Don’t forget, our capitalists have been hard at work infecting the rest of the world with OUR greed disease. We’re the ones advocating other nations stop seeing their people as valued citizens and instead as capital livestock to be exploited mercilessly.
Child labor exists elsewhere out of desperate, struggling developing economies. We’re worse imho, because we’re doing it amid record profits, because its never enough, and our gluttonous pig oligarch owners ever demanding mooooaaaaaar, exploiting these kids whose schools they’ve already destroyed and stole the funding of through tax evasion and legislative tax policy capture.
We aren’t human to them, we’re capital livestock, which just makes our non-wealthy children capital veal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/20/republican-child-labor-law-death
Capitalism isn’t exclusive to the US. It’s definitely a major breeding ground for the worst aspects of it, but it’s hardly unique in that regard.
If that’s literally your only metric, maybe.
If there’s no child labor, then everything is a-okay in your book?
Our brand of rigged market capitalism truly found it’s stride under Reagan’s deregulation giveaway. We’ve been exporting/advocating/bullying other developed nations to do the same ever since. There are tightly, tightly controlled, adequately taxed capitalist economies that focus on how REASONABLE capital incentive can benefit society (the point of any economy, that we’ve abandoned) that can work, like the Nordic model, but now we’re coming for that too, and we’ll do to them what we did to the UK and are doing to France.
It’s an easy sell. A faustian bargain. You just need a few people in the right positions of power. “Hey, YOU can live larger. You can live like a modern pharoah. Just sell out your countrymen. Do you like yachts? How about yachts the size of cruise ships?”
And Margaret Thatcher was doing her own disassembly of worker’s rights. They enabled each other, but one wasn’t wholly dependent on the other for their actions.
isnt something like 99.8% of the population financially incapable of holding capital/being called capitalists?
What children are being forced to work in dangerous places? Or missing school to do so? Is there a bunch of 4th graders missing school to go into the mines?
They’re literally getting dragged into machinery and killed on the job right now. Yes. Granted. They’re undocumented immigrants currently. So we’re not supposed to care about those. Inevitably though they will move on from abusing just those children.
Honestly anyone who would ask “where were they born” when considering whether to care about children getting hurt or killed is an unredeemable monster.
IMHO, the root of the issue is that the GOP has been dogmatically opposed to international law for decades now. They don’t like having to answer to anyone other than themselves. And you need 2/3rd of the senate to ratify.
It’s more than that, because Republican governors have been actively trying and succeeding in rolling back hard won child labor protection laws.
It’s not just about not having the foreigns telling them what to do, it’s because Republicans want children providing cheap labor to boost their stock portfolio. Here. Now.
Labor is only one of a multitude of things that this treaty addresses. Conservatives have been objecting to issues of sovereignty around its language on education, corporal punishment, criminal punishment, healthcare, sex and gender discrimination, etc.
It’s also worth noting that this treaty has carveouts to allow certain forms of child labor. Moreover, the US was able to ratify ILO 182 to agree to ban the worst forms of child labor.
I’m not saying child labor might not be a motivator for some of then conservatives opposed to ratifying this treaty, but there is a LOT more in there that US conservatives hate to relinquish control over, and when treaties are just focused on labor law, they have been easier to ratify.
This is more complex than just labor. The labor argument a fraction of the full story.
