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Child Labour - 80 - hrs / Week
August 24, 2009 - 6:28pm
Co$ violates labour laws and human rights
Pre-teens and Teens work up to 80 hours a week, have no time for formal education, and go unpaid, isolated from their family.
Hm. Scientology. (Dare we say the word? Will we get slapped?)
As much as I revile that organization, and accept that at least some of what they report here is probably true, this report is pretty one-sided. Also I can't understand why this report keeps showing the same instance of the same 13-year-old boy entering the building, from different angles.
And is this the kid who is allegedly the communications director? That's a pretty cool gig for a 13-year-old.
I don't in any way support recruiting kids to work for a cult, much less working for free, much less 80 hours a week, much less living in squalid conditions and completely isolated not just from family but apparently, kept away from anyone outside the cult -- if all that is true, and it might very well be. However, the main focus of the piece seems to be on the kids being deprived from attending school. Frankly, as a parent (and ex-teenager) that doesn't particularly bother me. In fact I find myself wishing that there were more opportunities for teens who want to take on real responsibilities and excape the tyranny of state-enforced confinement with their age-mates for 15 or more years of their young lives. I don't think most kids learn very much in school for the massive amount of time they spend there, and lots of them go through a great deal of suffering. You can get a GED in a year, or even attend college or university, provisionally, without a diploma. I think a couple years as communications director for a large corporation is probably in many ways more beneficial for development -- if that were the kid's choice.
Cool clip of L. Ron Hubbard in that video. What a nutbar.
I think it's an older addage that says large corporations are the place to be to gain a wide variety of experience. I think that's mainly true of medium size and smaller companies. There is where you get to mop floors and do the important stuff all at the same time. Large companies tend to slot you into one job description, and there you remain until someone takes notice of you and your talents, which can take years and years because its this oversized, slow moving corporate bureaucracy plodding along until a visible hand sticks a pin in the latest economic bubble. Most workers never break out of their capitalist cubicle prisons until the company files for bankruptcy or is taken over. Then they get to start out all over again with another company and widgetized employees producing uniform products and services for the republic of self-interested sheeple.
As for the kiddies and Enron Hubbard's school of practical capitalism, I think there's the obvious danger of producing uniform and standardized adolescents and eventually adults whove learned to think in the capitalist mold for self-interest and profit. Sure theyre learning practical skills for a capitalist world early on. But what about the individual child and learning for the sake of learning how to learn? I'm with Ralph Nader in believing that public schools have a higher purpose to educate young people, and that universities should continue to be incubators of independent thought and innovation. Science and basic research, for example,. should not be influenced by corporations or the military. Because then it's no longer science with a public interest. We don't need no corporate or militarized education. All in all capitalism wants to produce uniform widgets as bricks in the capitalist scheme of things. People are capable of so much more than living and working to make money for capitalists, whether it's donating their lives to money-making scientologists or the widget factory downtown. All in all it's just another brick in The Wall
"Look here everybody , the laddie fancies himself a poet!" [derisive laughter]