Bitchy History - The History of Child Labor in America

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast where one history professor 0.89

00:00:17.180 gets to bitch about history and the impact it has on the world today.

00:00:21.220 Hey everybody, I know it's been a minute, but I'm back. I've been burnt out both mentally

00:00:25.200 and physically. The highs here in Phoenix are in the 110s at least every single day and I just

00:00:31.160 haven't been feeling like doing depressing research lately or recording episodes. Go figure.

00:00:36.020 That said, today's episode is exactly that, depressing. But I do have some fun guest episodes

00:00:41.240 coming up. I'll be traveling next month and I'm planning to record another in-person episode,

00:00:45.680 this time with my friend Alexandria, formerly Alexandria Artifact on TikTok. We'll be talking

00:00:50.480 about the history of women in STEM. I also am planning another episode with country music

00:00:54.440 feminist icon Gwen Levy on the history of what I like to call murder country, aka country songs

00:01:00.780 where women end their abusive and unfaithful husbands' lives rather than waiting for the

00:01:04.960 police to deal with them, aka life without no-fault divorce. But now on to today's episode.

00:01:12.580 On May 1st, four child workers were found working on the kill floor at a poultry plant. A 16-year-old

00:01:18.500 died at the same plant last summer after being pulled into a deboning machine. Three of the

00:01:23.600 miners were working overnight shifts. What year do you think that's from? 1880? 1910? Of course

00:01:32.780 not. Those would be sensible years for stories like that to exist. No, unfortunately, that's a

00:01:38.660 story from this year. Before we get to how we've reached the point of miners working 11 o'clock

00:01:44.780 shifts at the poultry plant, let's talk about the history of child labor in the United States in

00:01:50.360 general. In the 19-teens, suffrage and labor activist Sarah Cleghorn wrote a

00:01:55.520 poem titled The Golf Links. The golf links lie so near the mill that almost

00:02:00.140 every day the laboring children could look out and see the men at play. Child

00:02:05.240 labor dates back all the way to the beginning of America. The Open Data

00:02:08.780 Project used data visualization and analysis to explore indentured servitude

00:02:13.580 in Philadelphia from 1771 to 1773. In that particular data analysis, 17% of the recorded

00:02:21.460 individuals were found to be children. Children were more often brought on as apprentices rather

00:02:27.160 than simply indentured servants. They'd be trained in a variety of jobs. Boys tended to be trained

00:02:32.140 as rope makers, carpenters, and tailors, while girls were usually trained in housewifery. Boys 0.92

00:02:37.960 were more likely to be taught an employable skill, while girls were taught sewing and other feminine 0.99

00:02:42.240 jobs, which is typical. That's an entirely different rant, though. One day I'll talk about

00:02:47.780 pink-collar jobs and gender essentialism, but that's for a future episode. Trust that it will 0.99

00:02:53.100 be coming up eventually, though. The data that they analyzed showed that the longest terms of

00:02:57.120 indentured servitude from a child during this era were actually two siblings, Anna Marie and Adam

00:03:02.760 Shendifer. They served 18 and 19 years, respectively, in indentured servitude. Adam was two years old,

00:03:09.780 and Anne-Marie was four years old when their father signed them into service. Maybe he had

00:03:14.920 a good reason to send his toddlers away to be servants, but even if he did, it speaks to how

00:03:19.840 acceptable child labor and servitude were in the American colonies. Poor, illegitimate, orphaned,

00:03:25.860 abandoned, or abused children were often placed in pauper apprenticeships, where they were raised

00:03:31.180 to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. While this sounds incredibly inhumane

00:03:36.580 to our modern ears, you have to understand that there were no real systems of social services

00:03:41.180 set up to care for children without families, resources, or advocates at the time. This was

00:03:46.140 as close an option to foster care as there really was. And this kind of system would be common in

00:03:51.500 America, Canada, and Great Britain for many years. Consider that Anne of Green Gables was set in the

00:03:56.600 1880s, and the entire setting for this story starts with Marilla Cuthbert telling Rachel

00:04:01.900 Linde that Matthew went to Bright River, we're getting a little boy from an orphan asylum in

00:04:06.680 Nova Scotia, and he's coming on the train tonight. From the 19-teens all the way up to the 1970s,

00:04:12.360 Britain had a child migrant program that sent 7,000 children between the ages of 3 and 14 to

00:04:18.500 Australia. They were promised families and a better life. What they got was not the happy

00:04:23.920 ending of Anne of Green Gables, nor was that the end most pauper children and indentured servants

