95 723. - education resources information center emphasizing child labor during those years. ... 1...

DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 405 276 SO 027 153

AUTHOR Bernstein, Richard B.; And OthersTITLE From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor in

New York State. Volume II: Civil War to thePresent.

INSTITUTION Council for Citizenship Education, Troy, NY.SPONS AGENCY New York State Education Dept., Albany.PUB DATE 95NOTE 84p.; Prepared for the New York Labor Legacy Project.

A Teacher's Guide for the 7th & 8th Grade Course U.S.and New York State History. For volume I, see ED 393723.

AVAILABLE FROM Council for Citizenship Education, Russell SageCollege, Troy, NY 12180; telephone: 518-270-2363 ($5;Volumes I and II together, $8).

PUB TYPE Guides Classroom Use Teaching Guides (ForTeacher) (052)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC04 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS *Child Labor; Children; Child Welfare; Civil War

(United States); Grade 8; Junior High Schools; *LaborConditions; Labor Legislation; *Labor Standards;*Local History; Middle Schools; *Social History;Social Studies; *State History; United StatesHistory

IDENTIFIERS *New York

ABSTRACTThis volume of essays and activities is written for

use in the eighth grade course "United States and New York StateHistory." The volume follows the chronology from the Civil War to thepresent, emphasizing child labor during those years. The essays areintended for teachers but can be mastered by many students. Theactivities focus on child labor and social history and are suited tothe peer orientation of middle school students. The book is dividedinto four sections: (1) "Child Labor in the Gilded Age: 1865-1900";(2) "The Struggle for Child Labor Reform: 1900-1933"; (3) "The'High-Water Mark' of Child Labor Reform: 1933-1960"; and (4) "TheResurgence of Child Labor: 1960 to the Present." Guiding questionsfor the volume are the inter-related questions of: (1) "Whichchildren should work?"; (2) "What work should children do?"; and (3)"Under what conditions should children work?" (EH)

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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be madefrom the original document.

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New York Labor Legacy Participants

New York Labor Legacy Executive CommitteePaul F. Cole

Dr. George E. O'Connell, ChairDr. Stephen L. Schechter, Coordinator

Joyce Durgerian, Secretary

Council for Citizenship EducationStephen L. Schechter, Director

New York State AFL-CIOEdward J. Cleary, President

Paul F. Cole, Secretary-Treasurer

New York State Council for the Social StudiesSteven Goldberg, President

Stephanie A. Schechter, Council Liaison

New York State Department of LaborJohn E. Sweeney, Commissioner

George E. O'Connell, Director, Labor-Management AffairsJoyce Durgerian, Supervising Labor Standards Investigator, Division of Labor Standards (retired)

Kevin E. Jones, Senior Public Work Wage Investigator, Bureau of Public WorkDavid J. Nyhan, Deputy Director, Division of Research and Statistics

New York State Education DepartmentDr. Richard P Mills, Commissioner

Dr. George Gregory, Supervisor of Educational Programs, Curriculum and Assessment TeamErnest Wheldon, Associate, North Country Field Services Team

New York State Occupational Information Coordinating CommitteeDavid J. Trzaskos, Executive Director

Victoria Gray, former internSean Rafferty, former intern

New York State United TeachersThomas Y. Hobart, Jr., President

Anthony J. Bifaro, Assistant to the PresidentAlice Brody, Assistant in Educational Services

NEW YORK

THE STATE CH LEARNING

THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT/THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK/ALBANY, N.Y. 12234

November 1995

Dear Colleague:

We are pleased to present you with the second volume of From Forge to Fast Food,just published by the New York Labor Legacy Project housed at the Council forCitizenship Education at Russell Sage College. This teacher guide has been publishedand distributed with the support of a grant from the Child Labor Education Fund ofthe New York State Department of Labor, the contributions of labor organizations, andthis special mailing by the New York State Education Department.

This teacher guide has been written for use in the eighth-grade course, "UnitedStates and New York State History." The chapters follow the chronology of that course,from the Civil War to the present; the essays are intended for teachers but can bemastered by many eighth-grade students; the activities were developed by middle-school teachers; and the focus on child labor is ideally suited to the social historyemphasis of that course and to the peer orientation of middle-school students.

This volume completes the saga of child labor history in New York State begun inVolume I of From Forge to Fast Food, from colonial times through the Civil War. Volume Iwas distributed to seventh-grade social studies teachers through BOCES and in NewYork City by Community School Districts. Please contact your BOCES or CommunitySchool District Office if seventh-grade teachers in your school did not receive their copy.

The Labor Legacy Project is very proud to acknowledge the exceptional collabora-tive effort undertaken by its member organizations to make both volumes of FromForge to Fast Food possible: the New York State AFL-CIO, the New York State Council forthe Social Studies, the New York State Department of Labor, the New York State Educa-tion Department, the New York State Occupational Information Coordinating Commit-tee, New York State United Teachers, and the Council for Citizenship Education atRussell Sage College.

If you or your colleagues would like to order additional copies of either volume,please contact the Council for Citizenship Education.

Sincerely,

Wai,2cielt -2t6leSidutetDr. Stephen L. SchechterCoordinator, New YorkLabor Legacy ProjectExecutive Committee

Dr. George E. O'ConnellChair, New YorkLabor Legacy ProjectExecutive Committee

Roseanne DeFabioDeFabioCoordinator, Curriculumand Instruction,New York State EducationDepartment

From Forge to Fast Food:

A History of Child Labor in New York State

A Teacher's GuideFor the 7th & 8th Grade Course

U.S. and New York State History

Volume II: Civil War to the Present

From Forge to Fast Food:A History of Child Labor in New York State

A Teacher's GuideFor the 7th & 8th Grade Course

U.S. and New York State History

Volume II: Civil War to the Present

by Richard B. Bernstein

with Teaching Strategies byKathleen Cotugno-Surin, Raymond A. Le Bel, and Stephanie A. Schechter

Prepared for the New York Labor Legacy ProjectA joint effort of:

New York State AFL-CIONew York State Building and Construction Trades Council

New York State Council for the Social StudiesNew York State Department of Labor

New York State Education DepartmentNew York State Occupational Information Coordinating Committee

New York State United Teachers

Administered by the Council for Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College

With the support of:

PIM MK

in

1 -

IMITI LLISAING

The University of the State of New YorkTHE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

Albany, New York 12234

6

ii FROM FORGE TO FAST FOOD

Published for the New York Labor Legacy Project 1995by the Council for Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College

The New York Labor Legacy Project was created in 1988 as the result of cooperative effortsamong five state governmental agencies and three state labor organizations to commemorate the50th anniversary of the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1938, which adopted anamendment known as Labor's Bill of Rights. The founding members included: the New YorkState AFL-CIO, the New York State Building and Construction Trades Council, the New YorkState United Teachers, the New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitu-tion, the New York State Department of Labor, the New York State Education Department, theNew York State Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, and the New York StateWorkers' Compensation Board. They were joined by the New York State Council for the SocialStudies in 1989-90. Since its founding, the New York Labor Legacy Project has undertakeneducational programs to advance understanding of the relationships between labor and law inNew York State and American history and society.

This publication may be quoted or reproduced for educational purposes without priorpermission. We ask that the work be cited in all quotations and reproductions as follows:Richard B. Bernstein et al., From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor in New York State,Volume II: Civil War to the Present (Troy, NY: Council for Citizenship Education,Russell Sage College, for the New York Labor Legacy Project, 1995).

AcknowledgmentMaterial from Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Volume 1 by Charles Reznikoff copyright

©1978 by Marie Syrkin Reznikoff reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.

Material from Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Volume 2 by Charles Reznikoff copyright©1979 by Marie Syrkin Reznikoff reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.

CreditsCover Design and Artwork by Leigh Ann Smith

Photographs reproduced from the Collections of the Library of CongressPrinting by Fort Orange Press, Inc., Albany, New York

Typesetting by Robin MacKenzie Prout, Wynantskill, New York

For additional copies and information, please contact:

Dr. Stephen L. Schechter, DirectorCouncil for Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College

Troy, New York 12180Tel.: (518) 270-2363; fax: (518) 270-3125

Printed in the United States of America

iii

Contents

Preface iv

Acknowledgments

Introduction vi

1 Child Labor in the Gilded Age: 1865-1900 1

2 The Struggle for Child Labor Reform: 1900-1933 20

3 The "High-Water Mark" of Child Labor Reform:1933-1960 39

4 The Resurgence of Child Labor: 1960 to the Present 52

iv FROM FORGE TO FAST FOOD

Preface

From Forge to Fast Food is a guide to assistteachers in fashioning their history classrooms intolearning environments where curriculum contentand student development meet.

The premise is simple: one way to engage youngpeople in the study of state and national history isto make young people the subject of that study.When studying the colonial period, for example,why not examine the evolving roles of children ascolonial apprentices, indentured servants, slaves,and family workers in the settlement of our stateand nation? What was it like for young people tolive and work in colonial times in New Netherlandand New York? What do their lives at work teachus about the concepts of childhood, family, com-munity, and society? How do these questions andthe answers to them evolve with the state and thenation? How did the life of the child change in thenew nation, the age of homespun, the Civil War,the age of urbanization and industrialization, andour own age of fast food and hi-tech? What are theprimary examples of child labor today, and how dothese compare with child labor in earlier times?What are the rights and responsibilities, and therisks and rewards, of child labor today? And whatare the needs and expectations of the world atwork for young people in the decades ahead?

From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor inNew York State, Colonial Times through the Civil Waraddresses these questions and others in a collectionof essays written by Janet Wells Greene andsupplemented by suggested classroom activitiesaimed at a middle school course in U.S. and NewYork State History. The activities are suggestionsonlydesigned to "jump start" teacher creativityalong lines that are true to history while beingdevelopmentally appropriate.

The second volume, From Forge to Fast Food: AHistory of Child Labor in New York State, From theCivil War to the Present, consists of four essayswritten by Richard B. Bernstein, supplemented bysuggested classroom activities. In this volume, thesubject naturally shifts in the age of reform fromchild labor in society to child labor as a subject ofpolitical reform and public policy.

The essays, along with the other resourcematerial in both volumes, can be used by studentsfor individual or group projects seeking to discoverwhat was happening not only in the nation but alsoin the State of New York. In this way, the essayscan also enrich the teacher's classroom referencematerial on New York. Together, both volumesprovide the teacher with a continuous history ofthis important yet neglected subject of our stateand national history.

Acknowledgments

This publication, like all such endeavors, is aproduct of many hands and minds. Stephen L.Schechter coordinated the publication process fromthe initial recruitment of the authors to the printingof their work. He was joined by Paul F. Cole andGeorge E. O'Connell, who as members of theexecutive committee, coached this publication tocompletion. Along the way, they diligently re-viewed each draft of each manuscript with carefulattention to both detail and overall design. They inturn were joined by several members of the LaborLegacy Project, especially Joyce Durgerian, GeorgeGregory, Kevin E. Jones, and David J. Nyhan, whoremained involved in this project from beginningto end providing friendly support and goodcounsel at each step of the process. George Gregoryalso reviewed the manuscript upon completion ofits final draft.

Richard B. Bernstein would like to thank DeanHarry Wellington and the library staff of New YorkLaw School, the Brooklyn Public Library, andThomas C. Mackey.

The authors were assisted in their work by thestaff of the Council for Citizenship Education,Russell Sage College: Karen Birsner helped do thelibrary research needed to identify bibliographicresources; Julie E. Her lands copyedited the manu-script; and Pamela Walker assisted in the finalpreparation of the manuscript. The authors of theteaching strategies were also supported by theirschool district, Niskayuna Central Schools, andassisted by the good counsel of Henry Mueller,chair of social studies for the Niskayuna middleschools. In addition, David J. Nyhan, then execu-tive director of the New York State OccupationalInformation Coordinating Committee enabledinterns, Victoria Gray and Sean Rafferty, to preparethe pocket guide for students that becomes part ofthe culminating teaching strategy presented inchapter 4 of this volume.

Three other member institutions, notably theNew York State AFL-CIO, the New York State

v

Department of Labor, and the New York StateEducation Department, provided ongoing supportfor this project in a variety of waysfrom thephysical facilities made available for our meetingsto the moral encouragement of its officials whocontinued to support the investment of time thatproject members devoted to this undertaking.

The historical content of this manuscript wasreviewed by Clete Daniel, an eminent professor oflabor history at the School of Industrial and LaborRelations, Cornell University, and by Janet WellsGreene who authored the first volume of this two-volume publication. The pedagogical dimension ofthe manuscript was reviewed by educators fromaround New York State who participated in aChild Labor History Workshop on September 17-18, 1994, in Albany.

A final note of acknowledgment and thanks goesto those who assisted in raising the funds neededto undertake this project. The research and writingof this publication was made possible with one ofthe first grants from the Child Labor EducationTrust Fund, an innovative educational assistancefoundation established by the New York StateDepartment of Labor, under the chairmanship ofthen Labor Commissioner John F. Hudacs. Theprinting of this volume was made possible with theassistance of Edward J. Cleary and Paul F. Cole,President and Secretary-Treasurer, respectively, ofthe New York State AFL-CIO, who reached out farand wide to AFL-CIO member organizations.Contributions for this project were received from:the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile WorkersUnion; the International Ladies' Garment WorkersUnion; the New York State AFL-CIO; PublicEmployees Federation; the Retail, Wholesale, andDepartment Store Workers Union; the ServiceEmployees International Union; the TransportWorkers Union; and the United Federation ofTeachers, Local #2. In the final hours of this projectwe received a crucial second grant from The ChildLabor Education Trust Fund, under the chairman-ship of Labor Commissioner John E. Sweeney, thatensured the completion of this volume.

10

Vi FROM FORGE TO FAST FOOD

Introduction

As historian Walter I. Trattner observed in 1970,"children have always worked."' ThroughoutAmerican history, children have worked alongsidetheir parents in family farms and businesses or ontheir own, either to support themselves or tosupplement their family's income. Most Americanshave regarded the question of child labor withequanimity; then and now, they have believed,with considerable justification, that it is good forchildren to have at least some work experiencebefore they become adults. Work builds character,reinforcing children's sense of their independence,responsibility, and worth; work enables children tounderstand adult life and adult responsibilities,giving them both deeper understanding of theburdens shouldered by their parents and otheradults and the grounding that will enable them toshoulder these burdens for themselves when theybecome adults.

