Fuckin’ A; comments like that sound supportive of this fuckery.
It sounds supportive of child exploitation.
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I actually just wrote, then deleted a lengthy post on that exact topic. I think America’s weirdly high drinking age contributes to a lot of social problems by making alcohol into a mysterious forbidden thing for kids. Compared to most other countries where kids are exposed to it gradually at much younger ages and by extension don’t have insane binge drinking in colleges and such.
I decided it wasn’t a can of worms worth opening here though, because the child labour issue in the story is much more to the point.
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14 year olds should not be working bars! How is that difficult to grok? Neither should 17 year olds, really.
I had to wait until I was 18 to get a license to serve alcohol in the place I worked when I was a teenager. Prior to that I worked in the kitchen.
Yeah, because all small business owners are known for following the rules so strictly, especially with regards to their own kids… sure… /s
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I think you’re probably right, but that’s not really the issue here - the issue here is child labor. 14 year olds should not be working in bars, or pretty much anywhere. They should be focusing on their education.
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It’s vanishingly low because it’s against the law
This is not rocket science
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At a restaurant table, if the 14 year old server over-serves, who is on the hook for the fines?
If you make it the on duty manager ultimately responsible and not the 14 year old, a smart manager would not put an underaged server (and by extension themselves) in such a position.
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with a minor in being a kid. education is important for kids, and so is play.
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In many restaurant, an absent owner/manager can very much ignore such aspects of serving. They will go with the most exploitable and easiest to ensure a low wage without push back.
We need to stop thinking as if economics can explain human behavior. We’re not rational actors participating in a perfect market place.
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This bill is already dead on arrival in my humble opinion. Not because of the age limit but because of this clause:
“The bill requires the licensed operator of the bar or restaurant be on the premises and supervising.”
Good luck getting some franchise owner to go to all of his franchises to make sure this is run right. I see multiple major lawsuits if this bill is passed
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Here in the UK, kids are allowed to drink at 16 with their parents in a bar*, and in the local pub near where I grew up (and my first job at 15, although not on the bar), the general policy was to let under-18’s drink, as long as they were local. The general idea was that it was better for the kids to be drinking in a pub where their neighbours/relatives could keep an eye on them, instead of sneaking off somewhere to drink White Lightning behind a barn.
I had friends who’s parents absolutely forbade them from alcohol before they were 18, which of course didn’t work, and they didn’t have quite as mature an attitude towards drinking as the rest of us. (Well, mature for an 18 y/o anyway).
tl/dr supervised drinking for young 'uns is probably good, child labour should be heavily regulated.
*(that’s the simplified version anyway)
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Here’s the less-simplified version:
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Yeah, I used to work with a guy who moved back to Ireland from the US with his wife and late-teens son. Said son went wild going to bars for a month or two and then just kinda stopped because the allure of underage drinking was gone. Pretty sure they moved back to the US fairly quickly so I wonder if he went back to underage drinking when they returned.
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