00:04:28.900 received. Lucy Maud Montgomery was serving us the most whitewashed of stories when it came to Anne

00:04:34.540 and her adventures in Avonlea. People like Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert were not the norm, though I

00:04:39.800 suppose that there are enough horror stories from modern foster care to let us know that Marilla

00:04:43.860 and Matthew Cuthbert still aren't the norm for people who take in children with nowhere else to

00:04:48.100 go. But what about children with families? Surely they didn't put their kids to work while they were

00:04:53.280 still toddling about and learning their ABCs. Actually, they absolutely did. America in the

00:05:00.520 late 1700s and early 1800s was overwhelmingly rural and our economy was agricultural. Farmers

00:05:07.020 put their own children to work young, again keeping the chores and farm tasks usually split

00:05:11.600 along gender lines. Girls took care of the household and helped with the younger children, 0.87

00:05:15.960 boys helped with the farm work, and eventually would be apprenticed to a craftsman to learn a

00:05:19.720 trade if they were not the one to inherit the farm themselves. By the 19th century, the reality

00:05:24.760 of work in America had changed drastically, especially in the North, which had taken to

00:05:28.860 industrialization like a duck to water. Those pauper apprentices went from serving as apprentices

00:05:34.240 with artisans and instead went to work in factories. But it wasn't just orphans working

00:05:39.160 in the factories. Women and children composed around 40% of the entire manufacturing labor

00:05:44.480 force during the initial period of industrialization. In the U.S., textile mills were a main 0.99

00:05:50.200 component of industrialization in the northern states. They hired whole families in the early

00:05:55.140 19th century. By the late 19th century, industrialization was in full swing in most of the

00:06:00.480 country. The South wouldn't really begin to fully embrace industrialization until the Second World

00:06:05.540 War for reasons that we are all aware of, even if Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis don't like

00:06:11.740 admitting it. I suppose here is a good place to put a little caveat about this episode. I am

00:06:16.700 intentionally not handling the issue of enslaved children in the antebellum period in this

00:06:21.160 particular episode. That's an entirely separate discussion, one which I don't really think is in

00:06:25.800 my lane, so to speak, and also one that probably deserves its entire own episode. But back to the

00:06:31.660 Gilded Age. By 1880, 5 million Americans were engaged in manufacturing, construction, and

00:06:37.800 transportation jobs rather than in agriculture. Most factory workers were working 10-hour days,

00:06:43.100 six days a week. And children were no different from the adults. At least 1.7 million children

00:06:48.620 under 16 years of age were employed in factory and field work. 10% of all girls aged 10 to 15,

00:06:54.980 and 20% of boys of the same age were employed. In 1900, 18% of all American workers were under

00:07:01.820 the age of 16. Children worked long, grueling hours. They also faced threats posed by high-powered

00:07:08.340 machinery. One reason for hiring them was due to their size, making them easier to fit between and

00:07:13.940 inside machines to do work or repairs. Those of you screaming about how dangerous it is to get

00:07:19.180 inside of a factory machine have a point. The employers, however, did not care. After all,

00:07:25.480 they were also paying the children lower wages than the adults, and there was always more poor

00:07:30.320 orphaned kids to hire if one of them got crushed on the factory floor. Imagine kids, some as young

00:07:36.400 as seven, slogging through 12-hour shifts for barely a dollar a day. They weren't just risking

00:07:41.720 paper cuts. They were getting seriously hurt, losing fingers, limbs, and sometimes even their

00:07:46.240 lives. And if that wasn't enough, many ended up with tuberculosis or nasty respiratory diseases

00:07:51.700 from the filthy conditions that they worked in. Why would anyone let this happen? Because their

00:07:56.620 families needed every penny just to keep going. The working class was stuck, choosing between a rock

00:08:01.840 and a hard place, and their kids paid the price. One of the most well-known labor tragedies of the

00:08:07.080 time took place in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. In that one fire, 146

00:08:14.300 factory workers died, and of those, 36 were minors between the ages of 11 and 17. The average age of

00:08:21.300 all of those who died was 21. Throughout the 1880s and up into the early 1900s, many attempts at

00:08:28.300 passing reforms and laws to ban child labor took place. You can find all sorts of interesting

00:08:33.180 articles in the archives either denouncing or supporting these reforms. In one 1883 article

00:08:39.000 in the New York Times, the brief notation on a labor bill in Wisconsin, which prevented the

00:08:43.520 hiring of children under 14 years of age, was spoken of in negative terms because it would see

00:08:48.920 3,000 children unemployed throughout the state. I love that their problem with this isn't that

