[Child labor was common in urban, industrial America for most of
the country’s history. It’s now making a disturbing comeback:
lawmakers across the US are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or
repeal statutes that prohibit employing children. ]
[[link removed]]

CHILD LABOR IS MAKING A BIG COMEBACK IN THE US  
[[link removed]]


 

Steve Fraser
July 7, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Child labor was common in urban, industrial America for most of the
country’s history. It’s now making a disturbing comeback:
lawmakers across the US are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or
repeal statutes that prohibit employing children. _

Children laboring at Johnson's Hulling Station, Seaford, Delaware,
1910., Lewis Hine 1874–1940. (Photo 12 / Universal Images Group via
Getty Images)

 

An aged Native American chieftain was visiting New York City for the
first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was
curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief
[[link removed]]
what most surprised him in his travels around town. “Little children
working,” the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too
commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where
it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however,
it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume,
drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear
might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback
with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking
[[link removed]] concerted
efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at
least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath
[[link removed]]
and consider this: the number of kids at work in the United States
increased by 37 percent between 2015 and 2022. During the last two
years, fourteen states have either introduced or enacted legislation
rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children
can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and
legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows
[[link removed]]
those as young as fourteen to work in industrial laundries. At age
sixteen, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and
demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds
can now even work night shifts
[[link removed]]
and once they hit fifteen can join assembly lines. All of this was, of
course, prohibited not so long ago.

Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions
[[link removed]] into
long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their
computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the
government of the power to dictate what children can and can’t do,
leaving parents in control — a claim already transformed into
fantasy
[[link removed]]
by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit
fourteen-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.

In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published “A
Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions,” arguing that such laws
[[link removed]]
stifled opportunity for poor — and especially black — children.
The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank
[[link removed]]
funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos
family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and
Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers’ foundation,
has joined in.

Nor are these assaults
[[link removed]]
confined to red states like Iowa or the South. California, Maine,
Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, as well as Georgia and Ohio,
have been targeted, too. Even New Jersey passed a law in the pandemic
years temporarily raising the permissible work hours for sixteen- to
eighteen-year-olds.

The blunt truth of the matter is that child labor pays and is fast
becoming remarkably ubiquitous. It’s an open secret that fast-food
chains
[[link removed]]
have employed underage kids for years and simply treat the occasional
fines for doing so as part of the cost of doing business. Children as
young as ten have been toiling away in such pit stops in Kentucky and
older ones working beyond the hourly limits prescribed by law. Roofers
in Florida and Tennessee can now be as young as twelve.

Recently, the Labor Department
[[link removed]]
found more than one hundred children between the ages of thirteen and
seventeen working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses in
Minnesota and Nebraska. And those were anything but fly-by-night
operations. Companies like Tyson Foods and Packers Sanitation Services
(owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm) were
also on the list.

At this point, virtually the entire economy
[[link removed]]
is remarkably open to child labor. Garment factories and auto parts
manufacturers (supplying Ford and General Motors) employ immigrant
kids, some for twelve-hour days. Many are compelled to drop out of
school just to keep up. In a similar fashion, Hyundai and Kia supply
chains depend
[[link removed]] on
children working in Alabama.

As the _New York Times_ reported
[[link removed]]
last February, helping break the story of the new child labor market,
underage kids, especially migrants, are working in cereal processing
plants and food processing factories. In Vermont, “illegals”
(because they’re too young to work) operate milking machines. Some
children help make J. Crew shirts in Los Angeles, bake rolls for
Walmart, or work producing Fruit of the Loom socks. Danger lurks.
America is a notoriously unsafe place to work and the accident rate
for child laborers is especially high, including a chilling inventory
of shattered spines, amputations, poisonings, and disfiguring burns.

Journalist Hannah Dreier has called it
[[link removed]]
“a new economy of exploitation,” especially when it comes to
migrant children. A Grand Rapids, Michigan, schoolteacher observing
the same predicament remarked: “You’re taking children from
another country and putting them almost in industrial servitude.”

The Long Ago Now

Today, we may be as stunned by this deplorable spectacle as that chief
was at the turn of the twentieth century. Our ancestors, however,
would not have been. For them, child labor was taken for granted.

Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British
upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that
would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders. An Elizabethan
law of 1575 provided public money to employ
[[link removed]] children
as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

By the eighteenth century, the philosopher
[[link removed]] John
Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that
three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe,
author of _Robinson Crusoe_, was happy that “children after four or
five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later,
Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four,
since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in
which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement,
moral or intellectual.”

American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on
Manufactures noted
[[link removed]] that
children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a
source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age
warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy”
remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed,
it evidently remains so today.

When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the
nineteenth century, observers noted
[[link removed]]
that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was
“better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children
accounted for 40 percent of the mill workers in three New England
states. In that same year, children
[[link removed]] under
fifteen made up 23 percent of the manufacturing labor force and as
much as 50 percent of the production of cotton textiles.

And such numbers would only soar
[[link removed]] after
the Civil War. In fact, the children of ex-slaves were effectively
re-enslaved through onerous apprenticeship arrangements. Meanwhile, in
New York City and other urban centers, Italian _padrones_ expedited
the exploitation of immigrant kids while treating them brutally. Even
the then-brahmin-minded, anti-immigrant _New York Times_ took
offense: “The world has given up stealing men from the African
coast, only to kidnap children from Italy.”

Between 1890 and 1910, 18 percent
[[link removed]]
of all children between the ages of ten and fifteen, about two million
young people, worked, often twelve hours a day, six days a week.

Their jobs covered the waterfront — all too literally as, under the
supervision of _padrones_, thousands of children shucked oysters and
picked shrimp. Kids were also street messengers and newsies. They
worked in offices and factories, banks and brothels. They were
“breakers” and “trappers” in poorly ventilated coal mines,
particularly dangerous and unhealthy jobs. In 1900, out of one hundred
thousand workers in textile mills in the South, twenty thousand were
under the age of twelve.

City orphans were shipped off to labor in the glassworks of the
Midwest. Thousands of children stayed home and helped their families
turn out clothing for sweatshop manufacturers. Others packed flowers
in ill-ventilated tenements. One seven-year-old explained that “I
like school better than home. I don’t like home. There are too many
flowers.” And down on the farm, the situation
[[link removed]] was
no less grim, as children as young as three worked hulling berries.

All in the Family

Clearly, well into the twentieth century, industrial capitalism
depended on the exploitation of children who were cheaper to employ,
less able to resist, and until the advent of more sophisticated
technologies, well suited to deal with the relatively simple machinery
then in place.

Moreover, the authority exercised by the boss was in keeping with that
era’s patriarchal assumptions, whether in the family or even in the
largest of the overwhelmingly family-owned new industrial firms of
that time like Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks. And such family
capitalism gave birth to a perverse alliance of boss and underling
that transformed children into miniature wage-laborers.

Meanwhile, working-class families were so severely exploited that they
desperately needed the income of their children. As a result, in
Philadelphia around the turn of the century, the labor
[[link removed]]
of children accounted for between 28 percent and 33 percent of the
household income of native-born, two-parent families. For Irish and
German immigrants, the figures were 46 percent and 35 percent,
respectively. Not surprisingly, then, working-class parents often
opposed proposals for child labor laws. As noted
[[link removed]] by
Karl Marx, the worker was no longer able to support himself, so “now
he sells his wife and child. He becomes a slave dealer.”

Nonetheless, resistance began to mount. The sociologist and muckraking
photographer Lewis Hine scandalized the country with heartrending
pictures
[[link removed]] of
kids slaving away in factories and down in the pits of mines. (He got
into such places by pretending to be a Bible salesman.) Mother Jones,
the militant defender of labor organizing
[[link removed]],
led a “children’s crusade” in 1903 on behalf of forty-six
thousand striking textile workers in Philadelphia. Two hundred
child-worker delegates showed up at President Theodore Roosevelt’s
Oyster Bay, Long Island, residence to protest, but the president
simply passed the buck, claiming child labor was a state matter, not a
federal one.

