You Are Being Lied To
The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion,
Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

edited by Russ Kick
published by Disinformation Books
400 pp * ISBN 0966410076

Child and Adolescent Labor: The Weakest Link in a Work-Based World

By Len Bracken

No form of labor cries out to be abolished louder than child labor. When I think of former Live with Regis and Cathy Lee! host Cathy Lee Gifford offering her son up to the commodity-celebrity machinery of the movie industry or of the multitudes of young lives destroyed by manual labor, such as the kids employed in the sewing factories that make celebrity clothing lines for people like Cathy Lee, child labor appears as the weakest link in our work-based world.

The harsh logic of the commodity economy is displayed from pitiless angles by child labor-Cathy Lee's Cody working in the spectacle and the half-hidden spectacle of 250 million children worldwide working long hours in slavish conditions. We live in a seemingly inescapable commodity economy, but certain aspects or stages of life must immediately be sheltered from this inhospitable ecosystem. Reasonable people should be able to deal with circumstances whereby children suffer so much from the poverty that afflicts five-sixths of humanity. But no, we can't even cut the startling US child poverty rate of 20 percent, worst among highly-developed countries. I would think that everyone with either a head or a heart understands why children must be sheltered and nurtured. And in a world that is awash in commodities and teeming with unemployed adults, how can caring for children mean transforming them into commodities through wage slavery?

The commodity economy owes much of its development to the exploitation of children and adolescents, both as workers and consumers, and this is its most shameful aspect. The legitimacy of child labor is now questioned by more people than nineteenth-century novelists like Charles Dickens and Emile Zola, although not by Uncle Sam. The United States was the major exception to the United Nations' 1990 ratification of the 1973 International Labor Organization Convention on the Rights of the Child-the United States signed the convention in 1995, but the US Senate has never ratified it.

Nor would the Senate ratify the Convention on Child Labor (Convention 138), and only recently did that august legislative body ratify Convention 182 on the elimination of the worst forms of child labor. This convention was agreed to by Jesse Helms, and signed by Clinton with fanfare in Seattle, as if it would allay the fears of World Trade Organization protesters. Why would Jesse Helms agree to Convention 182? Because it was negotiated with one fundamental objective-unlike 138, which would have required states to alter their labor laws, the United States would not change any laws to comply with the new agreement.

In July 2000, Clinton signed two more United Nations-approved additions to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, namely the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict-which faced stiff Pentagon resistance due to US recruitment of 17-year-olds with parental consent-and the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.

These protocols shouldn't encounter much ratification controversy, but the current bills in the House of Representatives increasing the limits on child and adolescent labor are stalled and not expected to move out of committee. Moreover, a recent News Hour with Jim Lehrer report mentioned a Rutgers University study documenting hundreds of thousands of violations of existing child and adolescent labor laws.

Of course, Washington and the states are not alone in sanctioning or turning a blind eye to abusive labor practices. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, children work long hours, primarily in agriculture and as domestic servants. But even in what are thought of as socially-developed countries, children work at apprenticeships and at jobs that have nothing to do with their planned careers. The United States ranks highest among developed countries in the percentage of 16- to 19-year-olds active in the labor force, primarily in the retail sector. Fifty percent of all working 15- to 17-year-olds work retail jobs, 25 percent work service sector jobs, and 8 percent work agriculture jobs. Grocery store clerk, nursing home attendant, farm worker-a recent report done by the National Research Council (NRC) and published by the National Academy of Science, Protecting Youth at Work (1998), says that these are dangerous jobs with high rates of fatal injuries.

In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 governs child labor, and the Employment Standards Administration of the Department of Labor administers this antiquated law. The law restricts the number of hours youth under sixteen may work, and it restricts youth under eighteen from working in some hazardous occupations. The states have their own standards; certain states actually allow youth under eighteen to work fifty hours per week in the agricultural sector during the school year. Given their concern for young people, legislators should know that doctors and social scientists have conceded an amazing point in the NRC report: excessive work causes crime, "substance abuse and minor deviance, insufficient sleep and exercise, and limited time spent with families."

