The Return of Child Labor Is the Latest Sign of American Decline
Steve Fraser
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 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 concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.
Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 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 those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, 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 and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.
Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions 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 by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-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 stifled opportunity for poor — and especially Black — children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank 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 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 16- to 18-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 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 10 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 12.
Recently, the Labor Department found more than 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses in Minnesota and Nebraska. And those were anything but fly-by-night operations. Companies like Tyson Foods and Packer Sanitation Services (owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm) were also on the list.
At this point, virtually the entire economy is remarkably open to child labor. Garment factories and auto parts manufacturers (supplying Ford and General Motors) employ immigrant kids, some for 12-hour days. Many are compelled to drop out of school just to keep up. In a similar fashion, Hyundai and Kia supply chains depend on children working in Alabama.
As the New York Times reported last February, helping break the story of the new child labor market, underage kids, especially migrants, are working in cereal-packing 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 “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 employchildren as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”
By the eighteenth century, the philosopher 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 Manufacturing noted 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 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% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles.
And such numbers would only soar 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% of all children between the ages of 10 and 15, about two million young people, worked, often 12 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 100,000 workers in textile mills in the South, 20,000 were under the age of 12.
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 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 of children accounted for between 28% and 33% of the household income of native-born, two-parent families. For Irish and German immigrants, the figures were 46% and 35% respectively. Not surprisingly, then, working-class parents often opposed proposals for child labor laws. As noted 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 heart-rending pictures 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, led a “children’s crusade” in 1903 on behalf of 46,000 striking textile workers in Philadelphia. Two hundred child-worker delegates showed up at President Teddy 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 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 15. That tragedy only added to a growing furor over child labor.
A National Child Labor Committee was formed in 1904. For years, 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 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 at work worldwide. Not all of them, of course, are employed directly or even indirectly by U.S. 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 U.S., a basal measure of social retrogression, has been relentlessly declining 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%. 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 de-industrialization. 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 2020-2022 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.
(Steve Fraser is the author of the just-published ‘Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion’. He is a co-founder and co-editor of the American Empire Project. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”.)
To Hear the Wail of the Children: Hard Exploitative Times
Abby Zimet
With a rapacious GOP shredding not just women’s/black/queer/poor people’s rights but now child labor laws – the number of kids as young as 10 working in America has soared 37% – we mark this weekend’s 120th anniversary of Mother Jones’ 1903 March of the Mill Children, wherein she led 100 “worn down, defeated waifs…sacrificed on the altar of profit” to ask Teddy Roosevelt to end their abuses “in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones.” God bless capitalism: He refused.
After over a hundred years of progression away from Charles Dickens’ “bitter world” and “dark, Satanic mills” – see Oliver Twist “dine on a slice of pudding for his twelve hour daily labor” – toward what seemed universal recognition that children deserve to have a childhood and profit margins be damned, child labor is now “making a comeback with a vengeance.” According to the International Labor Organization, upwards of 160 million children worldwide – roughly 1 in 10, about two-thirds boys – engage in child and forced labor, with nearly half working under hazardous conditions to produce goods from some 77 countries; in the world’s poorest countries, from India to Central America to sub-Saharan Africa, that ratio is 1 in 5.
Experts report an increase of over 8 million kids working in the last four years, with numbers still rising, particularly among those 5 to 11 years old. Yes: 5 to 11 years old. An estimated 22,000 child laborers are killed at work each year. This marks an improvement from the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution era of Dickens’ orphan Twist – born in a workhouse, forced into labor at 9, soon apprenticed to an undertaker – when each day an average of 112 kids died and over 6,000 were injured. Still, not great.