00:08:54.540 3,000 children in the state of Wisconsin were employed by cigar manufacturers, but that those

00:08:59.340 children would now be out of work. In New Jersey that same year, an article says that after a labor

00:09:04.940 law was passed, there were many applications made by parents, and sometimes children themselves,

00:09:10.820 to allow children under the age of 12 to work in the New Jersey silk mills. Again, in New Jersey,

00:09:16.320 they said that if this law is enforced, 3,000 children will be unemployed and many will be out

00:09:21.500 on the streets or in the poorhouse. Which again, seems to be missing the actual problem at hand,

00:09:26.560 but go back and listen to my episode on the impact of Puritanism on American culture for

00:09:30.660 my thoughts on how poorly we take care of our most vulnerable citizens here in America.

00:09:35.580 General B.F. Butler wrote in 1884 that as long as children were getting some education,

00:09:41.220 it would be a terrible idea to pass laws preventing them from working in the textile mills.

00:09:45.240 He writes,

00:10:15.240 for, as a rule, institutionalized children are of no use for themselves or their country.

00:10:20.680 It will not serve as much of a surprise to my listeners to learn that General Benjamin Franklin

00:10:24.920 Butler owned shares in the Lowell's Middlesex Mill Company in Massachusetts. How many hours

00:10:30.600 did he think were not too many hours a day, you might ask? Well, I can't tell you exactly what

00:10:35.400 he thought was appropriate for children, but he did institute a 10-hour workday, which to be fair

00:10:41.000 was a shorter workday than many of the other mills had at that time, I guess. Anyway, he might have

00:10:46.700 been a little bit biased on this issue. Also, if the best a country can do for a crippled father

00:10:52.600 or mother is to put their 11-year-old to work in a textile mill to support them, that might be a sign 0.96

00:10:58.620 that there are problems in your country, right? Especially since that crippled father or mother 0.99

00:11:04.220 was likely crippled in a factory job of their own. After all, factory work was dangerous. By 1900, 0.71

00:11:09.680 there were around 35,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries in factories every year, and only about

00:11:16.080 two percent of those injured, or the family of those killed, ever recovered on claims against

00:11:20.800 those employers. However, the sheer amount of column inches dedicated to this topic in the New

00:11:25.980 York Times and other newspapers indicates that people were starting to pay attention. And while

00:11:30.940 many articles like this one in 1907 titled, Southern Mill Men Angry Over Inquiry, think Federal

00:11:37.220 Bureau is helping New England in its child labor investigations. Because yes, dear listener, just

00:11:42.720 as the South had foamed at the mouth about northern abolitionists wanting to take away their slave

00:11:46.840 labor before the Civil War, the South was now extremely dedicated to keeping their cheap child

00:11:51.540 labor as well and pushing back against northern child labor reform groups like Jane Addams Hull

00:11:56.800 House. However, it is clear that this up war was only happening because of attempts to reform the

00:12:03.000 laws and restrict child labor. Many reformers, many of them women like Jane Adams, spoke out

00:12:08.460 against the evils of child labor at this time. By the start of the 20th century, efforts for reform

00:12:13.480 had become widespread. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee was formed dedicated to abolition

00:12:19.140 of all child labor. At this point, state-level laws restricting child labor were in place, but

00:12:24.940 these laws saw a lot of resistance and not much enforcement. Frequently, child labor law opponents

00:12:30.160 denied any problem existed and aggressively extolled the virtues of children in the workplace,

00:12:35.440 despite the publicity of photos taken by people like Lewis Hine, which highlighted the poor

00:12:40.280 conditions in which children were working and the health risks caused by that labor.

00:12:44.540 Many child laborers were underweight. Some suffered from stunted growth and curvature

00:12:48.420 of the spine. They developed diseases related to their work environments, such as tuberculosis

00:12:52.800 and bronchitis for those who worked in coal mines or cotton mills. Since state-level laws didn't

00:12:58.140 seemed to be working, child labor reformers began to look toward a federal law. In 1916, they had

00:13:03.440 their first success, although it didn't last long. Congress passed something called the Keating-Owens

00:13:08.300 Act. This act established the following child labor standards, a minimum age of 14 for workers

00:13:13.620 in manufacturing and 16 for workers in mining, a maximum workday of eight hours, a prohibition of

00:13:19.160 night work for workers under the age of 16, and a documented proof of age that was needed by

00:13:24.400 employers. The law was declared unconstitutional in 1918 by the Supreme Court in the case Hammer

00:13:30.060 v. Dagenhart because it overstepped the purposes of the government's powers to regulate interstate

00:13:35.340 commerce. Because of this, an attempt was made in 1924 to add a constitutional amendment that

00:13:40.820 would give Congress the power to regulate child labor. The amendment would give power to Congress

00:13:45.600 to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under 18 years of age. Ratification was

00:13:51.540 stalled in the 1920s by a campaign to discredit it by manufacturers and the first Red Scare.

