Get a Job, Kid!

Flipping through the Globe business section last month (after reading Dilbert of course), I see this headline: Student dropout rate too high? Let's try child labour. Well, I immediately throw on a pot of Earl Grey tea and prepare to settle in for a cracking bit of Swiftian satire. Imagine my shock and disappointment when I discover that Neil Reynolds, the author of this piece, is entirely serious. Or at least I think he is.

Reynolds points out that, although Canada's dropout rate has fallen (from 16.5 per cent in 1990 to 8.5 per cent in 2010), the dropout rate is still too high, particularly among many immigrant and aboriginal students. And at the heart of the problem is the fact that young people without high school diplomas have an employment rate of only 40 per cent, compared to 65 per cent for those with diplomas. Well, I agree this is bad, but I think the problem is partly one of definition. Is this a dropout problem or an unemployment problem? I think it's the latter.

Cast your mind back to your grandparents' generation. Unless you came from a long line of University professors, chances are your grandparents didn't finish high school. Hell, one of my grandfathers never even finished elementary school, yet he ended up with a well-paying unionized job that allowed him to buy a house, a car and support an extended family. That, of course, doesn't happen anymore. For almost any employer to look at you, you need that diploma.

So, of course, the solution is to put the dropouts to work. And for that, I will give Reynolds his Nobel prize for economics and a hero cookie.  But wait. Reynolds leaves two questions unanswered: Who is going to hire these kids? And maybe even more important, how much are they going to get paid? "...[W]e're not returning children to "Dickens's  dark satanic mills," Reynolds reassures us. So of course we're going to give them jobs that pay at least minimum wage. There we go, problem solved. Can I share that hero cookie with you?

Alternatively, we're going to pay them something far less than minimum wage, in which case we are returning to something that does indeed look suspiciously Dickensian. Not only that, but we would be creating a parallel market of much cheaper labour that would be in competition with adults looking for "real" jobs.

So which is it -- young adults supporting themselves with reasonable paying jobs, or children being exploited with wages that are far below the norm? The problem is, Reynolds doesn't say one way or the other. This is interesting in itself. Imagine, if you will, a business press that talks about corporations without ever making a reference to profit or loss or talks about commodity markets without any reference to price.

 If I were a real Marxist, I would say this is no coincidence but rather is symptomatic of a bourgeois press that always glosses over questions that are of interest to the working class. As Marx said, "the working class is the bourgeoisie's dirty secret." But I'm not a real Marxist, just a humble indoor Marxman, so I'll assume it just slipped his mind.