A multilevel campaign to further restrict adolescent labor and abolish child labor could focus on the outdated laws and the ambiguous jurisdiction. Parents and employers who work children like little beasts should be persuaded, gently at first, but by force if necessary, not to commodify children. And kids themselves, with their innate spirit of play still intact, might make a fierce mockery of the American jobs that wise elders foist on each succeeding generation.

This assault on work is well under way, and a movie like Office Space reflects the potential both for humor and material damage in actions that have the luster of wicked office pranks. The best humor is always humor that enlightens the boss, although I should add that graveyard humor ("the best gift is a dead boss") might be overly effective and shock rather than seduce people made of pastry-namely, the masses. The tactics that I'm hinting at here may seem absurd, but the circumstances that give rise to history are sometimes absurd, and if the moment is real, it is more rational than it first appears.

Management calls theft and other activities undertaken by bad workers counterproductivity, a phenomenon that costs the nation's businesses approximately $60 billion (according to a recent Reid Company report)-this figure is projected to increase 15 percent per year. What role do kids play in so-called counterproductivity actions? The Talk of the Nation radio show on how to protect youth at work revealed that most young people either commit crimes or break workplace rules within their first year on the job. And in its guidebooks, management has registered its complaints about Generation X-the next wave of younger brothers and sisters are considered by management to be even worse.

The natural short-term strategy in a country that works longer and has higher productivity than other developed countries is to be bad workers and fight abusive work with propaganda and direct action. Reports from India and elsewhere suggest that these tactics have been effective where traditional union representation habitually conspires with management. If these actions open up enough fronts, the world could develop a large-scale psychological war, something like the Cold War-a war aimed at the morale of bosses who must eventually give up their roles, a war that quickly wins over the population to the abolition of child labor and limitation of adolescent labor.

Like Office Space, which sets such an excellent example of humor as a weapon in this war, and as inept at it as I am, I try to cultivate a little Rabelaisian humor. This humor first enlightens my boss, by letting on that I pay my debts with ransom from my last boss, and then wins him over and liberates the bad worker in him by throwing his work schedule into the river of time. Uncertainty and fear are useful instruments, but I don't always advocate inducing psychosis because people are naturally lazy. We won't have to break the habits of tens of millions, we have to break their workerist psychosis with our beautifully lazy means, reconciled with our lazy ends. Laziness enjoys broad support from the people, both moral and active support. Over time, the morale of the respective forces in this sub-rosa psychology moves in opposite directions-reaction spends its force cracking the whip, while liberation gathers strength, resting, finding roots that nourish positive social realities. And then liberation makes the enemy weak and unsure with a few easy gestures.

Our numbers are vast and growing. Our morale and conviction are high from winning numerous battles against mindless productivity. Our spiritual weapons, conceived in the humorous spirit of Paul Lafaruge's Right to Be Lazy, multiply in journals like Wage Slave World News and Web sites like Why Work? In the epicenter of ideological confrontation that pits management goals for ever-increasing productivity against those who withdraw their obedience, the latter are building material force. And once they become the decisive material force, the refusal-of-work movement will be the decisive intellectual force. Even fantastic conceptions are based on being; ours happens to meet the requirements of progress and public health. The truth is that people need and want a big rest, and it's in their vital interest, but every small act of on-the-job laziness compromises the workerist system and the workerist way of life.

My broad strategic goals are a ten-hour workweek and the universal cancellation of debt-the only candidate I've found who supports these positions is nobody, but nobody puts them right on top of the list of things nobody will do for you. My bold forecast is that nobody will succeed in attaining these goals. If the fight against fascism has retained its significance, it is, in large part, as the fight against bosses and hierarchies. The days of workerist domination are doomed.

A short-term goal is to warn people against reaction and its propaganda about teamwork for the company, quickly responding to slander with a counterbarrage of insinuations about the horrors of work. A mid-term goal is to entice death-dealing CEOs to give up and put more effort into laziness (to prepare for the coming inaction). Rumors in this regard could frighten some people and inspire others to act in ways that may seem fragmented and apolitical, but actually have big negative effects on the commodity economy.