(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Child Labor Memories of a Former Child [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-26 The house where I learned to use a jackhammer between 4 and 5 decades ago I start many of my stories “Back when I was young and stupid—I’m not young anymore.” This story starts almost 5 decades ago, when I was very young indeed. These memories were triggered by reading about the Iowa bill re-legalizing some forms of child labor. See Jen Sorensen’s wonderful cartoon take on the issue. I grew up in Santa Fe, NM. My dad was a general contractor, and in New Mexico at the time there were no age limits on working for a family-owned company. Therefore, I worked construction labor every summer starting at the age of 11. Do not think ill of my dad for this. He did his damnedest to keep me safe and teach me how to be use tools well and carefully. I did learn valuable skills that let me start working for other contractors when I was old enough, And It did help pay for college. However as an adolescent… Well this story does start “Back when I was young and stupid.” Starting work at that age did have its double-edged sword of benefits and detriments: Benefits: At the beginning of the school year, I had money burning a hole in my pocket and I was the strongest kid in my class. Detriments: I’m not yet 60, and I have almost no cartilage left in my body. The joints that have not been replaced with snazzy titanium parts look, in the words of my orthopedist, “Like a 97-year-old.” While my shiny new replacement parts give me fun stories to tell at airport metal detectors, recovering from shoulder-replacement surgery is not something I would wish on anyone! And to be honest, I was lucky. I had a classmate in 6th grade whose dad owned a roofing company. He lost all the skin on his forearm when a bucket of hot tar splashed. Just pause a moment and think about that. He was a year older than me, but still in the sixth grade. He had an injury at 12 years old, that would traumatize anyone of any age! I knew another kid who had to have his hand sewn back on when he was 16. According to state law back in the dim mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you could still buy a new car with a carburetor,16 was old enough to work any job that didn’t involve serving or selling alcohol. He caught his wrist in a radial arm saw on a job site one day. I’ll spare everyone the details. They rushed him to the local ER in Española, where they couldn’t treat him. The ER staff put the hand in a cooler full of ice and ambulanced him to Albuquerque, where the doctors at UNM Hospital put him back together. He had played bass in a high-school band an one of the band members was a friend of a friend of mine. According the the friend-of-a-friend bandmate, his bass playing “didn’t get any worse.” My only two work-related injuries to speak of (or at least to tell stories about) occurred when I was 15 and 17—almost old enough to know better. The summer I was 15, I got my glove caught in the drive gear of a cement mixer. I pulled my hand out almost in time, but it did peel the tip of one finger like a grape. More than four decades later, I still don’t have much of a fingerprint on that finger. The summer I was 17, I was no longer working for my dad. A hastily constructed wheelbarrow ramp collapsed, and I dropped a wheelbarrow of large rocks on my forearm. It swelled up so much the doctors at St. Vincent’s Hospital thought they might have to operate to save my hand. They kept me for three days in the hospital with my arm in a sling pointing straight up, attached to the ceiling. I missed two weeks of work after that. Weirdly enough no bones broke, but that wrist still aches whenever the weather gets damp. I had been working with a master stonemason at the time, and the dry-stack retaining walls we built are still there. In spite of my injuries, I’m, still enormously proud of the work! Look up images of La Vereda Compound in Santa Fe, and you can see the stonework I was learning to do until my arm was crushed. Oh, and there was the summer I was 13. We were working on a massive renovation of a house on the outskirts of town (a modern street-view image of which is at the head of this story). Being 13 and as full of myself as only a 13-year-old male can be (God must suffer fools gladly to let us live through that age), I used to show off on the job site, carrying three sacks of Structo-Lite plaster mix mix in my arms at a time while my friends could only carry two sacks of Portland cement. The sacks were the same size, but a bag of Structo-Lite weighs only 50 lbs, while a bag of Portland weighs 94 lbs (I was young and stupid, but clever). From experience, I can give this advice: Don’t sneeze while carrying 150 lbs in your arms. One sneeze, and I pulled my back muscles. I spent the next four days lying on a heating pad flat on the floor, reading science fiction and hurting. Also on that job site, we had to remove a home-made concrete fish pond. The pond would not hold water, and the plan was to take it out and redo the entire area with a low hill and desert-scrub landscaping. My dad gave my friend and me the job of busting it out. I took a swing at it with a 16-lb sledgehammer, which scuffed the dust on the concrete and bounced off. My friend looked at me like I was a less-than-macho slug and took a swing--with the exact same result. Then my dad took a swing. Let me tell you something about my dad. He was short—only 5’6’ and on the thin side. He wore penny loafers and an oxford-cloth button-down shirt on the job site at all times. However, he moved with a grace and efficiency that could put a dancer to shame and he was the only person on the site strong enough to lift the 300-lb elevator counterweight we used in the back of the truck to add traction. He picked up the sledgehammer and promptly showed us how to swing it at the concrete—with the same damn result! OK, off to the tool rental to pick up a 90-lb jackhammer and compressor, which he promptly taught us to use. That tool did the trick. I turned out the leaking fish pond was made of two-foot thick steel-reinforced concrete! It took us several hours to bust it out. At one point I accidentally drove the spike of the jackhammer through my shoe into the concrete. I had to hop on one foot and hit the spike sideways with the sledgehammer to break it loose and get my shoe back. Again, I was lucky: The spike went between the tips of my toes, blistering them a bit, but NOT CUTTING THEM OFF! There’s a take on the old saying, “That which does not kill us only gives us stories to tell.” Either that’s a classic case of survivor bias, or complete bullshit. Probably both. Either way, I’m willing to bet most of the people clamoring for child labor have never been child laborers themselves. Let’s keep our kids alive and safe instead, and let companies pay adult wages for dangerous labor. 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