00:13:57.560 We would not see a federal restriction on child labor passed successfully until the era of the

00:14:02.140 New Deal, under which the Federal Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. This was once again

00:14:08.040 challenged in court, but the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in a case in 1941. The bill

00:14:14.260 provided for a 40-cent-an-hour minimum wage, a 40-hour maximum work week, and a minimum working

00:14:20.100 age of 16, except in certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing. Outside of mining

00:14:26.560 and manufacturing is an important caveat, which we will come back to in a bit, believe me.

00:14:31.320 But back to the conflict over child labor. You'd think it ended in 1941 when the Supreme Court

00:14:36.680 declared the Federal Labor Standards Act constitutional, but given what I shared at

00:14:40.940 the start of this episode, I bet you know that's wrong. Certain folks have been fighting against

00:14:45.980 child labor laws since the first time we put them in place. In 1980, David Koch ran for vice

00:14:51.800 president on the Libertarian ticket and promised to abolish child labor laws, along with abolishing

00:14:57.060 Medicare and an end to all corporate and personal income taxes. And in 1982, under President Reagan,

00:15:03.100 the Department of Labor made major changes to child labor laws, expanding the hours that a 14

00:15:08.460 and 15-year-old could work and allowing employers to pay students only 85% of minimum wage.

00:15:14.960 Organizations like the Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, and the Commonwealth

00:15:19.340 Foundation, all funded by the Koch brothers, by the way, have produced numerous reports arguing

00:15:24.920 the value of increased child labor and eliminating the minimum wage for children, arguing in one case

00:15:30.480 that depriving work opportunities to poor children in developing countries only limits their options

00:15:35.280 further and throws them into worse alternatives. There has been a major push in the last few years

00:15:40.440 to loosen these labor restrictions since 2021 there have been 28 states that have introduced

00:15:45.640 legislation to weaken child labor laws so far only 12 have actually passed them they've lowered the

00:15:51.480 age at which children can work in certain jobs expanded the number of hours they can work

00:15:55.720 including allowing them to work during normal school hours in some cases and shielding businesses

00:16:01.000 from civil liability for work-related injuries illness or death sustained by minors that they

00:16:06.120 employ. That shielding is important, since according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

00:16:10.920 57 children 15 years and younger, as well as 68 teens aged 16 to 17, died from injuries sustained

00:16:18.120 at work between 2018 and 2022. Among other types of work, young employees are now found in

00:16:24.360 manufacturing facilities and meat processing plants, where the work might entail using toxic

00:16:29.240 chemicals to clean the blood and other remains off the slaughterhouse floor. We're seeing 12-year-old

00:16:34.280 roofers in florida and tennessee 14 year old construction workers who aren't attending school

00:16:39.400 15 year olds working the night shift packaging up cheerios but as sad as all this is the really sad

00:16:45.320 thing is that child labor never actually ended in the united states according to a report from 1997

00:16:51.560 child labor accounted for 20 000 workers compensation claims 200 000 injuries and

00:16:57.480 thousands of case of permanent disability and more than 70 deaths each year how is that possible if

00:17:03.240 we passed child labor laws 60 years before that in the 1930s. Well, remember what I said about the

00:17:09.640 Federal Labor Standards Act making jobs outside of mining and manufacturing exempt from their rules?

00:17:15.560 That's important because at that time more than 60 percent of child workers were employed in

00:17:20.040 agriculture, which was unregulated by any of the laws meant to restrict child labor.

00:17:25.400 One major reason for this was that many reformers only saw child labor as bad in the context of

00:17:31.000 factories and mines. Farming was good, honest American work. Activist Alexander McElwey wrote

00:17:37.280 in 1905 that open-air farm work was beneficial in developing a strong physical constitution.

00:17:43.580 The argument was usually also that most children were working on their family farms and the

00:17:48.460 harvesting season didn't interfere with their school schedule, which might have been true at

00:17:52.600 the time, but with the rise of industrialized farming in America, that wouldn't remain the

00:17:57.240 case for long. In the U.S. today, four companies produce 81% of cows, 73% of sheep, 57% of pigs,

00:18:06.480 and 50% of chickens. In the 1930s, 24% of the American population worked in agriculture.

