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Child Labor (Issue)
As the nation continued to
industrialize, many children were forced to work under conditions that were
increasingly harsh. Boys would be expected to stand near hot furnaces,
molding glass for hours on end, or they would sort coal by hand in the mines,
where they might catch black lung disease or other illnesses associated with
a dirty, damp, and cold environment. Children in factories were often mangled
or killed, as they worked with or near heavy industrial machines. Even in the
best of conditions, working children were denied their right to an education.
As the nineteenth century
progressed, there was a reaction against this form of child abuse. Workmen's
associations often protested child labor because it kept wages low and
compromised job security, but there was also a growing appreciation that
children should be defended and protected for their own sake. At first the
response was rather mild. In 1842 the In 1904 a group of
reformers established the National Child Labor Committee, whose purpose was
to investigate the problem and lobby state-by-state for legislation to end
the abuse. It was not effective because each state feared
restrictive legislation could give other states a competitive
advantage in recruiting industry. In 1907 a federal law against child labor,
sponsored by Senator Alan Beveridge of In 1912 a Children's Bureau
was established as an agency of the Department of Commerce and Labor. Its
mandate was to examine "all matters pertaining to the welfare of
children," which included child labor, and it was led by Julia C.
Lathrop, the first woman to head a federal agency. Progress, however, was
still slow. In 1916 senators Robert L. Owen and Edward Keating sponsored a
bill that restricted child labor, which passed both houses of Congress with
the strong support of President Woodrow Wilson. The law was based on a
recommendation of the National Child Welfare Committee, but it only prevented
the interstate shipment of goods produced in factories by children under 14
and materials processed in mines by children under 16. It also limited their
workday to eight hours. In 1918 the Supreme Court declared this law
unconstitutional, because it was directed toward the regulation of working
conditions, not the control interstate commerce. In 1919 Congress passed the
Child Labor Act, which placed a tax on companies that used child labor, but
the court too overturned it. In 1924 there was an attempt to amend the Constitution
to prohibit child labor, but it never received approval from the required
number of states. In spite of these failures,
the national mood was clearly against child labor. As educational
requirements became more stringent and truancy laws more strictly enforced,
it became harder for companies to depend on child labor. Also demands within
industry for a better skilled, more highly trained labor force inhibited the
hiring of children. By 1920 child labor was in decline nationally. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's domestic reforms in the 1930s, which are known collectively as
the New Deal, also attacked child labor and settled the legality of the
issue. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 prohibited the use of boys
under 16 and girls under 18 on projects where the Federal legislation is now
also supplemented by modern more comprehensive state laws, which also aim to
safeguard children by restricting the type of job they may hold and the
number of hours they may work. Although there are isolated incidents, child
labor in the United States is no longer a major problem, and the remaining
domestic issue concerns the morality of importing goods that were produced by
child labor abroad. The international situation
regarding child labor is discouraging. In 1973 the United Nations called upon
the countries of the world to ratify a convention that established 15 as the
minimum age for work. Children as young as 13 would be permitted to do light
work, but only those who reached 18 could hold a hazardous job. The reform
has not been effective in the developing countries, where poverty forces many
children into the workforce to help their families. In 1997, the
International Labor Office estimated that 250 million children are working in
jobs that may cause physical or emotional damage. Breaker boys, some as young
as nine or ten, worked in the mines, crouched for ten-hour shifts picking
slate from coal chutes, breathing clouds of coal dust. All too often boys
were pulled into machinery and mangled to death. Others worked underground in
mud on fourteen-hour shifts as mule drivers. Bibliography
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