Here and there, kids tried running away. In response, owners began
surrounding their factories with barbed wire or made the children work
at night when their fear of the dark might keep them from fleeing.
Some of the 146 women who died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory fire of 1911
[[link removed]] in
Manhattan’s Greenwich Village — the owners of that garment factory
had locked the doors, forcing the trapped workers to leap to their
deaths from upper floor windows — were as young as fifteen. That
tragedy only added to a growing furor over child labor.

A National Child Labor Committee was formed in 1904. For years
[[link removed]],
it lobbied states to outlaw, or at least rein in, the use of child
labor. Victories, however, were often distinctly pyrrhic, as the laws
enacted were invariably weak, included dozens of exemptions, and were
poorly enforced. Finally, in 1916, a federal law was passed that
outlawed child labor everywhere. In 1918, however, the Supreme Court
declared it unconstitutional.

In fact, only in the 1930s, after the Great Depression hit, did
conditions begin improving. Given its economic devastation, you might
assume that cheap child labor would have been at a premium. However,
with jobs so scarce, adults — males especially — took precedence
and began doing work once relegated to children. In those same years,
industrial work began incorporating ever more complex machinery that
proved too difficult for younger kids. Meanwhile, the age of
compulsory schooling was steadily rising, limiting yet more the
available pool of child laborers.

Most important of all, the tenor of the times changed. The insurgent
labor movement of the 1930s loathed the very idea of child labor.
Unionized plants and whole industries were no-go zones for capitalists
looking to exploit children. And in 1938, with the support of
organized labor, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
administration finally passed the Fair Labor Standards Act which, at
least in theory, put an end to child labor (although it exempted the
agricultural sector in which such a workforce remained commonplace).

Moreover, Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the national zeitgeist. A
sense of economic egalitarianism, a newfound respect for the working
class, and a bottomless suspicion of the corporate caste made child
labor seem particularly repulsive. In addition, the New Deal ushered
in a long era of prosperity, including rising standards of living for
millions of working people who no longer needed the labor of their
children to make ends meet.

Back to the Future

It’s all the more astonishing then to discover that a plague, once
thought banished, lives again. American capitalism is a global system,
its networks extend virtually everywhere. Today, there are an
estimated 152 million children
[[link removed]]
at work worldwide. Not all of them, of course, are employed directly
or even indirectly by US firms. But they should certainly be a
reminder of how deeply retrogressive capitalism has once again become
both here at home and elsewhere across the planet.

Boasts about the power and wealth of the American economy are part of
our belief system and elite rhetoric. However, life expectancy in the
United States, a basal measure of social retrogression, has been
relentlessly declining
[[link removed].]
for years. Health care is not only unaffordable for millions, but its
quality has become second-rate at best if you don’t belong to the
top 1 percent. In a similar fashion, the country’s infrastructure
has long been in decline, thanks to both its age and decades of
neglect.

Think of the United States, then, as a “developed” country now in
the throes of underdevelopment and, in that context, the return of
child labor is deeply symptomatic. Even before the Great Recession
that followed the financial implosion of 2008, standards of living had
been falling, especially for millions of working people laid low by a
decades-long tsunami of deindustrialization. That recession, which
officially lasted until 2011, only further exacerbated the situation.
It put added pressure on labor costs, while work became increasingly
precarious, ever more stripped of benefits and ununionized. Given the
circumstances, why not turn to yet another source of cheap labor —
children?

The most vulnerable among them come from abroad, migrants from the
Global South, escaping failing economies often traceable to American
economic exploitation and domination. If this country is now
experiencing a border crisis — and it is — its origins lie on this
side of the border.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–22 created a brief labor shortage,
which became a pretext for putting kids back to work (even if the
return of child labor actually predated the disease). Consider such
child workers in the twenty-first century as a distinct sign of social
pathology. The United States may still bully parts of the world, while
endlessly showing off its military might. At home, however, it is
sick.

Republished from TomDispatch
[[link removed]].

Steve Fraser is a writer and historian whose latest book is _Mongrel
Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in
American History_
[[link removed]]
(Verso).

Our new issue on conspiracy is out now. Subscribe today to get it in
print at a special discounted rate!
[[link removed]]

* child labor
[[link removed]]
* capitalism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]