00:18:13.460 By 2002, that percentage had reduced to 1.5%. Large farms control nearly two-thirds of all

00:18:20.240 U.S. agricultural land and account for 42% of all agricultural sales. And that's okay,

00:18:26.240 Or at the very least, it's a topic for an entirely different podcast, because I know

00:18:30.300 nothing but the most basic pros and cons related to industrial agriculture.

00:18:34.900 Industries change to fit the needs of a population.

00:18:37.680 The problem is that the laws never changed with the industry.

00:18:41.240 These industrial farms are not just family farms where the children of the owners are

00:18:45.080 assigned chores and help plant and bring the harvest in.

00:18:48.220 They're massive corporations.

00:18:49.900 And if there's one thing we have learned from the 19th century, it's that corporations

00:18:53.780 will use whatever legal loophole they can find to increase their profits by decreasing the amount

00:18:59.300 they need to pay. Here I quote the U.S. Child Farm Workers' Dangerous Lives petition from

00:19:04.820 Human Rights Watch. Child farm workers as young as 12 years old often work for hire for 10 or more

00:19:11.140 hours a day, five to seven days a week. Some start working part-time at age six or seven. Children,

00:19:18.500 like many adult farm workers, typically earn far less than minimum wage and their pay is often

00:19:23.300 further cut because employers under-report hours and force them to spend their own money

00:19:28.020 on tools gloves and drinking water that their employers should provide by law children risk

00:19:33.620 pesticide poisoning serious injury and heat illness they suffer fatalities at more than four

00:19:38.820 times the rate of children working in other jobs some work without even the most basic protective

00:19:43.460 gear including shoes or gloves many told human rights watch that their employers did not provide

00:19:48.740 drinking water hand washing facilities or toilets girls and women in these jobs are exceptionally

00:19:53.860 vulnerable to sexual abuse as a result of their long working hours children who do agricultural

00:19:58.820 work drop out of school at four times the national rate so the real question is why is this only

00:20:04.820 becoming a story that hits the national news cycle now estimates by the association of farm

00:20:10.100 worker opportunity programs suggest that there are approximately 500 000 child farm workers in the

00:20:16.340 the United States. And while groups like Human Rights Watch and many others have been talking

00:20:21.160 about this for a long time, the issue of child labor has really only become a major story in the

00:20:26.520 last few years. Why? Well, I hate to say it, but most of these children are migrant workers, just

00:20:32.900 as their parents are. Conveniently, these individuals have few people to advocate for 0.99

00:20:37.480 them and no real way to fight back against abusive practices by their employers. After all, as long

00:20:43.080 as we can get our organic tomatoes and quinoa, who the fuck cares about the age of the person 0.98

00:20:47.300 picking it? At least that seems to have been the prevailing opinion for a very long time in America. 0.97

00:20:52.740 I hate to speculate, but I have a strong suspicion that we've only started to pay attention now

00:20:57.300 because the children dying in sawmills and slaughterhouses today are now occasionally

00:21:01.660 white. Not always, but the outcry of not the children always seems to wait until the children

00:21:07.720 in question are paler than average. Better late than never, I suppose, but the progressive era 0.99

00:21:13.420 seems a whole hell of a lot less progressive when we realize how many major loopholes they

00:21:18.620 left to allow the abuse and exploitation of minors. And somehow, instead of improving the

00:21:23.880 situation, we're letting ourselves slide right back to the Gilded Age. Groups like the Heritage

00:21:28.560 Foundation, with their Project 2025, want to turn us back to pre-1938 standards if they have their

00:21:34.640 way. I'm not kidding. Page 596 of the Mandate for Leadership, which is Project 2025, says

00:21:41.940 some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young

00:21:47.960 people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results

00:21:52.480 in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers

00:21:57.560 from trying the more dangerous job. With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults

00:22:03.000 should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations. That sounds suspiciously

00:22:08.100 like General BF Butler there. Will it take another triangle shirtwaist fire to fix things again? Or

00:22:13.760 can we agree that a 16-year-old being killed in a deboning machine is probably an unacceptable way

00:22:19.400 to deal with poverty in this country? And that putting minors into hazardous jobs is not the

00:22:24.520 way to deal with employee shortages and not the way forward for our country in the 21st century?

00:22:29.980 thank you for tuning in to hear me bitch about history if you're loving the show don't forget

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Bitchy History - July 17, 2024

The History of Child Labor in America

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Transcript