More Child Labor

One of the big under-covered stories of 2023 was the rolling back of child labor laws. 

The major restrictions on child labor were part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and from there the states passed their own versions of protections for children. Many of these laws distinguish between agricultural labor and other sorts, in part so that junior could work on the family farm without getting Ma and Pa fined or arrested. But the idea was that maybe putting children in harm's way or depriving them of the chance to get an education was a Bad Thing and maybe as a nation we should knock it off. 

We didn't get those laws easily. Lots of folks thought that child labor was double plus good. Opponents of the laws denied the existence of a problem, argued that work was good for the young 'uns. "I am really tired of seeing so many big children ten years old playing in the streets," was a real thing that a real "prominent lady citizen" said in opposition to child labor laws. And of course the ever-popular complaint-- "How can we stay in business and remain profitable if you pass these rules?"

The Camella Teoli Story

I'm going to digress for a second to tell a lesser-known story that illustrates what the need was.

Camella Teoli went to work in a Lawrence, MA mill at the age of 11. Early on in her career, a machine used to twist cotton into thread caught her hair and ripped off part of her scalp. At the age of 14, she was standing in front of Congress in March 1912. The conditions in the mill were famously horrific; low wages and a life expectancy of 39.6 years, with one third of workers dying before age 25. If your workforce is going to die off in their twenties, of course you need to start them young. 

Teoli was in front of Congress in March because in January, a new law had reduced the legal hours for women and children from 56 to 54 per week. The pissed off mill owners responded by speeding up the machines; so harder work, less pay. That kicked off the Great Lawrence Textile Strike, in which adults and children walked off the job.

The strike got ugly. Workers sent their children out of town, both for safety and as a publicity move, and the city officials decided to counter the bad publicity by deploying police and soldiers at the railroad station to keep children from getting in trains out of town, ultimately physically attacking the group of children. And Congress called a hearing, and Camella Teori, a 14 year old Italian immigrant testifying before First Lady Helen Taft, who invited Camella and other child laborers to lunch at the White House and contributed to the strike fund. Teoli became a national sensation, the face of our labor problem. 

Massachusetts passed some child labor laws that were aimed not so much at the inhumane conditions of the work, but at the fact that child workers were being deprived of any chance for education. But the states (particularly the southern ones) dragged their feet hard, because for a huge part of US history, lots of people have been okay--even more than okay--with child labor, as long as it's Those People's Children.

Teoli went back to work in the mill. She was never promoted. She never told her own children about her role in labor history, even as her daughter had learned to help her arrange her hair to cover a large bald spot.

So here we are again

My point? The desire to use young bodies as part of the industrial machinery of our country is not particularly new, nor has it always been obvious that children should not be required to work in dangerous conditions or to the detriment of their own education. 

In 2023, around a dozen states rolled their child labor protections back. 

Some, like Arkansas, teamed up the gutting of child labor protections with laws set to kneecap public schools. Iowa removed protections that kept young workers out of more physically dangerous jobs while expanding the hours they could be asked to work. Missouri similarly shot for increasing working hours for teens. Minnesota said yes to teens working in heavy construction. 

Many off these rollbacks have especially troubling features. Arkansas removed the requirement for age verification. Many of the states have eliminated the requirement for a work permit. The work permit is dismissed as a piece of troublesome paperwork, but it is also the checkpoint at which the school or some other responsible adult can say, "I'm not sure this is such a great idea for this particular teen." 

In some cases like Arkansas, the permits had a requirement for parents to sign off, but now Arkansas doesn't care to give parents a voice in this particular decision. Ohio's Senator Bill Reineke expressed a similar concern over child labor, arguing that kids who really want to work shouldn't be hampered because "they can't get their parents to cooperate with them." Parents--they only matter sometimes.

Also, "child labor" sounds so rough. When Indiana tried to pass a bill to roll back protections in 2020, it included a provision to rename the Bureau of Child Labor as the Bureau of Youth Employment. Arkansas called its law removing child labor protections the "Youth Hiring Act of 2023." See, the trouble with child labor is just bad branding. 

Who is pushing this stuff? Employers. In Iowa, a lobbyist for the Iowa Grocer Industry Association told the senate "Everyone has a worker need right now." And as for working later on a school night, Jessica Dunker, president of the Iowa Restaurant Association and the Iowa Hotel and Lodging  Association testified.

“Nine o’clock for a 15 year old sophomore in high school, you know, I’m sure they’re doing something already and probably it’s a school opportunity,” she said, “but if it isn’t, having kids get the opportunity to work is important.”

Covering a similar push in Tennessee, Stephen Elliot at USA Today noted in April, "The unemployment rate sits at 3.5% – a level last reached in 1969 – and businesses of all types, from factories to restaurants to retail stores, are struggling to find workers."

