Originally published at: Popeyes fast-food restaurant in Oakland shut down after child-labor violation claims | Boing Boing
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14th Street Chicken Corporation
Found the name for my new band.
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I can’t even be a smug Canadian about this. In Ontario, where I live, the government has announced they will allow children to drop out of school as young as 15 if they find a full time job in construction. If they can keep the same job for five years, they’ll be given a high school equivalency certificate.
The construction unions and contractors alike seem to love the idea, but as a construction worker I find it shocking and abhorrent. I don’t want to work with children, and I know they don’t belong on a construction site.
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The Republican dream becomes more true every day.
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In construction?! That’s a fairly dangerous job. Even older teens probably shouldn’t be doing it.
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Yep. For some reason, conservative governments across North America have a hard-on for competing to see who can be the jurisdiction with the most shameful workplace fatality.
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That and maternal mortality rate competition
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The reason is that they want to return their countries to the “glorious” Gilded Age, where wealthy white Christian men like themselves ruled all in the name of greed and everyone else had to lump it. Peons having to feed their children to capitalist industry to ensure basic food and shelter for the family would be evidence of their success.
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They can get proof of an education they do not have?
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I can see this being abused big time. That’s going to be lorded over anyone close to the five year mark to make them do anything.
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Won’t it also be abused by high school dropouts willing to dig ditches for five years to get the certificate?
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… if everybody knows the “certificate” doesn’t mean we actually got an education, then how can it qualify us for anything, what value can it have 
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What would having a high school equivalency certificate do for them if they decided to leave construction at the end of 5 years? Typically, such certificates/diplomas require passing a test that covers math, science, etc… and even then, earning such a certificate by passing some test(s) has limitations not present when one has earned an actual high school diploma. A certificate for lasting 5 years on a construction job comes off as a rather cynical reward, and one that to me seems aimed to trap teens into long time constructions jobs.
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Part of it is also due to the boom and bust cycles in construction. We work our asses off for a year, then a big project ends and we take a couple of months off before taking the next call.
Right now, developers/contractors are begging for workers as we’re in the busy part of the cycle, but within a couple of years projects will wrap up.
It’s normal for there to be calls for more workers to be trained, but in the past governments have fooled around with supervision ratios and forcing injured workers on disability to return to the workforce. Neither has been a success, so now they’re turning to child labour.
It’s frustrating, because the answer is really quite simple: stop imposing insanely tight deadlines, and spread infrastructure spending out over multiple years instead of dumping it all at once. All of these public-private partnerships where government throws billions of tax dollars for infrastructure but conditionally on projects being completed within a year is absolutely killing people.
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If employers can find out how an applicant got their equivalency certificate, the construction workers’ certificates will be worthless.
If employers can’t find out, all high school equivalency certificates will be worthless.
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In fairness, most folks I know who dropped out of high school(including myself) did just fine later on by using the age old tactic of lying on their resume. It was only when I was in my mid-twenties considering post-secondary that I went back and got it. Nobody ever checks a high school diploma, and who you know and how well you interview is a far better predictor of whether or not folks will land a job.
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