't even really comprehend this world view very well, though it is common.
Child labour ended around the time it wasnt needed, as did all phases of economic labour division (slavery, child labour, gendered labour, etc.).
In economic conditions which require poor quality labour, all you can do is decide whether you punish the poor or not. By refusing their labour, you're punishing them -- as much as refusing an oppressed minority work, on the grounds that their oppression exists.
A very bizarre thought, which I can only imagine stems from some misperceived impression of one's own importance, and confusing the emotional instinct to recoil from poverty with the moral impulse to do something about it.
So, slavery has existed for almost all of human history, and ended (yes, with a catalyst) during the height of the industrial revolution (when automation replaced the need for slave labour).
The american civil war wasnt the end of slavery, Britain ended slavery when as the controlling empire of the world, it made it illegal. It did so, in part, because it couldn't compete with slave-states on their export costs, had no significant dependence on slave labour, and was the heart of the new industrialisation which largely obsoleted it anyway.
France, which owned Haiti, did depend on slave labour -- and despite the French revolution which basically said all the "nice political stuff" --- they still couldn't end slavery. Initially they tried, but as soon as they realised Haiti was a cash cow, suddenly freedom became a French idea.
The US civil war was the american manifestation of those new economic conditions.
All of these systems: slavery, child labour, gendered division of labour -- etc. existed for basically all of human history; and still exist for large numbers of people today.
There were political events at the time of their obsolescence which were costly, sure -- as there will inevitably be when economic systems are obsoleted. The US south wasn't going to be able to compete on impoverished slave labour for very long.
I'm not exactly sure how you think history or economics works, but it has nothing to do with some self-righteous middle class people turning their noses up at chimney sweeps.
OP choses not to hire underpaid and overworked labour because it's wrong, even if doing so would provide temporary relief.