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Thirteen year olds working in the Netherlands don’t qualify for minimum wage- “13: (The minimum age of employment under the supervision and with no guarantee of a minimum wage.)”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_working_age

Not sure where you’re getting your info, but 14 year olds can legally work (with some restrictions) in France. Some EU countries have a minimum age of 13. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_working_age

I’ll take a stab at explaining from my (limited) experience. US schools receive funding from many sources, but the budget is set locally (usually once a year) by administrators and approved by a locally elected school board. When administrators make the budget they have to estimate how much money to set aside to pay substitute teachers. The administrators don’t know which or how many teachers will get sick so they distribute sick hours to the teaching staff evenly. You can think of sick hours kind of like getting ‘shares’ in the substitute fund. Now as teachers work for a district over time these sick hours continue to accrue. Basically it means teachers who have worked there for a long amount of time and haven’t needed to use the hours have hundreds of ‘shares’ in the substitute fund. People with a lot of accrued hours can transfer them to other employees. The amount of ‘shares’ in the substitute fund stays the same, but the ‘owners’ change. Meaning the giver loses their promise of substitute coverage, but the district can continue paying for both the sick teacher’s salary AND a substitute teacher to cover their classroom, AND buy those new crayons they promised. Hope that all made sense.

Some places just want to be very clear that sick time is the same for every employee while PTO hours can vary based on seniority/merit etc. Most folks already understand that, but some people need it spelled out.

If this is a public school there is not a lot of evil and greed happening. It’s just people doing their best with very meager funds and budgets they can’t change without board approval. If this issue is important to you, please take a second to learn about the fiscal year 2024 appropriations and consider contacting your federal legislators here.