Of course corporate America has eagerly joined this new “economy of exploitation,” especially of migrant children, in part thanks to existing loopholes in labor law and enforcement. From 2015 to 2022, with the number of kids at work in the U.S. surging 37%, labor violations involving kids inevitably also rose nearly 70%. That heedless trend follows a long tradition in a country where child labor has been vital since the Industrial Revolution, especially in the textile industry; by 1820, children, often girls, made up 40% of mill workers in New England, bless their young stamina, nimble fingers, and unwillingness to demand decent wages or conditions. Kids, often of immigrant parents, coughed through 10-hour shifts in coal mines or tended fiery glass-factory furnaces.
In 1870, a census counted 750,000 child workers under 15; by 1911, there were over two million. Staying true to the spirit of British Elizabethan laws that urged employing kids as “a prophylactic against vagabonds,” Daniel DeFoe argued “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread,” and Alexander Hamilton – sorry Lin-Manuel – said those “who would otherwise be idle” could be a good source of cheap labor to ward off the dangers of “idleness and degeneracy.”
Enter labor activist Mary ‘Mother’ Jones, once dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America,” to call bullshit. Born in Ireland, she was 11 when the Great Famine sent her family to Canada. Schooled in Toronto, she taught in Michigan, moved to Memphis where she met and married iron worker George Jones, left teaching to raise four children. In 1867, yellow fever killed her husband and all her children; devastated, she moved to Chicago and started a dress business, destroyed in 1871’s Great Fire. She followed Joe Hill’s dictate: “Don’t mourn – organize.” Speaking in mining and mill towns across America, she saw boys picking rocks from coal bins and girls feeding thread into looms for 12 hours a day.
In her autobiography, she wrote, “I wondered that armies did not stand forth to free those slaves.” In 1897, age 60, she added “Mother” to her name. Wrote a friend of her fierce kinship with workers, “She is flesh of their flesh, blood of their blood. Wherever she goes, she enters into the lives of the toilers and becomes part of them.” A powerhouse orator and fighter with a flair for the theatrical, she called herself “not a humanitarian, but a hell-raiser,” declaiming, “I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.”
And so she did. In the spring of 1903 she went to Kensington, PA to support 75,000 textile workers, including 10,000 children, taking part in the largest strike in Philadelphia’s history; the press barely covered it because mill owners had stock in their papers. “Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle,” she wrote in Autobiography of Mother Jones. “They were stooped things, round-shouldered and skinny…from whom all the childhood had gone.”
Assembling a crowd in Independence Park, she called up a few: “I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia’s mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children…That their little lives went out to make wealth for others…The officials of City Hall were standing in the open windows. I held the little ones of the mills above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were light to lift…The officials quickly closed the windows, as they had closed their eyes and hearts.”
The strikers were seeking a reduced 55-hour week and the end of night shifts for women and children. She led a march through Philadelphia, but when things quieted down for a while, “I concluded the people needed stirring up again.” The Liberty Bell, symbolizing freedom over tyranny, was touring the country, drawing large crowds; if it could go on tour, she decided, “so could child labor.” She asked parents if she could take their kids for a week or so, promising to return them safely, and they agreed.
On July 7, 1903, the March of the Mill Children, aka The Children’s Crusade, 100 children plus chaperones and a marshal, left Philadelphia; they were bound for Wall Street “to show the flesh and blood from which it squeezes its wealth…to call upon the millionaire manufacturers to cease their moral murders,” and, ultimately, to the Long Island summer home of Theodore Roosevelt to ask the reportedly reformist president to curb the abuses of child labor. The children carried knapsacks with a knife, fork, plate and tin cup. Taking baths in brooks, with farmers bringing food and trainmen offering free rides, “the children were very happy,” she wrote. “I thought when the strike is over and they go back to the mills, they will never have another holiday like this.”
They marched for two weeks, over 100 miles; the press mocked the “band of lunatics.” It was hot, they had no money, some kids left, returning to work. In Princeton, Jones asked to speak at the University “on higher education.” She told a crowd the rich robbed these children of any education “so they might buy automobiles for their wives and dogs for their daughters to talk French to.” “Here’s a text book on economics,” she said, pointing to a 10-year-old “stooped over like an old man from carrying bundles of yarn in a carpet factory that weigh 75 pounds…He gets three dollars a week while the children of the rich are getting their higher education.”
