For years children have been exploited to manufacture goods. They get paid meager wages, work long hours in factories that aren’t well-ventilated, and with no lunch break. No recess either. Imagine your child denied of the playground. It is absolutely terrifying.

While the notion of seeing ten-year old Chinese children making the shower curtain I bought at Wal-Mart the other day is not pleasant, it is an eye-opener for me on a whole different level. Why the hell are they paying them as much as they do?

What kid wasn’t a go-fer for their parents growing up? What did I get for having to go to the store ten times a day for my lazy mom? A freaking dollar a week! Keep in mind this also included having to make my bed, clean my room, and make sure the Jesus statue was always facing the 38th parallel. Making shoes would have been like summer camp in the context of my childhood.

I cannot tell you the amount of times a fun play experience with friends doing kid stuff like building forts and having some form of physical injury occur was interrupted by the distant shout of my name. My mother had this voice that could be heard for miles. When she called my name it was like Tarzan calling for the creatures of the jungle. Nobody else’s mom had this ability, lucky me.

So the siren goes off, indicating it was time to get back to work.

What was my weekly wage called? An ‘allowance’, which is something that sounds like a very positive thing, but make no mistake about it; the root word ‘allow’ does not mean free money. There is always a catch whenever you get something in the workplace, especially when it came to child labor.

Me: “Can I go home (slash go out and play) early?”
Boss (slash Mom): “Sure, if you do this, this, and this first.”

I am sure many of us have heard that one before, and it always seems to be followed up with more tasks and chores. You end up leaving when you were supposed to originally. Or in my case, it would be raining by the time I got to go outside.

So I took my dollar a week for making 1,232 trips to the local store, going to the bank twice and filling prescriptions for relatives, all just a part of my seven-day workload.

Did kids picket as a result of these obvious harsh workplace infractions? Did children revolt? No and there is a good reason why.

Parents deliberately held back the facts about money management and what it all meant. I was given a dollar and suddenly became the nine-year-old Trump of the neighborhood. I even had that messed-up hairstyle, all kids did then, just less combed-over. Like the people in these third world countries, a dollar is more then I had before.

Then the rich kid in town shows up and my dollar looks like a penny. He is loaded and has all the best toys, the best clothes, and the killer bicycle.

There I am with my unicycle and some crappy strap-on roller skates. It took me five-hundred-and-thirty-four weeks of allowance money to get them but young Mr. Rockefeller of the damn neighborhood needed not do a single chore for his riches. I was like Cathy Bates’ character in Titanic but much smaller, male and much younger. I was no blue blood.

All of a sudden though, when this happened, the whole fallacy about money unraveled. I learned for the first time that a dollar is worth shit and that I have been working as hard as little Hajji making uniforms in Jordan for millions of United States children to wear to school, yet he probably made more than a dollar for forty hours of hard work. I, on the other hand was getting the shaft.

What did I do when I got my epiphany? I bought a set of earplugs with my hard-earned cash. It was my first lesson of capitalism: the lowest-paid do the most work so make sure you procrastinate or ignore as much work as possible.

“Sorry Mom I must have been out of shouting range.”