A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US
A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US
This is Culver’s. They’re a burger fast food joint located throughout the Midwest and have things called “Scoopy Night” where a percentage of the proceeds go toward a specific cause. Schools, dance groups, etc can partake and the kids who attend that school/dance group/etc help take orders and deliver food to tables. Not quite as dystopian as OP has made it seem.
Nah, you got the wrong end of the stick, this is an uplifting story - it's a kid working hard to provide for his mum's cancer treatment that in any other developed nation would be covered by taxes. Uplifting. Right? So Uplifting. He doesn't need to be with his mum in her time of need, he should be suckin that capitalist dick.
This kid is way too young to be taking verbal abuse from customers. I remember being 19-but-looked-15 and grown-ass adult customers calling me stupid and useless, and generally speaking to and looking at me like I was a piece of dung stuck to the bottom of their shoe. People who thought I was a literal child behaved this way. Not to mention all the perverts. Kids shouldn’t be working customer service, not in a world where adults have such disgusting behavior.
I worked at an Arcade/Restaurant when I was 13 for 25-30 hours a week. It was absolutely a positive experience for me and it's a shame to see so many people here crucify the idea of any child working at that age. Y'all haven't the slightest idea whats the motivation and just assume they are being forced into it or something. Having a job so young built character and showed me that I was able to get the things I wanted in life if I put in the 'hard' work. Nobody forced me to work those hours, I wanted to! Props to Culver's for providing the opportunity to kids.
When I was 13 I was 'encouraged' by my family to get a job. I had no interest. They pulled some strings and I began illegally working (14 was the legal age) for a small family diner. At this time I just wanted to fiddle on my tech as I was very nerdy, but my family didn't want me to "stay in my room all the time," so pointless labour it was.
I did appreciate the liberation I gained from my family, even if I didn't have the knowledge of what to do with it; How to expand upon it. Probably for the best imo. I spent my whole first paycheck on some games that me and my homies would play in the garage and made great memories. If there was a life lesson to be learned during this whole experience, I never understood it at the time. Eventually I was let go from work since no-one taught me how to perform my job duties well enough. That's life, though!
By luck, one of my caring high-school teachers managed to slip-in his own curriculum. He taught a class of ~15 students some important financial skills... how mortgages work... how to create and manage savings... credit building... Bunch of important life stuff that I would consider essential knowledge in our society was an optional course I learned through word-of-mouth/happenstance.
???
why
Meanwhile and my ultimate gripe with this thread and tying this back into a dystopian - I see some people mention they learned valuable life lessons and a bunch of other copium. Witness me and your kin around you. Is the knowledge you gained - the wisdom acquired through action and experience - is it gained through labour? No. I didn't and others didn't either. Can it be taught safely without forcing children with a young developing brain into dangerous work environments? Yes. I gained such wisdom later from the safety and comfort of my school. And we rest on the final point with a question:
How many opportunities in the common layman eye are there for children to receive education on the matter?
If your experience had 1 or more, I'd love for you to share such experiences here as it's eye-opening to those who received and did not receive such privilege. I'm certainly interested! :)
She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.)
The children yearn for the fast food jobs, Overcooked and Roblox games have proven that.
I saw this on Reddit a while back. This isn't an actual employee, it's the kid of a manager who brought them to work for the day (school was closed or something). The dumbass manager thought it would be cute to dress her kid up and put them on the register, but patrons were rightly weirded out. Culver's corp found out and were pissed - I'm not sure if the manager got fired or not, but this definitely wasn't something Culver's was cool with.
This photo was taken years and years ago, look how young Neil Gaiman is in it.
"This is a systemic problem. Children should have their needs met without the need for work, and this child working is an obvious symptom of the problem at hand."
"Have you ever considered that I, an individual, worked at a mcdonalds at the age of 15? I used the money to buy a video game. Therefore your argument is invalid."
This comment section is fuckin weird.
Land of the free my ass
People offended just by looking at this picture out of context should really try explaining their preferred authoritarian social policy to a teenager who wants a part-time job but for whom some people would forbid them by penalty of the law.
Spoiler: They won't understand why you should have any authority over their body and time.
I don't understand why you should have that authority either. I mean, where does it end?
What are your criteria for exceptions? Shouldn't it be between the kid and their parents, and not you?
