Child labor is making a comeback in the U.S. Several states are passing laws to weaken protections for child labor so that younger children may be gainfully employed for hours every day. This is just one more “What century is this, again?” issue; they seem to be becoming more common.
Violations of federal child labor laws are on the rise. Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Labor fined a meatpacking company $1.5 million after the agency found it had employed more than a hundred minors, some as young as 13, to do hazardous work. “The jobs involved cleaning devices like back saws and head splitters with caustic chemicals that could cause burns. At least three teenagers suffered injuries,” Iowa Public Radio reported.
Who Thinks Child Labor Is a Good Idea?
Instead of responding with stronger protections for children, several states– including Iowa — have either recently passed or are about to pass laws that allow the employment of children as young as 14 . And no, I hadn’t noticed any popular demand for shipping the kids off to the factories, either.
The Economic Policy Institute says the lawmakers are responding to lobbying by many industrial and business associations. These groups are eager to hire younger teens to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries, on construction sites and assembly lines, and even to serve alcohol, which they can’t legally drink. These laws also propose that the employer can pay the young folks less than the federal minimum wage. And, of course, this exercise in exploitation is being promoted as “teaching children the dignity of work.”
Is Child Labor a Religious Issue?
In earlier times child labor was a religious issue for many people. One of the leaders of the reform movement that pulled small children out of factories was an Episcopal priest, Edgar Gardner Murphy (1869-1913). The Rev. Murphy’s child labor activism began after he became head of a parish in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1898. At the time, about a quarter of Alabama textile mill workers were under the age of 16. These children worked 12 or more hours a day.
The Rev. Murphy persuaded the Montgomery Ministerial Association — an interfaith group of local Christian clergy — to support a bill in the Alabama legislature barring children under the age of 12. But the bill was defeated. The Rev. Murphy’s next step was to form the Alabama Child Labor Committee. The purpose of the committee was to rally public opinion behind reform by showing people how bad long hours of work in mills and factories were for children.
A National Disgrace
There had been efforts at child labor reform going back to the start of the 19th century. But on the whole, the public was not paying attention to what was happening to children in the nation’s factories, mills, mines, and other industrial workplaces. And as the nation grew more industrialized, the problem got worse.
In 1872, a fire in a mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, killed twenty workers. Most of the workers were little girls, some as young as 5. The nation’s newspapers called for better workplace safety. None asked why 5-year-old girls were working at a mill. (The answer, of course, was that their families were poor and needed the money.)
By 1890, more than 18 percent of the nation’s children aged 10 to 15 had industrial jobs. Obviously, these children were not in school, and they also tended to suffer injuries and health problems. Girls were scalped when their hair got caught in milling machines; boys were burned tending industrial furnaces. A ten-hour day was a minimum. For more about what life was like for child workers, I recommend The American Era of Child Labor at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries.
The National Child Labor Committee
The Rev. Murphy continued to organize and network on behalf of reform. In 1904 he organized a joint conference with the Alabama Child Labor Committee and the New York Child Labor Committee, held in Carnegie Hall in New York City. At that conference he proposed that a nationwide effort was needed and called for a National Child Labor Committee to be formed. And it was.
The NCLC soon was endorsed by prominent clergy, philanthropists, politicians, and educators. Progressive reformers like Jane Addams signed on. The committee went to work putting the harsh reality of child labor in front of the American people. The Committee today is best remembered for sponsoring the photographs of child workers taken by Lewis Hine (1874 – 1940). Hine published thousands of photographs that shocked the nation and paved the way for real reform.
The Fair Labor Standards Act
The Rev. Edgar Gardner Murphy didn’t live to see how the movement he started succeeded. At the time of his death in 1913, Lewis Hine was still publishing photographs. The Social Gospel movement also took up the cause of child labor. The Social Gospel was a religious movement mostly led by Protestant clergy who believed Jesus called them to bring justice and charity to the poor and oppressed.
The major federal law that ended child labor, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, became law only after a struggle of many years and against the screaming objections of the captains of industry. The original bill not only greatly curtailed child labor; it also set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents and the maximum workweek at 44 hours. The original bill has been updated a few times, of course.
But now some states are passing laws that weaken the protections of the FLSA. For example, some legislators in Ohio and other states want 14- and 15-year-olds to be able to work past 7 p.m., when federal law says they have to stop. Others are trying to expand the kind of works children might do to include jobs federal law considers hazardous. Federal law is supposed to preempt state laws, but if the state laws are challenged in court there is no telling what conservative judges might do.
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