At Coney Island, the children rode rides and splashed in the surf; she also put them on display to “show their broken bodies.” On July 23, they marched into New York City with 60 people, and had a parade up 2nd Avenue where she delivered her “The Wail of the Children” speech. She described kids laboring “day and night in the cotton mills,” noting, “They have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?” Also: “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to get there. He had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he’d stolen a railroad, he could be a United States Senator.”
Roosevelt refused to see them, even after Mother Jones agreed to take just a few children to his home. By August, “Child Labor was back at work.” Still, a mining journal argued, the march swayed public opinion and “helped give child labor a mortal stab.” Jones kept organizing into her 80s; after she died in 1930, at a dedication of her gravestone on the Illinois prairie, 50,000 people mourned “the miners’ angel.” Two proposed federal child labor laws were struck down before FDR’s 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or a weakened version, ended the worst abuses: It established a 44-hour work week, mandated overtime pay, set a federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. But it only covered about 25% of the work force, and left gaping, enduring loopholes allowing child labor, especially in agriculture – where hundreds of thousands of mostly immigrant kids continue to toil in tobacco fields and other farm work. Even so, corporate leaders squawked so loudly at the restrictions that Roosevelt called them out in a Fireside Chat, telling Americans, “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day (tell you) that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.” Familiar, much?
Repulsively, they haven’t stopped howling since. Despite historians recently declaring U.S. child labor “almost exclusively a thing of the past,” an ever-profit-hungry GOP has been feverishly working to bring back a Dickens-lite labor landscape in the face of increased organizing, demands for decent wages, worker shortages thanks to COVID and Immigration restrictions, and MAGA bullshit about Deep State tyranny and “parental rights.” “There’s no reason why anyone should have to get the government’s permission to get a job,” argued an idiotic Arkansas pol seeking to eliminate child work permits. “(This is) just about “taking away the parent’s decision about whether their child can work.”
Translated: Child labor pays, we’ll do anything to turn a buck, and a little Black Lung never hurt anybody. In the last two years, GOP lawmakers in up to 14 states have rolled back regulations on child labor, invariably with the help of often dystopian lobbying by rich right-wing groups. The Cato Institute’s “Case Against Child Labor Protections” argues child sweatshops are “the best available alternative” for poor families and protections “limit their options further.” The Koch-funded Foundation for Economic Education: “Let the Kids Work.” The “Christian” Acton Institute: “Work is a gift our kids can handle.”
Thanks to that dubious gift, kids today work longer, harder, more dangerously than they have for decades. Scores of undocumented Latinx kids were found working in food plants, garment factories, construction sites in 20 states; the nation’s largest meatpacking plant had over 100 teens working in slaughterhouses cleaning bone saws and other lethal rigs amidst hazardous chemicals in Minnesota and Nebraska; over 300 kids as young as 10 were working for multiple McDonald’s in Kentucky up to 12 hours a day. Roofers in Florida and Tennessee can be 12; kids bake rolls for Walmart and sew J. Crew socks in L.A.; in Iowa, 14-year-olds can serve alcohol, work in freezers, meat coolers, industrial laundries, assembly lines; in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders quashed requirements for employers to ensure kids are 14, calling them “burdensome and obsolete.
The accidents pile up: a 17-year-old lost two fingers to a mowing machine; an 8th-grader’s eyes burned from farm pesticides; last week in Wisconsin, where kids aren’t legally allowed in sawmills due to their “red mist whirling blades of death,” 16-year-old Mikey Schuls died working at a hardwood mill “when horrible tragedy struck.” Safety officials are investigating, but, “What in the 1700s?” Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like Hell for the living.”
(Abby Zimet has written Common Dream’s Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women’s, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)