Are you imagining there is a parental figure with a bull whip for this kid in the back office and you want to outlaw physical abuse? There are already separate laws for that!
In the land of the "they were really better off as slaves!".
This is contextless ragebait. A lot of the outrage in this thread seems to boil down to:
- Children are too young to be working because factories. This teenager isn't working in a factory. The reason children were maimed and killed in factories isn't because they were too young to handle the machines; the machines were dangerous. Adults were and are also killed in mines and factories.
- Poor children shouldn't have to work to get nice things because people shouldn't be poor. Amazing idea. How soon do you think that can happen? It's not just the poor who need work to afford things.
- Children shouldn't have to work to survive because parents. Not always available, and, no, 'put bad parents in jail' isn't a solution. State custody is almost always worse.
- Children shouldn't be working in service roles because abuse. I'll touch on this soon.
- Children shouldn't be working for strangers because stranger danger. This isn't a problem that disappears just because you hit an arbitrary age, especially if you're a woman.
I'll preface by saying I am antiwork and anticapitalist, and I support youth liberation.
I grew up in a poor household where I was emotionally and physically abused by my parents and siblings. This numbed me to the abuse I would experience in service roles, but also just as frequently in office jobs. When I was 14, both of my parents were permanently disabled and I was ready to get on with the rest of my life when I realised I was never going to have time to be a child. I dropped out of school and started working multiple jobs, on and off the books. My situation was not unique where I grew up. The income allowed me to survive, to escape my 'family', finish and continue my education, and eventually flee the country to get functioning healthcare and a basic standard of living by the age of 18.
This was only possible because I begged, pleaded and humiliated myself to garner enough sympathy from the paternalistic Morality Police who thought I couldn't possibly know what I wanted for myself, and who thought my place was memorising bullshit in school and being confined to the house with my parents. who thought my parents weren't abusing me but that I made that up because I was 'spoiled'(?). It took six years for the ageist remarks to slow down; six years of constantly reäffirming my personhood and defending my intelligence and trying to 'pass' as an adult. Even then, in my twenties, it was 'are you here with your parents?' 'why aren't you studying, partying, travelling or doing drugs?' 'what do you know about [insert line of work]?' Maybe because I'd already been in the industry for ten years and I have bills to pay? Unthinkable, apparently.
I should not have had to go thru any of that, but I wasn't going to wait for the revolution. If I had lived the 'ideal' sheltered life that my lower middle class peers received: my life would have begun suddenly and abruptly — dropped in the deep end — in my mid-to-late twenties with all the skills and worldliness of an infant. Please stop presuming to know everything that is 'good' for young people. Please stop acting like the authority on when and how someone should be allowed to live their life. Under the current system: most people couldn't be said to be full 'adults', but instead permanent adolescents. One could find several things wrong with this image, but the presence of a teenager doesn't even rank in the top ten on that list. Attack the system, not the people trying to live under it.
Honourary mention to everything @Creddit@lemmy.world wrote: https://lemmy.world/comment/6630731
This is a pretty funny image because the kid looks like they're 8 and in full uniform, but there's no way to know their age from this picture. They could be like 14, and a part time job at that age (or a bit younger) isn't weird.
What's weird and, frankly, extremely fucked up is some internet weirdo taking creepshots of a minor and posting it on Lemmy. What the fuck is wrong with you, OP? How would you feel if someone was posting pics like this of your kid on the internet?
When I was that age I was mowing lawns to pay for my video arcade habit. This is probably safer
Thirteen year olds working in the Netherlands don't qualify for minimum wage- "13: (The minimum age of employment under the supervision and with no guarantee of a minimum wage.)". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_working_age
Kid in old age, probably: "Yeah, I was working in the Salt Mines at 11. Then they petered out, so I got me a job at the Pepper Mill. By the time I retired, I was first shift at the Olive Garden, doling out shredded cheese like a fiend. Yessir! Them was the days!"
Lol Republicans with their shenanigans. All red states have made child labour legal and kids aged 16 can work at a bar. #MAGA
I would just walk out.
Great. Now I'm craving a butter burger
I started working at McDonald's at age 13. Was the worst job I ever had and that remains true to this day even in my 30s.
Next, companies are going to start recruiting at Day Care centers lmfao
Babies serving babies