"C'mon, let the kids make some money and earn valuable experience," argue the usual suspects. When David Koch ran for Vice-President as a Libertarian in 1980, part of the platform included abolishing child labor laws. 

In 2014, Benjamin Powell wrote a piece for CATO arguing the case against child labor prohibitions with some really twisty reasoning. Looking internationally, he argued that although the "thought of children laboring in sweatshops is repulsive," that only happens because of poverty and the solution to poverty includes--well...

As countries become rich, child labor virtually disappears. The answer for how to cure child labor lies in the process of economic growth—a process in which sweatshops play an important role.

And yet, somehow, we have a wealthy nation and lots and lots of child poverty.

But if you really want to see cheerleading for child labor, check out a piece at the Foundation for Economic Education, the pioneer Libertarian thinky tank and advocacy group. A 2016 piece by Jeffrey Tucker argued that work would be so much better for children's inner lives than school, and some jobs might be dangerous, but kids love danger, and more...

If kids were allowed to work and compulsory school attendance was abolished, the jobs of choice would be at Chick-Fil-A and WalMart. And they would be fantastic jobs too, instilling in young people a work ethic, which is the inner drive to succeed, and an awareness of attitudes that make enterprise work for all. It would give them skills and discipline that build character, and help them become part of a professional network.

A century ago, children were "civic soldiers." We should be ashamed that we ever took the opportunity to work away from kids, suggests Tucker. That piece spawned another at the Acton Institute entitled "Work is a gift our kids can handle" by Joseph Sunde, which offers more of the same. Considering the question of household allowances:

What if we were to be more intentional about creating opportunities for work for our kids, or simply to more closely disciple our children toward a full understanding of the role of their work in honoring God and serving neighbor? In our schools and educational systems, what if we stopped prioritizing “intellectual” work to the detriment of practical knowledge and physical labor, paving new paths to a more holistic approach to character formation?

So where is this headed?

When rich folks like Betsy DeVos talk about letting children get education anywhere, including outside school, and  talk about children finding the place that best suits them in life, and also talk about how child labor laws should be ended, believe that those three things are related. When Pennsylvania attorneys argued that there was no need to bring equity to school funding because “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?” you're seeing another piece of the same puzzle.

Just look at Florida.

Florida, somehow, is bringing up the rear on this one. They have two interlocking bills poised this session to gut child labor protections. Some of the stipulations are standard for these laws-- lowering the age limits, increasing the work hours, removing work hour limits for non-school nights. But beyond these tweaks, there's one all-new provision. Among those now exempt from all limitations of the child labor laws are:

Minors 16 and 17 years of age who are in a home education program or are enrolled in an approved virtual instruction program in which the minor is separated from the teacher by time only.

Withdraw your child and homeschool them, and they can work as many hours as you wish.  Because if they're working on the "McDonald's career track," how much education do they really need? 

The other ugly piece of this is migrant children used as workers. Interviewing 100 migrant children in 20 states, New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier found

These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.

Are they being ennobled by this gift of work? I have my doubts. Much like the children working meatpacking jobs in Kansas and Nebraska, for whom a meatpacker paid a whopping $1.5 million fine. Boy, I bet that company wishes that, somehow, they didn't have to pay that fine.

Underneath all of this is an ugly set of assumptions. Companies need workers more than Certain People need an education, because after all, Certain People are really best suited to serving the Greater Good via a life as meat widgets. That's really all the education Certain People's Children ever really need, and besides, how else are we supposed to turn a profit. 

Meanwhile, agitators are far more concerned that a child will catch sight of an inappropriate book than get lost in an inappropriate job.

Look

I am a big fan of work. My perfect world is not one where someone just sits on their butt all day. Meaningful work is good for the soul. 

But robbing children of a chance to get an education and move up in the world so that some corporation doesn't have staffing problems (that they might have to address by offering better wages) is not okay. And putting them in dangerous situations just to make a buck is inexcusable. And justifying all of this by convincing yourself that these particular children are Less Than, so it's okay to use up their lives and bodies like this--that's inexcusable.

Grownups have a simple charge--to watch over, take care of, help, protect, and nurture young humans until they are old enough to go their own way. To strip away some basic protections and claim that you're doing the children a favor is just wrong. To argue that being a young meat widget is so ennobling that formal education is really not needed is silly. To argue that some young humans are to be pre-judged to be on a worker bee track for their lives, and so rob them of the opportunity to chart their own path is unAmerican.

We talk a big game in this country about how much we value Family and The Children, but the stripping of child labor protection, like the failure to seriously address school shootings, like the crusade to empower some parents to tell other parents how to raise their children, like our continued failure to provide paid parental leave-- all these things are a reminder that for some folks, children and family are not nearly as important as corporations.