School is not vocational education’s only venue, Bryan Caplan points out (in The Case Against Education):
If learning job skills in the school is good, wouldn’t learning job skills on the job be better? Unfortunately, we have an innocuous yet infamous label for kids learning job skills on the job: “child labor.”
Civilized adults recoil at the name. Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages.
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Federal regulations do more than exclude minors from dangerous jobs. Outside of family businesses, farming, newspaper delivery, and performing arts, work for kids under 14 is all but prohibited. U.S. federal law caps 14-and 15-year-olds’ work at three hours a day on school days and eighteen hours a week on school weeks. Plenty of states have stricter regulations. Under California law, 16-and 17-year-olds may not work without school permission or more than four hours on a school day.
When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.
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The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.
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When researchers compare working students to comparable nonworking students, work has a clear upside and no clear downside. Early job experience has durable dividends, boosting postgraduation earnings by 5, 10, or even 20% for at least a decade.
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Since the minimum wage doesn’t vary by age or experience, we shouldn’t worry that youths will be “exploited.” We should worry that youths—especially Poor Students—won’t be hired at all. Under current law, untrained workers must produce the cost of their training plus $7.25 an hour to be profitably employed. Quite a catch-22, especially for slow learners: you need training to become a productive worker, but firms won’t train you unless you already are a productive worker.
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Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law. As long as interns are college students or recent college grads learning a college-like job, government turns a blind eye. If McDonald’s hired unpaid trainees, prosecution would be swift. Unlike orthodox observers, I hasten to add, I say we need more hypocrisy. Instead of ending the unofficial exemption for college interns, we should grant it to everyone.
What else should policy makers do? Deregulate and destigmatize child labor. Early jobs are good for kids and good for society. Parental oversight isn’t a perfect way to root out abuses, but we rely on it in virtually every other sphere of life. Parents can make their kids devote their childhoods to sports and music—no matter how much they hate playing. Parents can sign their kids up for mountain climbing. Parents can take their kids to dangerous countries. Holding nonfamilial employment to stricter standards than mountain climbing is senseless.
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What about setting up a formal apprenticeship system? The best regimes are jewels, but they’re notoriously difficult to emulate. Most countries can’t be Germany.
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Before using taxpayer dollars to jumpstart apprenticeships, government should get out of the way and take stock of all the opportunities the labor market provides.