So I have been at a retail company for two years, the company that sells brand-name clothes at low prices. My GM has been the GM of the store for just over a year, but she was a supervisor from the time I started. So she was talking about how her 15-year-old son has a job, a construction job, where they like lay concrete and do all kinds of manual labor. And saying how her son only gets paid eight dollars an hour. And I’m like damn, that sucks! And she was like “well when I was 15 I was making 7.10 an hour and that was in 2004 or 2005”. I was like “yeah, you don’t see a problem with that? It’s 2022, and your son is laying concrete at $8/hr?” And she was like “yeah, but you gotta work your way up” and I was like “up to what? Honestly that sounds like you might want to look into the child labor laws if I’m being real, I’m not sure that a 15 year old should be laying concrete, $8 or not.”
So she brushed it off at the time, as not a big deal but I continued talking about it, because it pissed me off for her son. Later, she asked me how to go about looking up the labor laws. The GM. Who hires and fires people. Who has to abide by said laws. Doesn’t know where to look to find them.
I thought we were cool before that, but it really made me think. Why don’t people know their rights? Why are people not educated about this?
EDIT: this is not to say I’m not here to educate her, because if anything I purposely TRY to throw in little tidbits educating people of their rights in the workplace. I am happy that I am the one to be helping her out with this, because I take it absolutely seriously. However, it’s completely unfair to herself and anyone who has ever worked for her for her to be uneducated about this subject prior to me helping her. How do you know your worth as a worker if you don’t even know what is legal and what isn’t?