|
[page 2]
Private social reform organizations, such as the National Child Labor Committee and the
National Consumer's League, also did extensive research and investigation into
child labor, and many of those documents were sent to the Children's Bureau,
later to be incorporated into the main Department of Labor Library. Of
particular interest to these groups was the effect of work on the very young,
and how state labor laws exempted them from coverage. For example, in one issue
of the Child Labor Bulletin, the following event was exposed: "Eight
year old Daisy "caps" cans...she placed small tin disk that is finally soldered
to the cover on the cans of fruit and vegetables. She caps 40 cans a minute,
trying with all her childish strength to keep pace with a never-exhausted
machine. Her state (Delaware) considers fruits and vegetables of such great
importance that all cannery work and even the manufacture of fruit and berry
baskets are exempted from its child labor law."
The Department of Labor Library was the direct beneficiary of the movement to banish
exploitative child labor in the U.S. In fact, the amalgamation of the
Children's Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics libraries in 1917, formed the
nucleus of the U.S. Department of Labor Library. As a result, the numerous
investigative and research reports of the child labor reform organizations, the
myriad of monographs and periodical articles on the subject, and the government
publications on proposed legislative reforms in this area, comprised a great
deal of the "book-shelf" space. The Child Labor Committee publications have an
added bonus for the department's library, in that Lewis Hine, the patron saint
of child labor photography, had his pictures published in those works. The
Department of Labor Library shares the rights to those photos with the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The many reports, pamphlets and monographs in this collection were written by a virtual
Who's Who of social reformers. For example, a future Director of the
Labor Department's Women's Bureau, Mary Van Kleeck, in the January 18, 1908,
edition of the publication Charities and the Commons, described
licensed tenement "sweating system" factories in New York as disease ridden and
exploitive of children.
"The
presence of a contagious, infectious, or communicable disease, or the existence
of unclean or unsanitary conditions is sufficient ground for forbidding home
work. But, if no such unhealthy or unsanitary conditions exist, the fact that
three sickly children aged eleven, nine and six years, are at work, is the
concern of no official department, a violation of no law."
 That same publication
reprinted a speech by Dr. Felix Adler, also of the Child Labor Committee, in a
March, 1902, edition citing conditions among New York City child laborers.
Addler said, "It is strange that we do nothing for our little newsboys. They
are out at all hours of the night and day, exposed to the most inclement
weather.... By the time they have reached their fourteenth year they are worn
out."
It became fairly obvious that Federal, not state legislation, was needed to break the
rigid chains of child labor bondage. The department's Children's Bureau
published a considerable number of studies on reform efforts in this area.
The Child, a monthly summary of news on child labor issues
(1936-1950), exposed a broad range of reform ideas for eliminating the scourge
of youth. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (1933-1945), who would be the
guiding force behind the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set
regulations for young workers on a national scale. She once stated, "All
attempts to establish just labor standards... have included a basic minimum age
below which children are not to compete with adults for industrial or
commercial employment." [See: Jonathan Grossman, "The Fair Labor Standards Act
of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage," Monthly Labor Review
(June, 1978).]
The historical materials in the DOL facility are not exclusive to domestic problems. Child
labor regulations were a major concern of the International Labor Organization
(ILO). The first international conference held in Washington in 1919 adopted
conventions (standards), setting the minimum age for industrial employment at
14 years of age. Similar conventions covering employment at sea and in
agriculture (1920 and 1921 respectively) were also adopted. The U.S. officially
became a member in 1934 and most of the ILO publications on child labor as well
as other monographs and pamphlets are also among the DOL Library's
holdings.
 Domestic and
international child labor problems intertwined in the American workplace of the
early 20th century. In 1904, immigration through the receiving station at Ellis
Island surpassed one million entries a year. Most of the newcomers entered the
urban jungles of our large cities. Tenement factories sprouted up with abandon.
Mary Van Kleeck [in Charities and the Commons, January 18, 1908] found
that "No maker of artificial flowers can employ in his factory any child under
14 years-of-age. He may give out work to an Italian family, in whose tenement
rooms flowers are made by six children, ages 2½, 5, 8, 10, 14 and 16."