Both then and now, those who have raised theissue of child labor have not done so to support theproposition that children must never work. Rather,they have focused on three linked questions:

Which children should work? That is, atwhat age, depending on the kind of workat issue, should children be permitted towork at all?

What work should children do? That is, atwhat ages should they be permitted to dowhat kinds of work, and what if any kindsof work should be performed only byadults?

Under what conditions should childrenwork? That is, what relationships shouldsubsist among the kinds of work childrenshould do, the hours during which theycan work, the conditions of their workplaces, and the pay they are to receive forthat work?

These questions do not have abstract, timelessanswers; rather, as these essays illustrate, theiranswers alter, depending on the specific historicalcontext governing the conditions of child labor.

These four essays survey the child labor prob-lem in America from the end of the Civil War to thepresent day. They juxtapose the national context inwhich the child labor issue arose with specificillustrations and responses in New York State andseek to identify reciprocal influences between thenational and New York responses to child labor asan issue and a problem requiring the attention ofgovernment.

Endnotes1. Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A

History of the National Child Labor Committee andChild Labor Reform in America (Chicago: QuadrangleBooks, 1970), 21.

11

Chapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age 1865-1900 1

Chapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age1865-1900

Context: Child Labor in the Gilded-Age United States

From the end of the Civil War to the beginningof the twentieth century, child labor moved frombeing an unremarkable condition of economic lifeto the threshold of becoming a major social, eco-nomic, educational, political, and legal issue. Thisperiod, popularly called the Gilded Age from the1872 novel by Mark Twain and Charles DudleyWarner,' witnessed dramatic changes in thehistorical context in which American childrenworked. We can trace the roots of these changes tothe three major historical developments thatshaped the age:

industrializationthe rise of the industrialeconomy and of accompanying issues of law,governance, and public policy;

urbanizationthe dramatic growth of thenation's cities as focal points for populationgrowth and demographic change, and ascenters of commerce, culture, education,news, and politics; and

immigrationthe effects on Americanidentity, politics, and culture of the greatwaves of immigration from eastern, central,and southern Europe and from Asia.

The interaction of these developments addedrichness and complexity to late nineteenth-centuryAmerican history; more important for our pur-poses, they reshaped the context in which Ameri-cans considered whether, when, how, and for whatcompensation children should work. We firstconsider how each development affected the nationand the child labor issue as a whole; we then focuson the experience of the people of New York State.

IndustrializationAlthough the push to build American industry

dates back to the earliest days of the Americanrepublic, and although (as Alexander Hamilton's

1791 "Report on Manufactures"' makes clear)Americans assumed the utility, desirability, andmorality of child labor, a key factor in the reshap-ing of child labor was the dramatic growth anddiversification of American industry during andafter the Civil War.' The explosion of technologicalinnovations in this period transformed the Ameri-can nation. National systems of transportation(railroads and steamship lines) and communication(telegraph systems, complemented and eventuallysurpassed by telephone networks) helped to createa large, unified economic system. These develop-ments also shaped a new American culture, onethat assimilated technological changes with in-creasing speed and complacency. Americans beganto take for granted that their lives could be im-proved by such innovations as mass-produced,ready-made clothing; comparatively instantaneouscommunication spanning the continent and theoceans; the rise of mass newspapers, magazines,and books; and the resulting creation and dissemi-nation of a national popular culture!'

These technological changes also affected thelives of millions of ordinary Americans, for theytransformed the conditions of work and the rangeof occupations available to those who sought towork. The ability to produce more goods of differ-ent types stimulated consumer demand; thus,manufacturers needed more workers both togenerate the raw materials to feed the ever-grow-ing demand for finished goods and to make andsell those goods. This growing demand for laborgave rise to a growing demand for child workers inboth raw-material industries and finished-goodsindustries.

For example, the demand for cloth for ready-made clothing and other purposes in turnstimulated the rapid proliferation of mills andthe number of child workers. The fabric millscreated a wide range of jobs that could beand werefilled by children, such as "feed-ers" (who would put ready-made collarsthrough pressing machines); "back boys"

12

2 FROM FORGE TO FAST FOOD

(who would clear the floors of cotton mills ofdiscarded bobbins and trash); and "doffers"(who would replace "twister" machines' filledbobbins with empty bobbins).

The dramatic growth of modern urbannewspapers gave rise to a widely-recognizedsymbol of the Gilded Agethe streetwise"newsboys" or "newsies," who would sellnewspapers on streetcorners or on streetcarsor subways.

UrbanizationAmerican history has always manifested a

reciprocal relationship between industrializationand urbanization, but the heyday of that relation-ship was the Gilded Age. In the decades duringand following the Civil War, the nation's citiesgrew apace with the growth of industry. AfterAppomattox, urbanization joined with industrial-ization to dominate the evolution of Americansociety.' Cities mushroomed in this period:

By 1890 nine of every ten people in RhodeIsland clustered in towns, and Massachusettshad a larger proportion of people in towns of10,000 than any nation in Europe. Onedistrict of New York's Eleventh Ward, with adensity of 986 per acre, was probably themost crowded spot on earth; even the notori-ous Koombarwara district of Bombay had but760 persons per acre. In the twenty yearsfrom 1880 to 1900 the population of NewYork City increased from a little less than twoto almost three and a half million; Chicagogrew from half a million to a million and ahalf, to become the second city in the nation;such cities as Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo,Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus, Toledo,Omaha, and Atlanta more than doubled. In1880 there were 19 cities with a population of100,000 or more; by 1910, there were 50.6

In the emerging nation of cities, thronged withever-more people fleeing the decline of Americanagriculture or (as shown below) immigrating to aland of promise from Europe and Asia, more andmore children found their way into the Americanlabor force.

One of urbanization's principal contributions tothe growth of child labor was the rise of tenementmanufacturing. Such trades as clothing and cigar

manufacturing employed whole families in airless,crowded slum buildings and neighborhoods,working them up to twelve hours per day. The few,outnumbered inspectors of housing conditionsregularly found themselves outwitted by manufac-turers, corrupt building superintendents, and eventhe workers themselves.'

ImmigrationThe late nineteenth century was one of the great

ages of immigration in American history. This eraof immigration differed from previous immigrationbooms in two key respects: scale and sources. Inmany ways, the change in sources of immigrationwas more important than the change in scale. Byfar the largest sources of immigrants in this periodwere the nations of central, eastern, and southernEuropethe new, fragile nations of Italy andGermany and the ailing empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia; these immigrants wererefugees from economic privation and political andreligious persecution. This period also witnessedthe first great waves of Asian immigration, mostlyfrom China but with trickles of immigrants fromJapan and Korea as well. Many immigrant familieshad come from lands with even fewer barriers tothe idea of children working than the UnitedStates, and the immigrant families' desperatescramble to support themselves and possibly bettertheir lot in their new homes spurred thousands ofchildren into the labor force. Immigration was aparticularly powerful force in shaping the childlabor problem in such entry ports as New YorkCity.'

Education or Work:A Continuing Debate

As more children entered the labor force, anincreasing number of individuals and organiza-tions rose to challenge the trendarguing that allchildren, instead of working, should attend school,Such educational leaders as Horace Mann andHenry Barnard campaigned for a system of freeuniversal public education, drawing on strongsupport from reformers of various sorts, includinglabor unions.'

The education versus work debate has rootsearly in the history of the American republic. In theearly 1800s, some schools for the children of thepoor openedbut workers resented the stigmaattached to them and demanded instead a system

13


of public schools open to all children, without socialor economic or class distinctions. As early as 1829,the Workingmen's Party in New York City adopteda resolution demanding a school system "that shallunite under the same roof the children of the poorman and the rich, the widow's charge and theorphan, where the road to distinction shall besuperior industry, virtue and acquirement withoutreference to descent."1° In 1834, unions from aroundthe nation met in New York City and recommendedthe establishment of "an equal, universal, republicansystem of education.""

These demands for universal public educationmet strong opposition, which fell into two catego-ries:

Some opponents of universal publiceducation accepted child labor asnecessary for economic growth andnational prosperity and resisted anyeffort to siphon away a significantportion of the national labor force.

Other opponents of universal publiceducation argued that it would notmeet the goals its advocates set for it.These adversaries maintained thatchildren of poor and working-classfamilies would not benefit fromeducation.

These two positions often combined in argumentsagainst universal public education. For example, inone editorial the Philadelphia National Gazette woveboth arguments together to present what its editorsdeemed an irrefutable case:

(Universal, equal education is impossible iftrade, manufacturing and manual labor are tobe successfully prosecutedunless thestandards be greatly lowered and narrowed. . . .

The 'peasant' must labour during those hoursof the day which his wealthy neighbor can giveto abstract culture of his mind; otherwise, theearth would not yield enough for the substanceof all: the mechanic cannot abandon theoperation of his trade for general studies; mostof the conveniences of life and objects ofexchange would be wanting; languor, decay,poverty, discontent would soon be visibleamong the classes."

Though the battle for education had some earlysuccessesincluding the founding of free publicschool systems in Pennsylvania (1834) and NewJersey (1838)these successes were only partial;attendance in the Pennsylvania and New Jerseysystems was voluntary rather than required,leaving those children who had to or wanted towork rather than attend school free to do so. Theother states followed the Pennsylvania and NewJersey examples over the next four decades; evenso, these states made few and hesitant efforts toreconcile the conflict between child labor andcompulsory education."

From Condition to Issue: Child Laborin New York State

Although urbanization, industrialization, andimmigration spurred the rapid growth of childlabor in the United Statesthe 1880 census indi-cated that about six percent of the nation's childrenbetween ten and fifteen years of age "worked insome kind of industry"they operated with evengreater speed and force in New York State, "theleading industrial state in the nation."14 Estimatesin the 1880s of the number of children employed inthe state ranged from a low of 60,000 to a high ofwell over 200,000more than eight percent of thestate's labor force and about seventeen percent ofNew York's children.15 As historian Jeremy Feltnoted:

They worked making artificial flowers,driving teams, laying bricks, packing fish,tanning leather, and butchering cattle. Somewere machinists, buttonmakers, confection-ers, painters, plumbers, or glassworkers.Others worked in the fields and canning

factories, or in the cotton, hosiery, silk,woolen, hemp, and jute mills. There werelivery stable keepers, bartenders, seam-stresses, janitors, sailors, and even auction-eers under sixteen.16

Moreover, these children were also reaping abitter harvestof gradual damage to their health,and of specific traumatic and disfiguring injuries,and even of death. For example, in 1882 tworeformersElbridge Gerry, founder and presidentof the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty toChildren, and Dr. Abraham Jacobi, president of theNew York State Medical Associationrecognized

14


that the damage to the health and lives of childworkers constituted a new and appalling cost oflabor. Historians of the subject agree:

Children helped New York attain fits]preeminence [as "the leading industrial statein the nation"], though in the course of theirlabors some fell down elevator shafts, burnedto death, were mangled by machinery, workedstanding in several inches of water, deliveredmessages to houses of prostitution, stood ontheir feet for twelve hours a day, sold newspa-pers at two o'clock in the morning, or froze todeath in delivery wagons."

The three general categories of injury to childrenwere (i) inhaling harmful materials; (ii) whatmodern doctors would call repetitive stress inju-ries; and (iii) injuries from machinery."

In the 1880s, only 35 percent of the state'schildren between five and twenty-one attendedpublic schoo119despite the enactment of a statecompulsory attendance law in 1874. The statute,backed by reformer Charles Loring Brace and hisChildren's Aid Society, required children betweeneight and fourteen years old to attend fourteenweeks of school per year, with at least eight ofthose weeks being consecutive; children had toproduce certificates confirming their previousyear's school attendance. And yet this law wasfatally flawed, for children and their parentssimply lied about their age to exempt themselvesfrom the law's coverage; moreover, school officialswere required to enforce the law, yet were given noadditional funds or support to carry out theseduties. Moreover, many educators did not believethat they should run the risk, by enforcing thecompulsory attendance law, of depriving needyfamilies of the vital added income produced bychild workers: "[W]hile every community wouldapprove the compulsory attendance, in a suitableschool, of idle and vagrant boys, there would belittle sympathy in the project of taking childrenfrom work when the proceeds of their labor areneeded for the support of indigent and infirmparents."2° And some educators were dubiousabout the value of compulsory education; at leastone expressed relief that the poorest children in hiscommunity were more likely to work than to go toschool, noting that "the compulsory attendance ofthe element attempted to be reached by the lawwould be detrimental to the well-being of any

respectable school."21Ironically, just as educators were ambivalent

about their inability to enforce compulsory educa-tion laws for child workers, the children them-selves were ambivalent about the comparativevalues of education and work. In a 1914 study ofchild labor in Chicago, factory inspector HelenTodd questioned 500 factory workers betweenfourteen and sixteen years of age about theiropinions of school; more than four-fifths of thoseshe questioned (412) declared that they wouldrather work and gave a remarkable range ofreasons for their preference. One, who probablyrecalled school with bitterness, said, "They ain'talways pickin' on you because you don't knowthings in a factory." Another noted the relativefreedom he experienced in the workplace fromreligious bigotry: "The children don't holler at yeand call ye a Christ-killer in a factory." A thirdexpressed grim practicality: "You can buy shoes forthe baby." Echoing this perspective, a fourth madepointed comments comparing the relative value ofschooling and work: "I got three cards with 'excel-lent' on 'em, an' they never did me no good. MyMother kept 'em in the Bible, an' they never didher no good, neither. They ain't like a pay enve-lope." A fifth saw the issue in terms of pure power:"School ain't no good. The Holy Father he can sendyou to hell, and the boss he can take away yer jober raise yer pay. The teacher she can't do noth-ing."22 If such expressions represent the attitudes ofmost children who worked in this period, and theyprobably do, then the poorest children of Gilded-Age America seem to have had just as little use forthe schools as the schools had for them.

