4/05/2004

Nathan Newman offers a reality check on the latest in Nicholas Kristof's messianic campaign to teach the left how he learned to love neo-liberal corporate-driven gloablization: If the children aren't allowed to work, adults elsewhere will be allowed to work, and almost invariably at a higher wage, so they will have more money to bring home and possibly pay the taxes to fund schools for their children. Repeat that-- you take a job away from a child, you are creating a job slot for an adult, improving his bargaining leverage, and increasing the collective wages paid to the poor in the developing world. Those who talk about the benefits of child labor invariably tell some story of a particular child, but ignore how the pathetic wages paid to that one child has undermined wages for adults in that country overall. This is why child labor was banned in the United States-- not just because of empathy for children but from hard-headed strategy to deny corporations an easy way to avoid paying adult wages.

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