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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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This is one of the problems that I think you can actually prison your way out of.
If a minor is ever found working in a place they’re not allowed, every manager who has ever worked at the same time as the minor goes to prison for 20 years, along with 3 levels of bosses above them. Like the made up thing about North Korea imprisoning multiple generations of your family, but exclusively for management. Make it so the consequence of not reporting a child labor violation is so incredibly high for everyone who’s even nearby that regional managers start showing up to check because their life would be ruined if they didn’t find it.
Ok, but the ruling class are the ones who create the laws. They would never do this because they're not going to fuck themselves over or their profits, unless theyre doing it to quell a revolt.
Shit, I've been a carceral abolitionist since I found out there were other people that felt like me about the way this country keeps chattel slaves and even I can get behind that. We'll keep the prisons around-- for the capitalists as consequence for their capitalist ways.
Incarceration seems to be the only language many of them can understand
It seems fitting no?
it absolutely would not work, you cannot excise the primary contradictions of the mode of production through a punishment regime. labor costs have to go down as rates of profit fall to maintain growth of profits. labor costs go down through employment of precarious workers and the creation of precarious conditions for workers.
I disagree. Even working within a capitalist framework it is possible to impose penalties for particular behaviors that make the potential cost of those behaviors high enough to not be worth doing.
We always say that fines are the price of doing business, but that means if you make the fine high enough the business goes bankrupt. If you make the cost of being caught high enough, and personal enough, it will change behavior.
Would you be willing to hire a 14 year old if you know that if the inspector who comes by every 2 weeks hears a whisper about a 14 year old working you’ll go to prison? Would you pressure your underling to hire 14 year olds if you knew that situation would mean you, your boss, and the CEO also go to prison?
It’s not like corporations will just always disregard the law by their nature. They try to make the most money possible, so if you make the risk of doing bad things high enough, they will avoid doing those things.
the most you can manage in this case is a transfer of labor-cost savings abroad or onto some other vulnerable group. it is impossible to deny the motion of capitalism through the word of a law. it needs new markets to exploit or thinner margins. a capitalism that tightly controls these factors is one that can't grow, it is a fantasy. socialism is the only antidote
The corporations will prevent your law from existing or being enforced. Capitalists are not separate from the state, they are its primary controller.
If profits necessitate child labor then only a concerted anti-capitalist push will reverse it. Labor laws didn't emerge because they were good and popular they emerged because a militant labor force was already earning them through praxis and the state attempted to head off even greater gains through a legalized labor process that must follow "the rules", i.e. not use all of the tools at its disposal.
Basically by the time you'd get those laws and enforcement you'd already have the power to do even more.
in any place where that was how using child labor was punished, there would be no need for that punishment (and therefore that punishment would never be used). So idk what the point of fantasizing about the US not being the US but still being the US is.
Honestly only that I’m a nerd and find it fun to think about ways you could make significant improvements with small changes that would still work within the fundamentally evil framework we live under