In the coal fields, recent Slavic and Italian immigrants like the Irish and
German waves before them, sent their sons to work in the mines [Carroll Wright,
Commissioner of Labor, "Report of the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902,"
Bureau of Labor Bulletin #43 (November, 1902); and Victor Greene,
The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania
Anthracite University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.] While not recent
immigrants by the 1900s, African-American children of tender years broiled in
the hot sun picking cotton and other agricultural produce [Lewis Hine
Photographs in Bulletins of the National Child Labor
Committee].
When Congress created the Federal U.S. Department of Labor in 1913, one of its primary goals
was the administration of legal child labor and the elimination of illegal
practices. Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson (1913-1921), was a breaker-boy
in the Anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania, his successor James Davis
(1921-1930) was a "puddler" as a boy in a steel mill in Pittsburgh [See:
Speeches and Addresses of the Secretaries of Labor, 1913-1965], and
Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet officer in U.S. history, met immigrant
girls on the docks of Philadelphia as a young social worker to prevent pimps
from recruiting them as prostitutes [George Martin, Madame Secretary].
Perkins was a strong proponent of the National Child Labor Amendment to the
Constitution, which would have established a 16-year minimum age for work in
the U.S. While this effort fell short, she was able to get some restrictions on
the employment of young men and women in the National Industrial Recovery
Act of 1934 [See: Proceedings and Hearings Relating to the National
Industrial Recovery Act and Legislative Histories of the Minimum Wage]. As
mentioned, she was a key figure in the child labor regulations included in the
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Cries for legislative redress to child labor abuse grew louder as the "second industrial
revolution" in the U.S. (1890-1920) plunged the workforce into the dark and
satanic abyss of the factory system. In fact, child labor was considered
beneficial by many of America's founding figures. The diary of George
Washington describes a Massachusetts cloth factory where each spinning wheel
"has a small girl to turn [it]." [See: U.S. Congress, Report on the
Conditions of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Vol. VI (a BLS
study), 61st Congress, 2d session, 1910.] Prior to the Civil War, many
states looked to legislation to reduce the hours of excessive work for children
and adults. By 1853, seven states enacted laws limiting the hours children
could work. [See Reports of Bureaus of Labor -- Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Rhode Island.] The Knights of Labor,
one of the first national trade union organizations, advocated legal
prohibition of child labor by the 1870s. [See Journal of the Knights of
Labor.]
The power to prohibit child labor, by judicial interpretation of the courts, was considered
a matter left to the states. A federal law, the Keating-Owen Law of
1916, which set a 14 year-old minimum age for employment, was challenged
by Southern textile manufacturers and ruled unconstitutional in 1918, in the
famous Hammer v. Dagenhart case. A similar law passed in 1919 met the
same fate in 1922. In 1924, Congress passed an amendment to the Constitution
that would have covered child labor, but it was never ratified by a sufficient
number of states . Much of the literature spawned by these debates --
Congressional testimony, government reports, periodical articles, and public
speeches -- has been catalogued and is available in the Department of Labor
Library.
 The Fair Labor
Standards Act of 1938, as we have noted, established regulations for
employment of young workers. It continues to monitor activities. Yet the
scourge of child labor still exists. In 1960, a documentary produced by
journalist Edward R. Murrow, Harvest of Shame, in which Secretary of
Labor James P. Mitchell participated, illustrated how "beans were in
competition with school among migrant workers, and beans were [sic] winning."
The influx of both political and economic immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s has
been well documented, and arguments over free trade agreements often involve
the issue of child labor. As one labor leader stated,
"American capitalists are investing in
China with the idea of crushing out the unions of America, and it is time for
us to wake up from our slumbers... across our borders in Mexico you will find
[steel plants and smelters]. They do not go there to establish schools to make
good mechanics. Modern ingenuity has made it possible for a child to run some
of the machines, and the child will get the job while the men must
tramp."
Just as in the opening paragraph of this essay, one could imagine that John Sweeney, President
of the AFL-CIO, had made this statement. It is, however, a quote from the
radical labor leader Mother-Mary Harris-Jones, who said it in 1910.
All the citations in this essay were taken from publications in the U.S. Department of Labor's
Wirtz Labor Library.
| |
|
