My parents forced me to start work at the age of about 11. Since no one would hire me, they held my allowance of 25 cents a week until I had enough to buy a buck and a brush, at which point I went door to door washing windows. By the age of 14, I was doing phone sales and janitorial work where I wasn’t seen by the public, so they could pay me below minimum wage at an age where it was illegal for them to hire me. My parents were lifelong victims of the capitalist system, labouring in miserable, thankless, soul-crushing government desk jobs to support the mortgage and children they were told was their responsibility to have, so they saw no reason why I should escape the fate which had been forced on them. I was not permitted to have “days off.” If I wasn’t in school, I had to work, earning peanuts to make some rich white prick richer. My father referred to this as a “work ethic.”
As a result of this, I am now a radical anarchist organizer and card-carrying Wobbly unionist who has dedicated his life to the overthrow of capitalism and all other systems of oppression.