In the 1870s and early 1880s, reformers ofvarious stripes determined that child labor wasbecoming a serious issue that required some sort ofgovernment response, but the challenge provedbeyond their powers to address. Children's advo-cates such as the Children's Aid Society, "goodgovernment" societies such as the Citizen's Asso-ciation, crusading journalists, and politicians eachtried their hand at the problem. The problem wasthat, "Mike the blind man describing an elephant,each saw the solution in the particular part of theproblem he happened to be observing."23 Fewreformers recognized, as the preeminent historianof New York's struggle with child labor pointedout, "[t]hat child labor, slums, crime, poverty, andvice were the results of society's failure to copewith its industrial revolution and not of individual

15

depravity. . . . Hence the solutions were superficial,the results negligible and short-lived. . . .

[C]ommunity improvement organizations of theera . . . struck the edge of the child labor problemand glanced off into other endeavors."24 Organizedlabor, more powerful and more politically skilledthan the reformers, seemed more likely to goad thestate's government to strike a blow against theabuses of child labor. And yet, like the reform andcharitable organizations before it, organized laboronly saw and acted on part of the problem. Somelabor leaders regarded child labor principally as athreat, manipulated by employers, to the employ-ment prospects of adult New Yorkers; in theirview, employers reasoned, "Why hire an adult fora dollar when you can hire a kid for a dime?"Others focused on education, continuing theirdemands for a system of free, universal publiceducation to prepare all for a better life. In 1869, forexample, a convention of African-Americanunionists demanded "a free school system, recog-nizing no distinction on account of race, color,creed, or previous condition."

Beginning with its founding convention in 1881,the American Federation of Labor demandedcompulsory attendance laws, confronting directlythe choice between educating children and funnel-ing them into the labor market. Six years later, AFLdelegates adopted a compulsory-attendance-lawsresolution "so as to enable [the children] to acquirean education letting them to become intelligent andimportant factors in the regulation of laws and thesystem of government under which they live." In1893, AFL President Samuel Gompers promised hisorganization's convention vigorous action onbehalf of the nation's working children:

The damnable system which permits youngand innocent children to have their livesworked out of them in factories, mills,workshops, and stores is one of the very worstof labor's grievances. We shall never ceaseour agitation until we have rescued them, andplaced them where they should be, in theschoolroom and playground.

Despite these demands for action, New YorkState was slow to respond effectively. Not until1886 did the New York legislature enact a statute,the Factory Act of 1886, that both survived consti-tutional challenge and made a stab at combatingthe problem. Ironically, the first step was the


establishment in 1883 of New York State's Bureauof Labor Statistics. Even though its leaders wereuncertain of their legal authority and tended toaccept both employers' and workers' statements atface value, the Bureau's investigationsparticu-larly its 1883-1884 examination of the HarmonyCotton Works of Cohoes, New Yorkhelped togather and focus public demands for action on thequestion of child labor. Reporting that he foundsome of the children profoundly ignorant of themost basic facts of the world around them, Com-missioner Charles F. Peck reported that he hadseen

hundreds of thin and scantily clad girls andboys ranging from eight to fifteen years ofage, hurrying home with dinner pail in hand.. . . (Their sallow, parchment-like complex-ion, dwarfed bodies, pinched and care-wornfaces spoke more eloquently than words. . . .

Any system of labor which results in suchinjury to the physical nature and an igno-rance so deplorable as found among thesechildren . . . is not only a disgrace, but will . .

. prove dangerous to the prosperity andstability of our free institutions.26

The Factory Act was the product of the firstsuccessful alliance among organized labor, reformand charitable organizations, and the state'spoliticians. It barred children under thirteen fromworking in manufacturing establishments; requiredthat all children thirteen or older produce nota-rized affidavits signed by their parents confirmingtheir age; and set a maximum work week of sixtyhours per week for minors under eighteen andwomen under twenty-one. And yet the law wasmore symbolic than real; the legislature establishedpenalties (up to $100 for each "knowing[ ]" viola-tion) that were laughably small and standards thatchild workers and their parents could evade withease. Finally, the law set up a pitifully small forceof inspectors to enforce it. Two inspectors (ten by1887, twenty-nine by 1896, and fifty by 1907) werecharged with overseeing tens of thousands offactories? Not only could they not inspect all thesefactoriesthey had virtually no chance to reinspectthose factories found to be violating the statute tomake sure that the violations they had found werecorrected. A patchwork of partial amendmentsover the next fifteen yearsfor example, shiftingthe power to issue certificates from individual

16


notaries public to local boards of health; adjustingthe minimum age for child workers upward and thenumber of hours per week downward; establishingliteracy tests for child workersaccomplished little,especially as employers and employees alike becameadept at evading the law's commands. One particu-larly common dodge was to have children work thestatutory weekly maximum hours over three daystwo twenty-four hour days and a third day of twelvehoursand take full advantage of the statute'sloophole permitting additional work to carry out"necessary repairs."" Moreover, even when inspec-tors could bring a case against employers for violat-ing the law, their case's Achilles' heel was that thechildren refused to testify against their employers,whether due to fear of reprisal or to simple worrythat they would lose their jobs."

In addition to its impossible task, the state'sinspection force had periodically to overcome thestigmata of administrative ineffectiveness andpolitical corruption. The crusading district attorneyWilliam Travers Jerome charged: "[T]here are fewlaws the laboring man can ask for that Tammany isnot willing to put upon the statute book; but thehabit of enforcing the laws . . . has long since beenlost by Tammany and anyone may disregard thoselaws who chooses to put down the stuff [that is, paidbribes]. "30

In sum, though on paper New York had a set ofapparently admirable laws regulating child laborand prohibiting its worst abuses, Jeremy Felt chargesthat "[Uri practice . . ., the new laws had not accom-plished any significant reduction in child labor. Theywere not only difficult to enforce, but probably werenot intended to be enforced." He cites one particu-larly damning statistic: "During the period 1887-1901, the average annual total of fines levied forviolations of the entire factory law (including childlabor violations) was $969."31 Between 1886, whenthe state government began to keep comprehensivefigures, and 1900, the percentage of children undersixteen working in New York's factories stayed atabout four percentit did not grow due to theefforts of the state's labor inspectors, but it did notdrop because the state government took no effectivemeasures to reduce that rate. But the problem waslarger than governmental indifference or incapacity:

The underlying difficulty was . . . [that](Nub& opinion was largely indifferent, and noreal attempt had been made to mobilize it. Evenamong those most interested in social problems,

there was indecision about goals and a ten-dency to rush from one creaking spot in theindustrial structure to another. . . . Only aconcerted drive on the child labor problem inits largest sensecareful attention to theentire environment of the childwould be oflasting benefit. 32

The period between the enactment of the FactoryAct of 1886 and 1900 is encapsulated in Felt's phrase,"legislation without enforcement."33

Endnotes1. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The

Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day (1872; New York: SignetClassics/New American Library, 1972).

2. Alexander Hamilton, "Report on Manufac-tures," 5 December 1791, reprinted in Harold C.Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-1987), 10: 1-340 (final draft, 230-340) (esp. 252, 253,270).

3. Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: AHistory of the National Child Labor Committee and ChildLabor Reform in America (Chicago: QuandrangleBooks, 1970), 31-32; and see generally Robert PennWarren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on theCentennial (New York: Random House, 1961); DanielJ. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience(New York: Random House, 1973).

4. See Boorstin, The Americans: The DemocraticExperience, passim; Thomas R. Hughes, AmericanGenesis (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), passim.

5. See generally Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorpora-tion of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age(New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).

6. Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager,and William E. Leuchtenberg, A Concise History of theAmerican Republic, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1983), 500.

7. Jeremy D. Felt, Hostages of Fortune: Child LaborReform in New York State (Syracuse; NY: SyracuseUniversity Press, 1965), 11-13. Felt's monograph isthe leading history of child labor and child laborreform in New York. It and the research it collects inits pages form the principal bases for the balance ofthis essaysupplemented by Trattner, Crusade forthe Children.

8. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 32; and seegenerally Maldwyn A. Jones, American Immigration,rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);Roger Daniels, Coming to America (New York:

17

Harper Collins, 1992); and Ronald Takaki, Multicul-tural America: A History (Boston and New York:Little, Brown, 1993).

9. See, e. g., "Labor: Champion of Public Educa-tion," AFL-CIO Publication No. 121 (Washington,DC: AFL-CIO, 1986).

10. Quoted in "Labor: Champion of PublicEducation," [1].

11. Quoted in ibid.12. Quoted in "Labor: Champion of Public

Education," [3].13. Ibid.14. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 1.15. Ibid., 1, 17.16. Ibid., 17-18.17. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 1. See also ibid.,

28-30.18. Ibid., 28-29.19. Ibid., 1.20. Ibid., 7-8 (quote at 8, from B. B. Snow, Super-

intendent of Schools, Auburn, NY).21. Ibid., 7-8 (quote at 8, from B. B. Snow, Super-

intendent of Schools, Auburn, NY).22. Quotations from Edwin Markham, Benjamin

B. Lindsey, and George Creel, Children in Bondage(New York, 1914), reprinted in David Montgomery,


The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, theState, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), 131-132.

23. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 5.24. Ibid.25. See Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 11.26. Quoted in Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 15, 1.27. Felt points out (Hostages of Fortune, 21) that

this laughably small inspection force is a clear signthat the legislature did not take this statute seri-ously. The legislature would have had no problemfinding far many more qualified inspectors; forexample, more than four hundred men applied forthe eight new posts created in 1887.

28. Ibid., 27.29. Ibid., 23.30. Quoted in Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 26

(parenthetical added).31. Ibid., 31.32. Ibid., 36.33. Ibid., 36, and see generally ibid., chap. 2 (at

17-37).

18


Teaching Strategies forChapter 1

Background for Activity AIt is recommended that student perceptions ofchild labor be assessed as an introduction to thechapters in this volume. The Child Labor PreviewWorksheet should provide the basis for a livelydiscussion on the topic and increase studentinterest in child labor. These questions and answerswill be reviewed in chapter 4 to show how studentperceptions of child labor have changed.

Activity AStudents will write responses to a series of ques-tions concerning their knowledge about childlabor. These questions will form the basis of adiscussion on the topic.

Directions1. Distribute Child Labor Preview Worksheet.Have students write individual responses.

2. Lead a discussion on child labor based onstudent responses to the questions. Studentsshould discuss how they arrived at their answers,i.e., hearsay, what they were told, assumption, etc.How did they obtain this information upon whichtheir answers are based?

3. Students (or the teacher) should keep theworksheet so students can review these answersafter they have studied the history of child labor.Tell students that by the end of the school year theymay change their answers to these questionsespecially after they learn not only about thehistory of children at work but about what theirrights and responsibilities are in the workplace.

19

Forge to Fast Food *source 9Chapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age

Child Labor Preview Worksheet

To find out how much you know about child labor, answer the following questions on your ownto the best of your ability.

1. Why do children work?

2. Why should children work?

3. Why should children not work?

4. At what age should children be permitted to work? Why?

5. What kinds of jobs should children be permitted to do? Why?

6. What kinds of jobs should children not be permitted to do? Why?

7. How many hours per week should children be allowed to work? Why?

8. How much should children be paid?

9. How do your parents feel about children working? (If you have never discussed this with them,do so for homework.)

20


Background for Activity BThe Factory Act of 1886 was the product of the firstsuccessful alliance among organized labor, reformand charitable organizations, and the state'spoliticians. It barred children under thirteen fromworking in manufacturing establishments; itrequired that all children thirteen or older producenotarized affidavits signed by their parents con-firming their age; and set a maximum work weekof sixty hours per week for minors under eighteenand women under twenty-one. Even with this lawin place many children still worked in violation ofit. In the quote below, Charles F. Peck, Commis-sioner of Statistics of Labor in New York Statereported what he saw at that time.

Activity BStudents will analyze the following quote fromCommissioner Peck:

II-nundreds of thin and scantily clad girlsand boys ranging from eight to fifteen yearsof age, hurrying home with dinner pail inhand. . . . Mheir sallow, parchment-likecomplexion, dwarfed bodies, pinched andcare-worn faces spoke more eloquently thanwords. . . . Any system of labor which resultsin such injury to the physical nature and anignorance so deplorable as found among thesechildren . . . is not only a disgrace, but will. . . prove dangerous to the prosperity andstability of our free institutions.

Directions1. Have students read the quote from Commis-sioner Peck. Have students look up words they donot know. (The teacher can provide copies or usean overhead of the quote.)

2. Have students discuss the appearance of thechildren in the students' own words. The discus-sion should include the factors (malnutrition, littlerest, mental state, exposure to pollution, loudnoise, etc.) that contributed to the physical condi-tion of the children.

3. According to Peck, what are the opportunitycosts to society of allowing children to work?

4. Students should also identify and explain thefactors (ambivalence toward education, indifferentpublic opinion, etc.) which fostered the continua-tion of children working during this period.

21


Background for Activity CBeginning in this period, various photographersincluding Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, visuallydocumented the working conditions of children.These photographs set the scene for students intheir study of child labor of the period.

Activity CStudents will analyze and interpret photographs ofthe period to make conclusions about children atwork during this period.

Directions1. Provide students with the background fromRichard B. Bernstein's essay. Choose photographswhich are available from a wide variety of re-sources: textbooks, library books, commercialphoto sets, posters, etc. This activity is mostsuccessful with at least ten different photographs.Since this curriculum focuses on New York State,try to use photographs taken in New York. Thelocal or county historical society should be a readyresource for local scenes.

2. Distribute the student worksheet "PhotographAnalysis." Review directions with students.

3. Divide the class into groups of three or four tostudy the photos. Provide each group with one ormore photographs. When the analysis is complete,have the groups show their photo(s) and reporttheir findings to the class. Students should recordin their notes conclusions drawn as well as ques-tions raised which could not be answered. Answersto these questions may surface during their studyof child labor.

4. An alternate activity to a straight presentation isto have students in each group write a skit basedon the photos. They should first show theirphoto(s) to the class to provide the other studentswith the setting. Conclusions and questions raisedshould be recorded into notes.

22

12

Photograph Analysis

Student Researcher:

Date of Analysis:

Information about the Photograph:

Size: Kind: Condition:

Location Taken:

Source of Photo:

Approximate Date Taken:

Photographer:

Forge to Fast Food 94sourceChapter 1: Chia Labor in the Girder! Age

In your mind divide the photo into four equal parts. Rotate through the parts to fill in the chart below withdetails of the photo.

PEOPLE OBJECTS SURROUNDINGS ACTIVITIES MOOD

What are the most important parts of the photo? Why are they important?

What questions are raised by the photo?

What two conclusions can you make about the work and/or the lives of children in the photograph?Answer on the back of this worksheet.

23


Background for Activity DIn the late 1800s, New York State passed child laborlegislation. One goal of that legislation was toreduce the number of injuries children sufferedannually while working. The legislation provedineffective because it was hard to enforce due inpart to the small number of inspectors.

Activity DStudents will assume the role of an inspector. Theirgoal is to report on the conditions of children in theworkplace during the late 1800s.

Directions1. Provide students with background informationfrom the essay. It is important for students tounderstand the gains and limitations of child laborlegislation of the late 1800s as well as the difficul-ties in enforcing it.

2. Have students read the excerpts from CharlesReznikoff's Testimony and answer the followingquestions for each excerpt:

What was the job and the steps of thejob performed by the child?

What factors contributed to theaccident described?

Did the laws at that time prohibit thischild from doing this kind of work?Explain.

Note: The American poet, Charles Reznikoff, wasalso a lawyer and editor for the American BarAssociation.

3. Have students write a report to be submitted tothen Commissioner Charles F. Peck, New YorkState Bureau of Labor Statistics. They shouldinclude:

a summary of the conditions found, and

recommendations to the commissioner forlegislation to improve these conditions.

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14 Forge to Fast Food9ZesourceChapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age

Note: The following is based on actual law reports of the courts of several states and recast intoverse by Charles Reznikoff. The names of all persons are fictitious and those of the villages andtowns have been changed.

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1885-1890), "The North," "V. Boys and Girls"

3

"In the good old summertime,"Ellen, all of fourteen, worked in a steam laundryas a "feeder":put collars through the machine that pressed them.

The feeder sat on a platform,collars on the small table in front of her;the lower roller hot enough to iron collars as they were passed

through,while the upper roller pressed down upon themwith a pressure of two hundred pounds;the heated roller was hollow and revolved around gas jetsso hot that if a collar stopped on it for a minuteit would be scorched.

Ellen saw a collar with a lap on itthe buttonhole part lapped back on the collarput her hand out to pull it awayand her finger was caught in the buttonholeand she could not get it outbefore her hand was drawn between the rollersburnt and crushed as she screamed.

* * * * * * * *

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1891-1900), "The South," "III. Children"

6

The factory hours were the ordinary hours in the stateeleven and a half to twelve hours a day.He had been put to work at eight or nine years of ageand had now been working in the mill more than two years:all day in the cotton millfilled with machinery whirring at high speed.His work was to carry spindelsor "quills" as they were calledfrom the "weaver room" to the "quiller room"to be refilled;and at this work had to go up an "alley,"past a workbench in a corner of the room.

At the workbench just thenone of the help was cutting the wire for "pattern chains"with a hammer and chiselhe could not find the nippers usually usedand as the boy was passing with a "turn of quills"and looked up at a clock to see what time it wasa piece of wire flew into his eye=and put it out.

* * * * * * * *

25

Forge to Fast Food 94sourceChapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1891-1900), "The North," "VII. Machine Age"

2

All revolving shafts are dangerousbut a vertical shaft,neither boxed nor guarded against,most dangerous.

The girl's work for the company was changedto sweeping the floors:among other places the floor of a roomwhere the shaft in a passagewaybetween the wall and a machineran from the floor to the ceiling.In sweeping around it one morningher apron was caughtand drawn about the shaftand she was whirled aboutstriking the wall and machinery.

***********

8

The boys had just been brought to this countryby their parentsand neither boy spoke nor understood any English.The elder, thirteen years of age,was working as a "back boy" in the mule spinning-roomand he got his little brother of eightinto the roomto learn the work of a "back boy";other boys were taking their brothers in to learnand he understood from their motions what they were doing.

The younger boy went to work cheerfully enoughpicking up bobbinsand putting waste into a boxand if the man in charge ordered him outhe did not understand him.But he had not been at work a day and a halfbefore his hand was caught in a gearingwhich the other boys had been told to stay clear of.

* * * * * * * *

26

15

16 Forge to Fast Food 9ZesourceChapter 1: Child Labor in the Girded Age

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1901-1910), "The South," "IV. Machine Age"

4

Betty was about eleven. She had no regular work at the millbut did one thing and then anotherand sometimes would take shirts to a tableattached to a mangle.

That morning the machine had not been startedand when she had placed the shirts on the table[she] rested her fingers on the rollers;and another little girl who also worked in the millstarted the machine:it caught Betty's arm and crushed it.

* * * * * * * *

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1901-1910), "The North," "II. Children at Work"

1

Cutting corn with an ensilage cutter and filling a silohe had a boy of nine or ten helping him:the boy to poke the corn with a stickfrom the cutter to the carrier. Safe enoughas long as the knives and cogwheelswere covered with an iron cap.

But a nut that held the cap came offand the boy was told to hold the cap in place with one handand poke the corn with the other,and he did: crossing his hands,his left hand on the cap and poking corn with his right.But after a few minutesthe mitten on his left hand was caught in the wheelsand his hand drawn into the cogs.

2

He was fourteen or fifteen years oldand worked on a machine in the mill.He started to go to the water-closetand had reached the stairsbut returned to tell the man in the roomwhom he was required to notifyof his absence.Going back in the darkness between the machinesfor the gas had not yet been lithe slipped on some oil on the floor,threw out his hand,and it was caught and crushed in the gears of a machine.

***********

27

Forge to Fast Food 9Zgsource 17Chapter 1: Child Labor in the Gil-clic Age

4

When Lea was twelve she became a "doffer" in a spinning-company's mill:

removing the full bobbins from the machines they called"twisters"

and putting them back empty.The twisters stood in a row on both sides of a narrow aisle,three feet or so wide,and the floor was always slippery because of oildripping from the machines.The bobbins were at times too tight for herstuckand she was told by the foreman if stuck to kick the bobbinuntil it was loosened.

In kicking a bobbin she slippedand fell against one of the twisters;her hair, caught in the rollers,was torn offhair,scalp,an ear,and part of her face.

***********

7

He was only thirteen when hired by the steel companyhe had said he was fourteen to get the joband his mother had signed an affidavit that he was fourteenand he went to work in the company's rolling mill:twelve hours each day, six days a week,from five in the afternoon until four in the morning,his work to open and hold open the doors of furnacesin which iron was placed every half hour;and he was told to wait between opening the doorsjust where he worked.

It was chilly that night and he was tired and sleepyfor more than a week they had made him work fourteen hours

a dayand he sat down under an iron door just to restafter iron had been placed in the furnaces.As a rule no cars were run over the trackafter one o'clock at nightuntil the iron in the furnaces had been taken awayand he would have nothing to do for about twenty minutesuntil they were going to feed ore into the furnaces again.

He fell asleep.As he slept he heard the cars comingbut he could not get up.When he sat down his legs were doubled up under himand now in his sleep he stretched out one of themuntil it crossed a railand a car crushed his legmuscle and bones.

* * * * * * * *

28

18 Forge to Fast Food *sourceChapter 1: Child Labor in the Gilded Age

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (1911-1915), "The North," "VI. Machine Age"

1

The "mangle" had a hollow cylinder, heated by steam:above it,three rollers with belts turning them.The laundry to be ironedwas carried between cylinder and rollers.Sometimes an article if not completely dry, passing under the third

roller,would stick to the roller and wind around it.Then the machine would have to be stoppedor, generally, the article was just pulled looseand then sent between cylinder and rollers a second time.

A girl of seventeen, working in the laundry,in trying to pull a tablecloth from the third roller,had a finger of her right hand caught between roller and cylinderand, in her hurry, to pull her hand free,the fingers of her left hand were also caught;all the fingers drawn up to the knucklesand the pressure such that the fingers were flattenedand the bones crushed.

* * * * * * * *

Source: These extracts are drawn from Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative(2 vols.; Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978, 1979).

Volume I: 58-59, 130-131, 238, 242-243.Volume II: 91, 129-130, 131, 133-134, 247.

29


Background for Activity EMany changes in the United States in the late 1800sincreased the use and the abuse of child labor.Industrialization led to the development of newproducts and transformed the workplace. Urban-ization meant that factories and businesses in citieshad an increasing number of workers from whichto choose. Immigration provided great numbers ofworkers, many of whom were unskilled.

Activity EStudents will research and interpret their findingsfor the key concepts of industrialization, urbaniza-tion, and immigration. They will write an essaydiscussing the demand created for child labor inthe late 1800s.

Key Concept I:1. Define industrialization2. What changes in industrialization took

place in the late 1800s?3. How did these changes affect the demand

for child labor?

Key Concept II:4. Define urbanization.5. What changes in urbanization took place in

the late 1800s?6. How did these changes affect the demand

for child labor?

Key Concept III:7. Define immigration.8. What changes in immigration took place in

the late 1800s?9. How did these changes affect the demand

for child labor?

Directions1. Place students in base groups of three.

2. Assign each student one of the three key con-cepts. Students should then leave their base groupto join members of other base groups who havebeen assigned the same key concept. In the jigsawgroup, have students research the answers to thequestions for their assigned concept. (Student rolesin research groups may be defined as recorder,

speaker, summarizer, etc.) Members of eachconcept group should record and understand allinformation so they can teach the information tothe members of their base group. Students shouldbe able to read the information about these con-cepts from Richard B. Bernstein's essay itself. Theyalso should refer to texts, narratives, and otherresources to supplement their answers.

3. Students should then turn to base groups so thateach group has an expert on each key concept.Allow time for students to teach one another eachkey concept. Students should take notes for usewhen writing their essay.

4. After students in the base groups have discussedand recorded information on all three key concepts,they should be ready to write an individual essaythat answers the following question:

How did changes in the late 1800s increasethe demand for child labor?

Note: Remind students that an essay contains anintroduction and conclusion as well as the detailsfor each topic discussed. In this case there are threetopics industrialization, urbanization, andimmigration. Each should be discussed in aboutone paragraph.

Vocabulary*Gilded Ageindustrializationurbanizationimmigrationraw-material industriesfinished-goods industriestenement manufacturingcensuscompulsory attendance lawreformersorganized laborallianceaffidavitsprohibiting

*Words are listed in the order in which they appearin the corresponding essay.

30


Chapter 2: The Struggle forChild Labor Reform

1900-1933

Until the twentieth century, child labor was morea fact of American economic and social life than aproblem crying out for reform. By contrast, in thedecades between 1900 and the beginning of theNew Deal in 1933, the nation and New York Statewitnessed vigorous contests over whether, when,and how government should use its power toregulate or prohibit child labor. Several factorsmade this change possible:

the formation of specialized reform organiza-tions focused on child labor;

the development by these organizations ofsophisticated public information campaignsand political lobbying;

a series, skillfully exploited by child laboradvocates, of horrifying industrial accidentsand fires that galvanized public outrage at theconditions that made such tragedies possible;

the growing involvement of organized laborin efforts to combat or regulate child laborand working conditions; and

the increasing responsiveness of legislatorsand executive branch officials to proposalsto use the power of government to regulateworking conditions.

Campaigns to regulate or prohibit child laborand to improve children's working and educationalconditions proceeded on both federal and statelevels, and with far different results: Whereas NewYork became a pioneer in devising and enforcingchild labor laws, federal policies repeatedly fell toconstitutional challenge in the federal courts, andan attempt to amend the United States Constitutionto overcome these supposed constitutional obstaclesran out of steam.'

New York as TrailblazerHad a survey of public opinion asked New

Yorkers around 1900 about child labor, most of therespondents would have described it as a problem inthe American South. Most reformers interested in theissue had focused their attention on southern textilemills and agricultural labor, and in 1887 Alabamahad enacted one of the nation's first child labor laws,establishing a minimum age of fourteen for factoryworkers and a maximum working day of eight hoursfor workers under sixteen; in 1901 the AlabamaChild Labor Committee organized, setting a patternfor all later child labor activist organizations.2 At thesame time, the New York State chief factory inspec-tor reported that 50,000 of the state's 1,000,000factory workers (five percent of the total) werechildren under eighteenand some observersdeemed this a conservative estimate, arguing that thetrue figure might be at least 75,000 child factoryworkers (a rate of 7.5 percent).3 Similar statistics,reports, and piecemeal informal investigationspersuaded several groups of New York reformersthat they might follow Alabama's lead.

In 1902, Florence Kelley, a founder of the socialwork profession, and Lillian Wald, the founder of theHenry Street Settlement, persuaded the Associationof Neighborhood Workers that they should take upthe issue of child labor. The Association, whichbrought together members of New York City'sthirty-one settlement houses, formed a temporarygroup to be called the "Child Labor Committee." Inits first fund-raising campaign, the committee'sorganizers declared: "The problem of child labor isone which curiously enough has escaped attention inthe general movement for improvement in industrialconditions of this city. [We] therefore propose todiscover the extent of this evil."4 The committee'snext action was to launch a series of focused investi-gations into such spheres as factory work and streettrades; each report then received careful and wide-spread publicity, and sympathetic treatment fromthe newspapers, with the New York Tribune declaring,

31

Chapter 2: The Struggle for Child Labor Reform 1900-1933 21

"Great interest has been taken all over the countryrecently in the efforts to reform the evils of childlabor in the cotton mills of the South. It now appearsthat we need to turn our attention homeward."'Focusing at first on New York City, the committeealso recognized the need to examine conditionsthroughout New York State's cities, towns, villages,and rural areas.

By 1903, the committee had taken shape as theNew York Child Labor Committee (NYCLC), andhad developed remarkable skill in presenting itsfindings and arguments to the state legislature. Theyear 1903 was a banner year for the law governingchild labor. The state legislaturegoaded by theNYCLCenacted five pathbreaking measures, mostof them sponsored by Assemblyman Edward R.Finch (Republican-New York County) and SenatorHenry W. Hill (Republican-Buffalo), that greatlyexpanded the scope of New York State's regulationof conditions of labor and focusing on children:6

The Finch-Hill Commercial EstablishmentsAct, the first child labor measure to reachbeyond factories and other manufacturingenterprises, barred children twelve andthirteen years old from "vacation work" (thatis, work during the summer vacation monthsof July and August) in stores in the state'slarger cities; established a nine-hour-maxi-mum working day for children under sixteen;and repealed the "Christmas exception" thatformerly suspended such limits betweenDecember 15 and New Year's Day.

The Finch-Hill Factory Act provided that nochild under fourteen could be "employed,permitted, or suffered to work" in a factory orin connection with a factory (thus coveringoffice boys and delivery boys); it also estab-lished a maximum nine-hour day for childrenunder sixteen.

The Finch-Hill amendment to the state PenalCode imposed fines and imprisonment onany person who made a false statement tosecure the documents and certificates that thelaw required a child worker to have.

The Lewis amendment to the state's compul-sory education law required children to stayin school up to the age of fourteen andrequired working children in the state's larger

cities to attend night school to make certainthat they received at least an eighth-gradeeducation.

The Street Trades Act was enacted only inweakened form due to a turf fight withElbridge Gerry's Society for the Prevention ofCruelty to Children and with municipal courtjudges. Applying only to newsboys in thestate's largest cities, the measure barred boysunder ten and girls under sixteen from sellingnewspapers in the streets. Newsboys ten tofourteen years old had to secure a badge andpermit but could sell newspapers on thestreets until 10 p.m.

In 1904, responding to the success of the NYCLC,another group of reformers, drawn principally fromthe struggle against Southern textile mills but with theencouragement of the NYCLC, assembled in NewYork City to found the National Child Labor Commit-tee. The two groups, though not formally affiliated,generally cooperated thereafter, though they occa-sionally competed for charitable contributions andclashed on the desirability of federal child laborlegislation; the National Child Labor Committeefavored such laws and believed them to be the onlyeffective response to a national child labor problem,whereas the NYCLC, based on its frustrating experi-ences in securing and enforcing new laws at the statelevel, was more skeptical about the prospects ofeffective federal legislation.'

When, in 1907, the NYCLC incorporated to achievepermanent status, its charter declared its objectives:

To promote the welfare of society with respect tothe employment of children in gainful occupa-tions; to investigate and report the facts con-cerning child labor; to raise the standard ofparental responsibility with respect to theemployment of children; to assist in protectingchildren, by suitable legislation, against prema-ture or otherwise injurious employment, and toaid in securing for them an opportunity forelementary education and physical developmentsufficient for the demands of citizenship and therequirements of industrial efficiency; and to aidin promoting the enforcement of laws relating tochild labor.'

That same year, the National Child Labor Commit-tee secured incorporation by act of Congress; its

32


statement of purposes was nearly identical to that ofthe NYCLC, except that it added the following aim:"to coordinate, unify and supplement the work ofState or local child labor committees, and encouragethe formation of such committees where they do notexist." The resemblance between these statements ofgoals indicates the organizations' common roots.9

The child labor reformers discovered that theproblem pervaded the nation's and the states'economic life, and thus that the goal of regulating orprohibiting child labor had to be tackled on apiecemeal basis. For example, New York reformershad to cope with the state's legal division of citiesinto three classes based on population, and thecorresponding modification of laws to imposediffering requirements on New York's first-class,second-class, and third-class cities. Similarly, thestate's regulatory laws imposed different require-ments and standards on different segments of theeconomysplitting factories from retail stores,street trades from retail stores and factories, andindustrial from agricultural labor. And, wheneverchild labor issues arose, the legislature had toreview again the complex question of the relation-ship between child labor laws and compulsoryeducation laws. Often, a general reformsuch asthe enactment in 1910 and in 1913 of workmen'scompensation statutesraised issues that requiredseparate enactments to cover child workers; thus, in1923, the state legislature adopted the DoubleCompensation Law, providing doubled awards tochild workers under eighteen who were injured atwork. (This law reduced illegal factory labor butdid not fulfill the promise of increased compensa-tion for injured child workers.)1° Nonetheless, overthe next three decades, the state legislature enacteda step-by-step program of legislation that graduallytightened the requirements on employers and thelimits on when, where, and how children couldwork.

Though unremitting pressure by the NYCLC andits national counterpart, by crusading newspapers,and by labor organizations helped to secure im-provements in the law governing child labor,sometimes a tragedy had to spur public opinion. In1911, one of the most infamous industrial disastersin American history took place in a crowded sweat-shop on the eighth floor of the Asch Building inNew York City's Greenwich Village. Onlookersgathered at the corner of Washington Place andGreene Street on March 25, 1911, saw a nightmarishscene, as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company's pre-

mises were engulfed by fire. The factory's employ-ees were packed into the factory's small, over-crowded rooms. When the fire started in piles ofrags scattered around the rooms, they struggled toescape, but they discovered that the exits wereblocked by boxes and heaps of shirts, and that thefire escape ended in a six-foot drop over a glassskylight. Even worse, the heat of the fire had meltedthe rickety fire escape into uselessness. Some leapedfrom windows in fright and despair, slappingdesperately at their burning clothing, only to fall totheir deaths on the street below. Others tried to usethe fire escape, only to have it collapse under theirweight. One hundred forty-six workers, most ofthem women and girls as young as fourteen, losttheir lives in an inferno still notorious eight decadeslater."

The Triangle fire galvanized public and pressopinion. The Committee on Safety, a citizens' grouporganized by such leading reformers as Henry L.Stimson, Frances Perkins, and Rabbi Stephen Wise,demanded that the state create a Factory Investigat-ing Commission, and the state legislature enactedthe required law on June 30, 1911. Chaired by twonoted Progressive lawmakersState Senator RobertF. Wagner and Assembly Speaker Alfred E. Smith,the Factory Investigating Commission carried out aseries of pioneering investigations throughout thestate, and issued four massive, well-documentedreports between 1912 and 1915; during its first yearalone, the commission heard the testimony of 222witnesses, and the record of that testimony covered3,489 pages. The Commission investigated issues asdiverse as tenement homework and agriculturalcanneries, street trades, and the health of childworkers. Its reports became the driving force behinddemands for further legislative reforms andprofessionalization of the enforcement of the childlabor laws.12 Spurred by the Factory InvestigatingCommission's investigations, the state legislaturecontinued to enact laws and to expand the powersof the Labor Department. In 1913 alone:

The legislature empowered the Labor Com-missioner to expand the list of dangerousoccupations barred to children by the 1909Voss Dangerous Trades Act without havingto get the legislature's approval.

The legislature banned the tenement manu-facture of food, dolls, dolls' clothing, andchildren's wearing apparel, and forbade

33


children under fourteen from engaging intenement homework.

The legislature extended the 1903 FactoryLaw to cover manufacturing conducted incannery sheds (buildings where fruits andvegetables were prepared for processinge.g., shelling peas and husking corn) andbarred children under fourteen from suchwork.

Not content with merely supporting the work ofthe Factory Investigating Commission, the NYCLCcontinued its own investigations. In addition, theNYCLC stepped up pressure to bring the state'seducation and child labor laws into conformity,but this quest moved with painful slowness andrepeated setbacks. For example, in 1916 the state'sWellington Law barred children from workingeither until they had reached the age of fifteen orunless they had been graduated from the eighthgrade. And yet, in 1917, the state enacted a sup-posed wartime measure known as the Brown Act.This law exempted boys over fifteen in cities andover fourteen in rural areas from compulsory schoolattendance so that they could undertake military,agricultural, or industrial work, exemptions to begranted at the discretion of the state's Departmentof Education. Not until 1918, after the armisticeending the First World War, did the EducationCommissioner suspend the Brown Law.13

The National Scene: Short-LivedReform

Historians identify the child labor struggle as animportant component of the heterogeneous Pro-gressive movement, and in many ways they areright to do so. Most advocates of child labor reformsupported other Progressive measures as well. Butthe problem with this view is that the child laborreform movement in New York State both predatedand survived national Progressivism (at leastaccording to the conventional historical time frameof Progressivism). Child labor reform began before1900 in New York State and persisted there wellinto the 1920s and 1930s. As noted above, theDouble Compensation Law was adopted in 1923;in 1925 the state established a maximum forty-four-hour work week (that is, an eight-hour day fivedays a week plus a four-hour Saturday) for childrenunder sixteen who worked in factories and stores;and in 1928 the Labor Law was amended to prohibit

employment of any child under fourteen in any"trade, business or occupation carried on for pecuni-ary gain."

By contrast, the national child labor reformmovement experienced repeated setbacks and, bythe Great Depression, almost total defeat. Those whoadvocated national action maintained that state-by-state campaigns would result in a checkerboard ofjurisdictions that prohibited child labor and juris-dictions that permitted it; the evil would not beremoved but simply segregated, and those whowished to avail themselves of child labor simplywould relocate their businesses to nonprohibitingor nonregulating states.14

The first attempt for federal legislation occurredin January of 1907, when Republican Senator AlbertJ. Beveridge of Indiana made a powerful speech onthe Senate floor calling for national action to abolishwhat his admiring biographer called "child sla-very."15 Beveridge spent three dramatic days docu-menting the horrors of child labor to hisuncomfortable colleagues and counted it a majorachievement that he had put child labor on thenational political agenda. Beveridge's argumentswere open to serious challenge on constitutionalgrounds, however; other Senators repeatedlydemanded to know how the federal constitutionalpower to regulate interstate commerce could reachthe seemingly local process of manufacturing orinvade what they deemed the sacrosanct powers ofthe states. Beveridge's efforts (in coordination, atfirst, with those of the National Child Labor. Com-mittee) did, however, spur the Labor Department tomount its own detailed investigation of workingconditions; the finished report, published in nine-teen volumes between 1910 and 1913, complementedthe efforts of New York State's Factory InvestigatingCommission and provided powerful ammunition forother states' legislative responses and for efforts tosecure a federal statute on the subject."

Not until 1916 did Congress enact the first federalchild labor legislation. The handiwork of twoProgressive Democrats, Representatives RobertOwen of Oklahoma and Edward Keating of Colo-rado, the measure was designed to bar from inter-state commerce any product made with the use ofchild labor. It ran into stiff opposition from congres-sional delegations from southern states, who citedwhat one historian called "all the old arguments":

34

the absence of compulsory education to absorbthe energies of the liberated child workers; the


necessity of work to prevent the moral perver-sion of young children; the importance ofacquiring, while young, the necessary skills forfuture work in the textile factories; the robbingof widowed mothers of their livelihood; theabridgment of the inherent personal right towork; and the illegal invasion of states'rights."

Nonetheless, after threats of filibusters andcomplex maneuvering by the bill's supporters to winover President Woodrow Wilson, who had hadserious constitutional scruples about signing themeasure, on September 1, 1916, the Keating-Owenbill became law, to take effect in one year from thedate of the President's signature.18 But before the actdid go into effect, the Executive Committee ofSouthern Cotton Manufacturers announced theirintention to challenge the measure's constitutional-ity. On August 31, 1917, a federal district judge inNorth Carolina ruled in the case of Hammer v.Dagenhart, striking down the federal child labor lawas a violation of the Constitution's limits on congres-sional power to regulate interstate commerce. Ninemonths later, after extensive briefs and oral argu-ments, the United States Supreme Court agreed, by avote of five to four." As Justice William Rufus Daydeclared for the majority:

If Congress can thus regulate matters en-trusted to local authorities by prohibition of themovement of commodities in interstatecommerce, all freedom of commerce will be atan end, and the power of the States over localmatters may be eliminated, and thus oursystem of government be practically de-stroyed."

Congress tried again, hoping that grounding achild labor law on some other constitutional founda-tion than the congressional power to regulateinterstate commerce would satisfy the Court. Thistime, it simply levied a tax on products manufac-tured with the use of child labor. Again southerntextile manufacturers mounted a vigorous and well-financed legal challenge to the measure. In 1922, inBailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., the Court rejected thesecond statute by a vote of eight to one. Chief JusticeWilliam Howard Taft declared for the majority thatthe statute at issue in Bailey was indistinguishablefrom that struck down in Hammer v. Dagenhart; hecarried three of the four dissenters in Hammer with

him, and the lone dissenter in both cases, JusticeJoseph H. Clarke, did not even bother to write anopinion in Bailey.21

In the wake of Hammer v. Dagenhart and Bailey v.Drexel Furniture, the last-ditch prospect for federalauthority to regulate child labor was a constitutionalamendment overturning the two Supreme Courtdecisions. Thus, in May of 1924 Congress proposedan amendment to the Constitution to the states:

SECTION 1. The Congress shall have power tolimit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of personsunder eighteen years of age.

SECTION 2. The power of the several States isunimpaired by this article except that theoperation of State laws shall be suspended to theextent necessary to give effect to legislationenacted by the Congress.

Although its supporters predicted that it wouldwin swift adoption by the requisite thirty-six states,the amendment soon bogged down, as a host ofopponents from a variety of perspectives unleashed apowerful propaganda campaign against the amend-ment. The New Republic commented: "The friends ofthe amendment were totally unprepared to combatthe flood of distorted propaganda which let looseupon them. They had been accustomed to argue theircase before reasonable and attentive human beings.They suddenly found themselves compelled todiscuss a matter of public policy with a monstrousjazz band."" Opponents included southern textilemanufacturers, representatives of conservativereligious denominations (who feared that the amend-ment would be an opening wedge in a governmentcampaign to supplant traditional family structures),leaders of patriotic organizations, states' rightsadvocates, and opponents of any proposal thatsmacked of socialism or Communism." Even in NewYork, one of the most advanced states in the field ofchild labor legiclatinn, the amendment's supporterscould not even get the state legislature to considerthe amendment for more than a decade after it wasproposed.24

Thus, by 1933, though New York had become aleading state in developing laws and enforcementmechanisms in the field of child labor reform, thenational campaign had all but ground to a halt, withlittle help from the Empire State.

35


Endnotes1. On the federal issues, see generally Stephen B.

Wood, Constitutional Politics in the Progressive Era:Child Labor and the Law (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1968).

2. Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: AHistory of the National Child Labor Committee and ofChild Labor Reform in America (Chicago: QuadrangleBooks, 1970), 45-67, esp. 51-55; Jeremy D. Felt,Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New YorkState (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,1965), 74.

3. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 63.4. For the founding of the Child Labor Commit-

tee, see Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 43-46 (quote at 44).5. Quoted in Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 49; see

generally id., 47ff., for descriptions of thecommittee's publicity campaign and its results.

6. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 51-62.7. On the founding of the National Child Labor

Committee, see Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 57-67; Wood, Constitutional Politics, 10-13; and Felt,Hostages of Fortune, 45, 74-75. On relations betweenthe National Child Labor Committee and theNYCLC, see Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 74-75.

8. Quoted in Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 71-72.9. Quoted in Trattner, Crusade for the Children,

246 n. 39.10. See Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 81-84.11. See the still-authoritative account by Leon

Stein, The Triangle Fire (Philadelphia: J. B. LippincottCo., 1962), passim, and the summary in Felt, Hos-tages of Fortune, 86-87.

12. See Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 87-88, 104, 143,144, 173-176, 242 n. 67. See also Preliminary Report ofthe Factory Investigating Commission, 3 vols. (Albany,NY: Argus Co., 1912); Second Report of the New YorkState Factory Investigating Commission, 4 vols. (Al-bany, NY: J. B. Lyon Co., 1913); Fourth Report of theNew York State Factory Investigating Commission, 5vols. (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Co., 1915).

13. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 96-127.14. See Wood, Constitutional Politics, passim.15. See Wood, Constitutional Politics, 13ff. (esp. 13

n. 40, citing Claude G. Bowers, Beveridge and theProgressive Era [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932],250-252).

16. See Wood, Constitutional Politics, 20-21. Thereport is United States Department of Labor, Reporton the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, 19

vols. (Washington, DC: U. S. Government PrintingOffice, 1910-1913). On the hesitant efforts of theNational Child Labor Committee, which at firstsupported national legislation and then elected towait for the completion of the Labor Departmentreport, see Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 69-93.

17. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 127-128.18. The most detailed analysis of the legislative

maneuverings is in Wood, Constitutional Politics, 22-80; see also Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 119-131.

19. The case, Hammer v. Dagenhart, appears at 247U. S. 251 (1918). The briefs are found in Philip B.Kurland and Gerhard Casper, eds., Landmark Briefsand Arguments of the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates: Constitutional Law (Arlington, VA: UniversityPublications of America, 1975), 18: 831-986. Seegenerally Trattner, Crusade for the Children, chap. V.Also see generally the discussion in Wood, Constitu-tional Politics, 81-176.

20. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. at 276.21. 259 U. S. 20 (1922). See Wood, Constitutional

Politics, 177-299, for the most complete analysis ofthe legal maneuverings and constitutional argu-ments that culminated in Bailey. The briefs arecollected in Kurland and Casper, eds., LandmarkBriefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of theUnited States: Constitutional Law (Arlington, VA:University Publications of America, 1975), 21: 1-190.

22. The New Republic, xlii (May 20, 1925), 350,quoted in Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 169.

23. See Trattner, Crusade for the Children, chap.VII, passim; Wood, Constitutional Politics, 186-188,221n, 263, 300; Richard B. Bernstein, AmendingAmerica (New York: Times Books/Random House,1993), 179-181; Clement E. Vose, ConstitutionalChange: Amendment Politics and Supreme CourtLitigation Since 1900, a Twentieth Century FundStudy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D.C.Heath, 1972), 248-250; Alan P. Grimes, Democracyand the Amendments to the Constitution (1978;Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988),101-104; and Michael E. Musmanno, ProposedAmendments to the Constitution: A Monograph on theResolutions Introduced in Congress Proposing Amend-ments to the Constitution of the United States ofAmerica, House Doc. No. 551, 70th Cong., 2d sess.(1929; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 137-145.

24. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 195-216 passim.

36 EST COPY ANXILABLE



Background for Activity AOn March 25, 1911, 146 workers, many of themgirls, were killed in a fire at the Triangle ShirtwaistCompany in New York City. The Triangle firegalvanized public and press opinion and led tosubstantial gains in the child labor movement inNew York State.

Activity AStudents will analyze and compare data fromnewspaper articles and testimony on the Trianglefire and Imperial Foods Company fire which killedtwenty-five people in a North Carolina chickenprocessing plant in 1991. Although there were nochildren involved in the Imperial fire, many of thevictims were single parents impacting children'slives nonetheless. Students will then write a letterto the editor of a newspaper of today using evi-dence from the accompanying chart concerning thedeplorable conditions of labor then and now.

Directions1. Divide students into groups.

2. Distribute the worksheet, Fire! 1911/1991, alongwith the accompanying newspaper accounts andKate Alterman's testimony. The teacher may decideto use jigsaw groups for this activity. Students

should complete the chart from the assignedreadings as well as from additional readings andpictures of the Triangle fire easily found in textsand history books. Pictures and articles of theImperial Foods fire are readily available in anylibrary or media center. Since this activity willgenerate much discussion, it is advisable to havethe additional resources available forstudent use.

3. In a large group discussion, have the smallgroups share their answers and record them on amaster chart.

4. Have students write a letter to the editor of alocal newspaper, citing the conditions whichcontribute to unsafe work areas and includingrecommendations to improve these conditions.

Source: This activity is based upon a lesson fromthe Crossroads Middle School curriculum ofNiskayuna Central Schools and the Council forCitizenship Education, Russell Sage College.

Enrichment Activities1. Have students develop a skit or role play basedupon the testimony of Kate Alterman.

2. A challenging exercise for students is to use theinformation in Richard B. Bernstein's essay for thisperiod to develop two timelines in which theycompare the advances made in New York Stateconcerning child labor with those of the nationaleffort.

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Forge to Fast Food ResourceChapter 2: The Struggle for Child. Labor *form

Fire! 1911/1991

Use information from the readings about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire and the Imperial FoodsCompany fire to fill in the chart below.

27

Questions Triangle Fire (1911) Imperial Foods Fire (1991)

1. How many died?

How many werechildren?

2. What started the fire?

3. What were thecauses of death?

4. What preventedpeople fromescaping?

5. Give examplesof panic amongworkers.

6. Give examplesof how buildingswere unpreparedfor fire.

Draw a conclusion: If you were checking factories for fire safety, what would you look for?

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28 Forge to Fast Food 9Zr-sourceChapter 2: 'The Struggle for Child Labor Reform

Triangle Shirtwaist Reading

The following excerpt is from the March 26, 1911, issue of The New York Times:

141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire;Trapped High up in Washington Place Building;Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside

Three stories of a ten-floorbuilding at the corner of GreeneStreet and Washington Placewere burned yesterday, andwhile the fire was going on 141young men and women, at least125 of them mere girls, wereburned to death or killed byjumping to the pavement below.

The building was fireproof. Itshows now hardly any signs ofthe disaster that overtook it. Thewalls are as good as ever; so arethe floors; nothing is the worsefor the fire except the furnitureand 141 of the 600 men and girlsthat were employed in the upperthree stories.

Most of the victims weresuffocated or burned to deathwithin the building, but somewho fought their way to thewindows and leaped met deathas surely, but perhaps morequickly, on the pavements below.

At 4:40 o'clock, nearly fivehours after the employees in therest of the building had gonehome, the fire broke out. The onelittle fire escape in the interiorwas never resorted to by any ofthe doomed vi-"s. Some ofthem escaped by running downthe stairs, but in a moment or twothis avenue was cut off by flame.The girls rushed to the windowsand looked down at GreeneStreet, 100 feet below them. Thenone poor little creature jumped.There was a plate glass protection

over part of the sidewalk, but shecrashed through it, wrecking itand breaking her body into athousand pieces.

Then they all began to drop.The crowd yelled "Don't jump!"but it was jump or be burnedthe proof of which is around inthe fact that fifty burned bodieswere taken from the ninth flooralone.

The victims, who are nowlying at the Morgue waiting forsome one to identify them by atooth or the remains of a burnedshoe, were mostly girls of from 18to 23 years of age.

There is just one fire escape inthe building. That one is aninterior fire escape. In GreeneStreet, where the terrified unfor-tunates crowded before theybegan to make their mad leaps todeath, the whole big front of thebuilding is guiltless of one. Nor isthere a fire escape in the back.

The building itself was of themost modern construction andclassed as fireproof. What burnedso quickly and disastrously forthe victims were shirtwaist,hanging on lines above tiers ofworkers, sewing machines placedso closely together that there washardly aisle room for the girlsbetween them, and shirtwaisttrimmings and cuttings whichlittered the floors above theeighth and ninth stories.

According to two of the ablest

fire experts in the city the greatloss of life at the shirtwaistfactory fire can be accounted forby the lack of adequate instruc-tion of the girls in the way toconduct themselves in time offire.

These men, H.F.J. Porter, anindustrial engineer, with officesat 1 Madison Avenue, and P.J.McKeon, a fire prevention expert,who is now delivering lectures atColumbia University, are bothfamiliar with the building whichwas destroyed and had advisedthe owners of the factory toestablish some kind of a fire drillamong the girls and put in betteremergency exits to enable them toget out of the building in case offire. Mr. Porter said last night,when told of the fire by a Timesreporter: "I don't need to godown there. I know just whathappened."

Two years ago Mr. McKeonmade an insurance inspection ofthe factory, among others, andwas immediately struck by theway in which the large number ofgirls were crowded together inthe top of the building. He saidlast night that at that time therewere no less than a thousandgirls on the three upper floors.

"I inquired if there was a firedrill among the girls, and wastold there was not," said he. "Theplace looked dangerous to me.There was a fire escape on the

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Forge to Fast Food' Resource 29Chapter 2: The Struggle for Child. Labor Reform

back and all that, and the regula-tions seemed to be complied withall right, but I could see that therewould be a serious panic if thegirls were not instructed how tohandle themselves in case of afire.

"I even found that the door tothe main stairway was usuallykept locked. I was told that thiswas done because it was sodifficult to keep track of so manygirls. They would run back andforth between the floors, andeven out of the building themanager told me.

"It is a wonder that thesethings are not happening in thecity every day," said he. "Thereare only two or three factories inthe city where fire drills are in

use, and in some of them where Ihave installed the system myselfthe owners have discontinued it.

"One instance I recall in pointwhere the system has beendiscontinued despite the fact thatthe Treasurer for the company,through whose active co-opera-tion it was originally installed,was himself burned to death withseveral members of his family inhis country residence, andnotwithstanding that the presentPresident of the company, whileat the opera, nearly lost hischildren and servants in a firewhich recently swept through hisapartments and burned off thetwo upper floors of a buildingwhich was and still is advertisedas the most fireproof and expen-

4 0

sively equipped structure of itscharacter in the city.

"The neglect of factory ownersof the safety of their employees isabsolutely criminal. One manwhom I advised to install a firedrill replied to me, 'Let em burnup. They're a lot of cattle any-way.'

"The factory may be fittedwith all the most modernfirefighting apparatus and theremay be a well-organized firebrigade, but there is absolutelyno attempt made, to teach theemployees how to handle them-selves in case of a fire. This isparticularly necessary in case ofyoung women and girls whoalways go into panic."

30 Forge to Fast Food ResourceChapter 2: The Struggle for Child Labor ?Worm

Kate Alterman's Descriptionof the Triangle Fire

Note: This extract from the trial testimony of Kate Alterman, a worker who survived thefire, comes from the transcript of one of the most famous cross-examinations in legalhistory. Max Steuer, the attorney for the defendant owners of the Triangle company,sought to show that Kate Alterman had been coached to tell her story in the most dra-matic and horrifying manner possible. Although Steuer succeeded in winning the casefor his clients, Kate Alterman's story still effectively evokes the terror and despairexperienced by the Triangle workers:

I went out from the dressing room, went to the Waverly side windowsto look for fire escapes, I didn't find any. Margaret Schwartz was withme, afterwards she disappeared. I turned away to get to Greene Streetside, but she disappeared, she disappeared from me. I went into thetoilet room, I went out from the toilet rooms, bent my face over the sink,and then I went to the Washington side to the elevators, but there was abig crowd, and I saw a crowd around the door, trying to open the door;there I saw Bernstein, the manager's brother, trying to open the door buthe couldn't; he left; and Margaret was there, too, and she tried to openthe door and she could not. I pushed her on a side. I tried to open thedoor, and I could not, and then she pushed me on the side, and she said,"I will open the door," and she tried to open the door, and then the bigsmoke came and Margaret Schwartz I saw bending down on her knees,her hair was loose and her dress was on the floor a little far from her,and then she screamed at the top of her voice, "Open the door! Fire! Iam lost! My God, I am lost, there is fire!" And I went away from Marga-ret. I left, stood in the middle of the room. That is, I went in the dressingroom, first, there was a big crowd, I went out of the dressing room, wentinto the middle of the room between the machines and examining tables,and then I went in; I saw Bernstein, the manager's brother, throwingaround the windows, putting his head from the windowhe wanted tojump, I suppose, but he was afraidhe drawed himself back, and then Isaw the flames cover him, and some other man on Greene Street, theflames covered him, too, and then I turned my coat on the wrong sideand put it on my head with the fur to my face, the lining on the outside,and I got hold of a bunch of dresses and covered up the top of my head.I just got ready to go and somebody came and began to chase me back,pulled my dress back, and I kicked her with the foot and she disap-peared. I tried to make my escape. T had a prIrk.=t hook with me, and thatpocketbook began to burn, I pressed it to my heart to extinguish the fire,and I made my escape right through the flamesthe whole door was aflame, right to the roof.

Source: Leonard E. Davies, Anatomy of Cross-Examination (New York: Prentice Hall Law& Business, 1993), 389-390.

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Forge to Fast Food Resource 31Chapter 2: 'The Struggle for Child Labor Reform

Imperial Foods Company Reading

The following articles were reported by the Associated Press on September 5, 1991:

Toxic Smoke, Locked Doors Led to Chaos, Then DeathBy Fred Bayless

The Associated Press

Hamlet N.C. When the screaming started, Carolyn Rainwater was "stripping tenders," pullingribbons of white meat off chicken breasts for processing. When the screaming grew louder, shelooked up and saw the smoke.

"It was the blackest smoke I had ever seen in my life," said the 50 year-old grandmother, one ofthe few workers to escape serious injury when deadly smoke from a flash fire raced through theImperial Foods Co. plant Tuesday morning.

Twenty-five people were killed, 49 were injured.The boundary of life and death was set by the billowing wall of toxic smoke. Those who worked

in the front of the building were able to escape through a main entrance. Those in the back weretrapped between the poisonous fumes and doors locked, employees say, to prevent pilferage.

The smoke created panic, then chaos. It chased some workers into room-size coolers where theyfroze. It smothered others as they groped, gasping in the dark for escape. Friends and co-workersdied together in clumps on the factory floor.

"In a fire of this nature people congregate together out of fear," said Hamlet Fire Chief DavidFuller. "That's where they died."

There were 90 workers in Tuesday's 7 a.m. shift at Imperial Foods, a 30,000 square-foot collec-tion of separate adjoining structures surrounded by a red brick facade. Once an ice cream factory,Imperial Foods now produces nuggets and other chicken products for Shoney's, Wendy's, andother fast food restaurants.

Workers and fire officials say the plant was a maze of large rooms separated by moveable walls.Workers and their product moved through the plant, from front to the rear, as the chicken was cut,cleaned, cooked and packaged, then finally frozen.

Doors in the rear of the plant were locked, workers said. Employees say the management hadcomplained someone was stealing chicken. Some workers were troubled by locked doors, but withjobs, even those paying $5.50 an hour, a commodity in this small community, no one mentionedtheir fears.

"People didn't raise them because they were afraid they might lose their jobs," said ElaineGriffin, a worker who escaped out the front door.

Sometime after 8 a.m., a hydraulic line ruptured spewing cooking oil into flames heating a 26foot-long fat fryer in the middle of the plant.

Fuller said soaring flames ignited insulating material in the roof, adding more toxic fumes to theoil smoke.

The smoke spread quickly, blocking the way to the front exit. Fuller said one survivor told himhe was engulfed by the smoke as he ran full speed to the rear of the plant.

Rainwater found herself a member of a panicked mob running to a back door as the lights wentout.

Rainwater ran to a loading dock blocked by a tractor-trailer; she and two others went into thetrailer and started pounding on the walls. Before someone finally moved the truck, others in thecrowd panicked.

Fuller said several employees sought sanctuary behind the heavy metal doors of two huge flashfreezers on both sides of the plant. Dressed for the warm Carolina summer day, they quickly frozein temperatures as low as minus 28 degrees.

BEST COPY MAKE 42

32 Forge to Fast Food ResourceChapter 2: The Struggle for Child Labor Reform

Fire Probe Begins at Chicken PlantBy Paul Nowell

The Associated Press

Hamlet, N.C.Most of the 25 victims of achicken processing plant fire died of smoke inhala-tion; the mayor said yesterday as authorities triedto determine how many exits were locked.

Most of the victims of Tuesday's blaze weresingle parents, officials said.

Would-be rescuers and survivors told of lockedor blocked fire exit doors. A padlock was seen on adoor with a sign saying 'Fire Door Do Not Block.'

But Mayor Abbie Covington refused to confirmthe reports of locked doors at the Imperial FoodProducts plant. State Labor Commissioner JohnBrooks, who arrived yesterday to lead a stateinvestigation, said it could be two months beforehis department could issue a report on any viola-tions it might uncover.

"I don't have any evidence of doors beinglocked," Covington said. "If we determine thatdoors were locked, I'm sure there will be somesense of outrage, but I'm not in a position to reachthat conclusion. To be angry at somebody won't doany good at this point."

Firefighters were being questioned "to find outexactly what they found when they got to thebuilding" Covington said.

If doors were locked while people were in thebuilding, violators could be subject to fines and,because deaths were involved, possible criminalprosecution, Brooks said.

He said it would be up to the local prosecutor todecided if other charges, possibly includingmanslaughter, might be filed.

The firethe state's worst industrial accidenterupted when a hydraulic line ruptured near a 26foot-long deep-fat fryer and the spilled fluid caughtfire, said Charles Dunn, deputy director of the StateBureau of Investigation.

There was no sprinkler system at the plant. Afire extinguisher was installed above the fryer aftera 1983 non-fatal blaze, Fuller said. The extinguisherwas supposed to go off automatically, but Fullersaid he didn't know if it worked Tuesday.

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Background for Activity BThe "Declaration of Dependence by the Children ofAmerica in Mines and Factories and WorkshopsAssembled," by Alexander J. McKelway, is asummation of the case against child labor. Privategroups such as the National Child Labor Commit-tee were pushing hard to regulate child labor.

Activity BStudents will analyze and evaluate the Declarationof Dependence.

Directions1. Introduce students to the various persons andgroups who were involved in the child labormovement of this period as described in thecorresponding essay.

2. Provide students with a copy of "Declaration ofDependence by the Children of America in Minesand Factories and Workshops Assembled."

3. Review with students the strategies for analyzinga document. First have students quickly read thedocument to get a general idea of what it is about.Next, students should read the document definingwords and phrases not understood. The thirdreading of the document is for meaning.

4. The teacher should explain the format followedin the document. Like many political declarations,including the Declaration of Independence of 1776,this document contains three parts:

Preamble: The first "whereas" statement isa statement of principle.

Grievances: The second "whereas" state-ment sets forth the conditions of bondageas grievances.

Resolves: The third part, following theconnecting phrase "therefore be itresolved," sets out the proposed actionsfor which support is sought.

5. Students should highlight or underline thedifferent parts. They should also define the words"resolves" and "dependence."

6. Have students read the Declaration of Indepen-dence of 1776. They should identify and comparethe parts which contain the corresponding pre-amble, grievances, and proposed actions. Discusswhat is similar and different about the two docu-ments.

7. This can provide an opportunity for students tolearn about the purpose and style of resolutions.They can then use reference books to learn howresolutions are written.

8. Divide the class into groups. Distribute theworksheet, "Declaration of Dependence by theChildren of America in Mines and Factories andWorkshops Assembled." Have students answer thequestions based on the document and class discus-sion. Their answers can be discussed or graded.

Additional Questions for Discussion:What groups are in favor of strictlylimiting child labor in today's worldand why?Who would be opposed to such limitsand why?What rights for children would youadvocate for today?What suggestions would you makefor regulation of child labor today?

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34 Forge to Fast Food" 9Zesource

Chapter 2: The Struggle for Chifd Labor Reform

Declaration of Dependence bythe Children of America in Mines

and Factories and Workshops Assembled

WHEREAS, We, Children of America, are declared to have been free and equal, and

WHEREAS,

RESOLVED,

RESOLVED,

We are yet in bondage in this land of the free; are forced to toil the longday or the long night, with no control over the conditions of labor, as tohealth or safety or hours or wages, and with no right to the rewards of ourservice, therefore be it

I That childhood is endowed with certain inherent and inalienablerights, among which are freedom from toil for daily bread; the right toplay and to dream; the right to the normal sleep of the night season; theright to an education, that we may have equality of opportunity fordeveloping all that there is in us of mind and heart.

II That we declare ourselves to be helpless and dependent; that we areand of right ought to be dependent, and that we hereby present the appealof our helplessness that we may be protected in the enjoyment of the rightsof childhood.

RESOLVED, III That we demand the restoration of our rights by the abolition of childlabor in America.

Alexander J. McKelway, 1913

Source: Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee andChild Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 7.

45

Forge to Fast Food "Resource 35Chapter 2: 'The Struggle for Chill Labor Reform

Declaration of Dependence bythe Children of America in Mines

and Factories and Workshops Assembled

Answer the following questions in the space provided.

1. a. Who is the author of this document?

b. He belonged to which group?

c. What was the group's stand on the child labor issue?

2. a. For whom did he write this document?

b. Why did they not write it themselves?

3. Identify the principle stated.

4. a. List or circle on the declaration the grievances stated.

b. Were these grievances accurate for 1913? Why?

5. a. List or underline the rights stated.

b. Do you believe children of 1913 were entitled to these rights and why?

6. a. In 1913 who favored regulation of child labor?

b. Who did not?

7. Based upon what you have learned about child labor up to this time period, should child labor havebeen abolished in 1913? Why?

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Background for Activity CIn the early 1900s the child labor debate was wagedin newspapers and magazines. Reformers usedpolitical cartoons to advocate their views on childlabor.

Activity CStudents will use a three-step strategy to analyzetwo political cartoons against child labor and createtheir own cartoon concerning child labor.

Directions1. The teacher should explain to students thatpolitical cartoons have enabled Americans toexpress their views of government throughout thehistory of the United States. All political cartoonshave a subject (S), symbols (S) , and opinion (0). Wecall this our three step S20 formula or strategy.

2. Students can learn to analyze any politicalcartoon using the S20 strategy. Students canpractice the technique on cartoons found in news-papers or magazines. Tell students that people mayinterpret a cartoon differently.

3. Present the accompanying political cartoons.Explain that these originally appeared in the early1900s. Have students use the S20 strategy toanalyze these cartoons.

4. Suggested answers for the Lincoln cartoon are:S- child labor; S-ball and chains, handcuffs, Lincolnstatue; 0-child laborers are less free than slaves.They are still "in chains." Suggested answers forthe chariot cartoon are: S-child labor; S-chariot,

cigar, top hat, $ signs, boys are slumped over witheyes closed; 0-Some people are exploiting childlabor for money and power.

5. Have students create their own political cartoonabout child labor. It can deal with the history ofchild labor in New York State or a current childlabor issue. Have students submit an S20 analysisof their cartoon along with the cartoon itself.

Vocabularyreformregulatelobbyingorganized laborrepealedincorporatedretail storesstreet tradescompulsory education lawsworkmen's compensation statutessweatshopenactedtenement homeworkexemptedProgressivismjurisdiction -interstate commercedelegationsdissenteramendmentpropaganda

47

Forge to Fast Food. WcsourceChapter 2: The Struggle for Chile Labor Reform

Child Labor Cartoons

37

Reproduced courtesy of The Collections of the Library of Congress.

BEST COPY AVAILABLE48

38 Forge to Fast Food 94sourceChapter 2: The Struggle for Child Labor Vann

Child Labor Cartoons

HAPPY CHILDHOOD DAYS 239

RIOIARDS IN PHILADELPHIA NORTH AMERICAN

MAY I N DETROIT TIMER

Reproduced courtesy of The Collections of the Library of Congress.

49

Chapter 3: The "High-Water Mark" of Child Labor Reform 1933-1960 39

Chapter 3: The "High-Water Mark" ofChild Labor Reform

1933 -1960The years from 1933 through the 1960s comprise

the "high-water mark" of child labor reform. Begin-ning in 1933, the federal government began to catchup with New York and other states that had estab-lished the leading edge of child labor reform, andNew York continued to extend its statutory regula-tions of child labor and its enforcement mechanisms.

The Great Depression, which began with the stockmarket crash of 1929, shocked many Americans,who soon abandoned their complacent views aboutthe conditions of American labor, including childlabor. But, just as powerfully, the Depression thrustmillions of Americans into poverty and forced manychildren back into the nation's factories and work-places. Those who worked side-by-side with chil-dren, and those who began their working career aschildren, recalled this pressure of economic neces-sity. Some New Deal projects, such as WorksProgress Administration (WPA) interviews, began tocapture first-person accounts of what child laborwas like and what thinking prompted children tobecome workers. For example, Louis Pare, a formermill foreman in Manchester, New Hampshire,explained to a WPA interviewer his thinking onchild labor:

I liked the people who were with me in the millsand I sympathized with them. I helped them asanybody else would have done in my place.Didn't I, when I was a boss, hide some whoweren't quite sixteen, when inspectors visitedthe mills? If boys and girls were big andstrong enough to work, even if they were alittle under the legal age, I gave them a chanceto keep their jobs. I started working in theLowell mills when I was only eight years old,and I could understand. Their parents werepoor and needed every cent they could get. SoI'd tell these younger workers to keep out ofsight until the inspector had gone away. Therewas no harm to anybody in that, and it did alot of good. Besides, the law wasn't so strict inthose days. 1

Similarly, a miner named Fred Harrison recalledhis experiences of child labor in another WPAinterview, noting how many children who workedin the mines began by accompanying their fathersinto the mines:

I began in the drift mine when I was twelve.According to law, you must be sixteen beforeyou start, but there's also a provision that aminer can take his son in to work with him.Of course, he can't do as much as a man, buthe can pick up chunks and put them in a carbeing loaded, and he can fetch prop-caps whenhis old man is putting in a narrow cutting. . . .

Harrison remembered that, as a child working inthe mines, he had to put up with occasional tauntsand jokes from veteran miners:

Some of the waste material is thrown into theplaces just mined out, and this part of themine is known as the "gob." Miners throwscraps from their lunches into the gob and theplace is always overrun by rats that fight andsqueal in the dark. When I first went into themine I was terrified at the thought of the rats,and so were other boys beginning in themines. One of the standard threats of veteransto green boys is: "Look alive, or I'll throw youinto the gob with the rats."

Harrison also recalled that the boys working inthe mines developed their own rituals, almostamounting to a miniature workers' culture, andthat a key part of this child-workers' culture wasthe induction of new workers through hazingrituals:

The first day a new boy is in the mine, theother lads who have been working awhile puthim through a hazing ordeal. His pants aretaken down and coal dust smeared on hisbody. If it's an old-fashioned place where thelard-oil lamps are used instead of carbide, a

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little lard oil is used to make the coal duststick better. Spanking with a shovel or a pickhandle ordinarily forms part of the initiation,too. 3

Again, as in the previous era, the struggle forchild labor reform in the period 1933-1960 pro-ceeded on both federal and state levelsthough inthese decades federal and state efforts movedahead with equal speed and strength and, moreoften than not, complemented each other. Thebalance of this essay chronicles these roughlyparallel efforts.

New York Builds on PreviousAchievements

Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, undercontinued pressure by child labor reformers, NewYork lawmakers continued to revise the state'slaws to expand protections for child workers andto harmonize the state's education laws with itslabor laws. The state's reform efforts, however,continued to pursue the fragmented, subject-by-subject approach dictated by the stategovernment's earlier piecemeal efforts, and stillrequired the watchful supervision of such reform-ers as the New York Child Labor Committee(NYCLC).

FactoriesThe pressures of the Great Depression, which

induced factory operators to hire adults at thewages they used to pay to children, and of morecomprehensive and effective federal and stateregulation severely cut into the problem of childrenworking in factories. Still, difficulties in this fieldpersisted throughout the Depression. NYCLCinvestigators doubted official government figuresas impossibly low, and tried to focus regulators'attention in particular on upstate factories.4 Unfor-tunately, the pressures of the Second World Warand the resulting shortage of adult workers led to ashort-lived resurgence of child labor in factories,and to a state law permitting the State War Councilto issue exemptions to individual manufacturerspermitting employment of sixteen-year-old andseventeen-year-old boys even during hours whentheir employment was normally forbidden by law.To no avail did child labor advocates protest toGovernor Thomas E. Dewey that the state hadrefused to adopt such a law during the First WorldWar. Investigations conducted in Rochester re-

ported that more than half of the city's high schoolstudents were working as well as attending school,some as many as seventy to eighty hours a week.'New York City's Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardiaprotested:

I have a list here . . . of youngsters who aremaking $28, $30, $35, $40 a week. Yes, andwhat will they be doing later on? They willnot have a good skilled trade, they will nothave the educational background . . . they'llhave no profession. They will go backward. 6

LaGuardia's predictions did not pan out, how-ever, for the wartime experience represented anaberration, not the sign of a new trend. The LaborDepartment persisted in and extended its postwarinspections of factories, and the figures indicatingemployment of children in factories droppedcorrespondingly. Even so, the figures on schoolattendance and the dropout rate in the postwar eraindicated that twenty percent of the state's childrenbetween the ages of fourteen and seventeen wereeither at work or seeking work.'

School Attendance and Working ChildrenThe evolution of the process for granting chil-

dren working papers continued in the 1930s, underthe watchful eye of reformers such as the NYCLC.New York City's system continued to set thestandard for the rest of the state, and upstatesystems continued to be inadequate, with citiessuch as Rochester and Albany abandoning physicalexaminations as a precondition for issuing workingpapers; during 1937-1938, state figures indicated,three-fourths of the cities failed to reject a singleapplicant for working papers on the grounds ofhealth.' Instead, reformers focused on the need "tokeep children in school rather than attempt toregulate them once they had gone to work."9 Thestruggle to raise the mandatory age for children tostay in school focused, first, on fifteen years, andthen on sixteen years. In 1933, Governor Lehman,supported by U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner(formerly the co-chairman of the Factory Investi-gating Commission), began a campaign for a billrequiring all New York children to stay in schooluntil the age of sixteen. Efforts to secure this bill,and a compromise fifteen-year version, failed in1933, 1934, and 1935, largely due to the oppositionof the Roman Catholic Church, which viewed themeasure as an interference with parental rights. Theshort-lived National Recovery Administration

51


(NRA) federal minimum age of sixteen years, whichlasted from 1934 until the Supreme Court invali-dated the "blue eagle" (as described below), appar-ently had a lasting effect, persuading the peopleand politicians of New York to adopt a state lawhaving the same effect. Finally, in April 1935 thestate legislature enacted, and Governor Lehmanproudly signed, the Feld-Breibart Law (also knownas the Sixteen Year School-Leaving Law). TheNYCLC regarded the measure as one of its greatestachievements, equal to its work in reducing childlabor in the state's factories.1°

Commercial EstablishmentsThrough the last decade of its existence, the

NYCLC continued to find isolated instances ofstores and delivery firms employing children belowthe minimum working age, and the New York StateLabor Department's resources simply could notkeep up with the vast number of commercialestablishments throughout the state. Even in the1950s, the Labor Department found about 3,500cases per year of children illegally employed bycommercial establishments.11

HomeworkIn 1934, the Neustein-O'Brien law expanded

state regulation of the practice known as homework(under which families brought materials home withthem to assemble into finished goods). The newstatute required any individuals conducting home-work to secure licenses and permits from the stateLabor Departmentbut representatives ofhomeworking industries successfully lobbied, overthe objections of Labor Commissioner Elmer F.Andrew, for a statutory exemption for home-workers in one-family and two-family homes inany community of fewer than 200,000 people, thusleaving homework in small towns and rural areaslargely undisturbed. Andrew protested, to no avail:

[It is] conservative to say that the bulk ofindustrial homework in the State is carried onin 1-2 family dwellings . . . on articlesforbidden to be made in tenements, especiallyon infant's and children's knotwear, crochetedgarments and hand made dresses. This is trueboth in outlying sections of big cities and insmall towns, hamlets and rural areas. Theexploitation of these workers so far as rates ofpay are concerned is unbelievably worse thanamong factory workers. 12

Under pressure by the NYCLC and GovernorHerbert H. Lehman, the state legislature recognizedthat child labor and homework were more thanurban problems; in 1935 it extended the power ofthe Labor Department to inspect commercialestablishments in villages and towns, and repealedthe homework exemption for communities under200,000 people, thus making the homework regula-tions applicable throughout the state. Furtherstatutory and regulatory changes indicated the stategovernment's commitment to total prohibition ofindustrial and tenement homework, and its recog-nition that a total ban was the only answer to theproblems posed by homework."

Street TradesSuch trades as bootblacking and shoe shining

and newspaper vending continued to pose prob-lems, even after the state legislature's efforts tostrengthen the Street Trades Law. Often failures ofinformation and communication lay behind lax ornonexistent enforcement; in Yonkers in the late1920s, for example, the school system's refusal toenforce what most called the Newsboy Lawprompted the NYCLC to broker a three-way systemunder which the city's police department wouldnotify the school system of first-time violations andthe Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil-dren would prosecute parents for second and laterviolations, only to discover in the mid-1930s thatthis system too was a dismal failure. Only changesin the newspaper business, emphasizing homedelivery to urban and suburban readers, managedto phase out the "newsboy" problem; in the 1950sthe state established a newspaper carrier boycertificate for boys between twelve and eighteen,and granted over 45,000 certificates per year, andgradually imposed the requirement that newspa-pers had to cover these delivery boys underworkmen's compensation statutes.]'

Agricultural LaborAt last, the state even turned its attention to

perhaps the single most persistent form of childlaboragricultural labor, specifically migrant labor.In 1936, the State Committee on Summer FarmLabor Problems for the first time probed agricul-tural child labor; its report detailed often appallingreports of widespread employment of children asyoung as nine in harvesting produce on the state'sfarmlands. Six years later, in 1942, GovernorThomas E. Dewey named an Interdepartmental

52


Committee on Migrant Camps (which later reorga-nized as the Interdepartmental Committee on Farmand Food Processing Labor) to plan and coordinatestate efforts to regulate migrant agricultural labor.Despite these efforts, in 1944, 1945, 1952, and 1959,the New York Consumers' League conductedrepeated investigations of its own of agriculturalchild labor in the state, finding conditions virtuallyunchanged. Embarrassed by these findings, in 1948the Labor Department undertook its own series ofannual inspections of labor camps, and in 1952 theNew York legislature founded a Joint LegislativeCommittee on Migrant Labor, which issued its firstreport a year later. After repeated public investiga-tions and private exposés, the state's first legislationto deal with the topic, the Van Lare-Waters Act(1954), turned out to be a disappointingly mild bill;the measure only required farm labor contractors toregister with the Labor Department and empoweredthe Labor Commissioner to revoke registrations onceit had been determined that a contractor violated thelaw. That same year, the legislature also authorizedthe Health Department to set standards for migrantcamps occupied by ten or more persons. And yet, in1960, the legislature enacted a law permittingtwelve-year-old and thirteen-year-old children toharvest berries, fruits, and vegetables for up to fourhours a day, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m."

Federal Efforts Finally Bear FruitIn 1933, the inauguration of President Franklin D.

Roosevelt (who from 1929 until his election in 1932had been governor of New York) heralded a new,vigorous set of federal responses to the GreatDepression.16 Roosevelt and his allies continued toappeal for the adoption of the proposed child laboramendment to the Constitution, though with no realsuccess.17

The first important New Deal measure from theperspective of child labor reform was the NationalIndustrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which created theNational Recovery Administration also known asthe NRA or the "blue eagle" from its symbol. Childlabor became a major target of the "blue eagle.""The NIRA prohibited tenement homework in allindustries engaged in interstate commercethough,as the premier historian of child labor reform inNew York has pointed out, its exact impact isdifficult to gauge and probably was more symbolicthan rea1.19 In 1934, the NRA's industry-wide codesvirtually established a minimum age of sixteen years

for any worker employed by New York industriesengaged in interstate commerce. These measurescomplemented New York state laws such as theNeustein-O'Brien Law of 1934 (described above).

But the NRA codes often sowed confusion ratherthan improving working conditions and the state'shomework inspectors actually welcomed SchechterPoultry Corp. v. United States," the Supreme Court's1935 decision striking down the NIRA." Not untilanother Supreme Court decisionNational LaborRelations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.22upheld Robert F. Wagner's National Labor Rela-tions Act did child labor reformers begin to thinkthat a federal statute outlawing child labor mighthave a chance.

More than fifty bills were introduced in the 75thCongress (1937-1939), and congressional legislation-drafters (with the encouragement of PresidentRoosevelt) created an omnibus bill, covering theissues of child labor, minimum wage, and maxi-mum hours, which became law as the Fair LaborStandards Act of 1938 (FLSA). The new law "pro-hibited the shipment in interstate commerce ofgoods made wherever child labor had been em-ployed within thirty days prior to shipment."23 Themeasure defined child labor as the employment ofchildren under sixteen, or of children under eigh-teen in occupations designated hazardous by theFederal Children's Bureau (which had beenfounded in 1912 after a four-year campaign thatinvoked the aid of Presidents Theodore Rooseveltand William Howard Taft24).25

Businesses that employed child labor promptlyorganized efforts to challenge the constitutionalityof the FLSA, despite the indications of Jones &Laughlin that this tactic was doomed to defeat. OnFebruary 3, 1941, in United States v. Darby LumberCompany," the Supreme Court unanimouslyoverruled Hammer v. Dagenhart and recognized abroad congressional power to regulate interstatecommerce, including banning from interstatecommerce products made with child labor. Darbydid not involve the specific issue of child labor;however, its result confirmed the validity of federalregulation of that subject. The defeat of the ChildLabor Amendment thus became beside the point.

The Reformers Think of FoldingTheir Tents

The successes of this period suggested to childlabor reformers that their work was largely, if notentirely, complete. As a result, after abortive

53


discussions of merging with the National ChildLabor Committee, on December 3, 1941, the NewYork Child Labor Committee voted to dissolve.27Jeremy Felt, the historian of the NYCLC, wrote in1965:

However symbolic the New York laws, theydid open a brighter world for some children.Even if child labor abuses were somewhatmore subject to economic developments thanto legislation, a great many children wouldhave worked away their formative years if ithad not been for the committee and itsfriends. The committee may have barredchildren from work only to have thembuffeted by some other ill-conceived feature oftheir environment, but that does not alter thefact of its contribution. They achieved what itwas possible to achieve on the state level forthe working children of New York and nogreater tribute could be given them. If theirhistory has any value, more should bepossible today. 28

The National Child Labor Committee persists tothis day, even though in the late 1950s the commit-tee considered changing its name; ultimately, itretained the former name, but mainly because ofstatutory reasons having to do with thecommittee's tax-exempt status, doing business foryears as the National Committee on Employmentof Youth and the National Committee on theEducation of Migrant Children.29 As historianWalter Trattner wrote in 1970:

When the fifty-year-old National Child LaborCommittee began changing its focus, its originalobjectives had been nearly achieved. Problemscertainly remained, but child labor had beendramatically reduced and, in fact, if defined by1904 standards, largely eliminated. . . .

The crusade against child labor in the first halfof the twentieth century illustrated the gropingsof American democracy; peaceful reform waspossible, but slow. Hopefully, constructivechange will come more rapidly during thesecond half of the century, including thealleviation of poverty and elimination of theremnants of child labor. Until then, however, itis comforting to recall that reformers usually donot have to repeat themselves. . . .3°

The future would test whether the NationalChild Labor Committee's optimism was justified.

Endnotes1. Interview of Louis Pare by Philippe Lemay,

Manchester, NH, no date, in Ann Banks, ed., First-Person America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980),42.

2. Fred Harrison, interview reprinted in Banks,ed., First-Person America, 82, 84.

3. Ibid., 84.4. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 93-94.5. Ibid., 94-95.6. Quoted in ibid., 95.7. Ibid., 95.8. Ibid., 116.9. Ibid., 120.10. See generally ibid., 115-127.11. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 138-140.12. Quoted in Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 151. See

discussion in id., 151-152.13. Ibid., 152.14. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 165-169.15. Ibid., 169-194.16. For standard accounts, see Arthur M.

Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, II: The Comingof the New Deal, 1933-1934 (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1958); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D.Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York:Harper & Row, 1963), and Anthony Badger, TheNew Deal (London and New York: Longmans,1989); for a history that suggests that Roosevelt'spolicies built on and extended those of his Republi-can predecessor rather than manifesting a dramaticbreak with the Hoover Administration, see AlbertU. Romasco, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depres-sion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

17. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 189-202.18. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 190-195.19. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 151; contra, Trattner,

Crusade for the Children, 195.20. 295 U. S. 495 (1935). The briefs and oral

arguments are reprinted in Philip B. Kurland andGerhard Casper, eds., Landmark Briefs and Argu-ments of the Supreme Court of the United States:Constitutional Law (Lanham, MD: UniversityPublications of America, 1975), 28: 337-864.

21. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 151.22. 301 U. S. 1 (1937). The briefs and oral argu-

ments are reprinted in Philip B. Kurland andGerhard Casper, eds., Landmark Briefs and Argu-ments of the Supreme Court of the United States:

54


Constitutional Law (Lanham, MD: UniversityPublications of America, 1975), 33: 181-474.

23. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 204.24. Ibid., 96-98.25. Due to the lobbying efforts of Senators and

Representatives from farming states, the FLSA didnot extend to the regulation of agriculture, andthus agricultural migrant labor.

26. 312 U. S. 100 (1941). The briefs and oralarguments are reprinted in Philip B. Kurland andGerhard Casper, eds., Landmark Briefs and Argu-ments of the Supreme Court of the United States:Constitutional Law (Lanham, MD: UniversityPublications of America, 1975), 37: 505-762.

27. Felt, Hostages of Fortune, 217-220.28. Ibid., 224.29. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 228-229.30. Ibid., 229, 233.



Background for Activity AThe Child Labor Amendment to the United StatesConstitution was originally proposed in 1924. Theamendment passed in twenty-eight states, fallingshort of the thirty-six needed for adoption. