Is child labor a form of exploitation?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

An acquaintance businessman, owner of a company for the wholesale of all sorts of things, arranged for his daughter, a six-grade student, to be in his warehouse "by pull". The girl works two days a week for three hours: she performs quite real tasks of cleaning premises and sorting goods. For this he receives 150 rubles per hour - about as much as they pay in this company for light unskilled labor. About 4 thousand rubles a month comes out, which is quite good money for the sixth grade of secondary school.

As you can imagine, the exploitation of child labor is illegal - according to the Labor Code, children can only be involved in special cases, such as circus performances. My friend, however, is not embarrassed by this: he believes that the introduction to work has an important educational effect, especially in conditions when your parents are rich people and you have a real risk of becoming a major street racer from the news reports.

The humor of the situation lies in the fact that child labor in Russia is now available only to very wealthy people. A simple employee - a cashier or, say, a manager, not to mention a worker, usually cannot just take and bring his child with him so that he can provide him with all possible help. The director will ardently object, because he does not need to be held accountable at all. At best, the child will be allowed to draw with felt-tip pens in the corner or work a little for free, and this, you yourself understand, will not have the proper educational effect.

Theoretically, the school should prepare young people for adult life, and universities should polish this readiness to the level of almost ready-made professionals who are able to start fruitful work immediately after receiving a diploma.

In real life, schools and universities really graduate children with some minimal understanding of the achievements of modern science, but … absolutely unadapted to real work. For a typical graduate of a domestic educational institution, work is a new and unexplored occupation, which he looks at like a medieval peasant on a racing bike.

This leads to obvious problems: young people are afraid of work, which is why they are forced to either toil from idleness, sitting on their parents' necks for years, or to agree to the very first offer of employers, even quite useless.

The situation could be changed quite simply: create jobs for schoolchildren. The same schools could well cover the needs for cleaners, cloakroom attendants, cook assistants and janitors. With labor offices, it would be possible to organize already some kind of minimum production. Children could work there and earn money on cell phones or sit-downs in cafes, thus preparing themselves for a normal adult life.

Unfortunately, despite all the obviousness of the idea of creating jobs for schoolchildren, it is no less obvious that modern pedagogy is developing in the opposite direction. Nowadays a very convenient and beneficial idea for responsible persons prevails, according to which children should be protected as much as possible from the adult world.

Be sure, if children were taught swimming in our schools, they would listen to lectures about famous swimmers for 11 years, and they would be allowed to splash into the pool for a couple of hours a semester, with life jackets and the whole class on one narrow track.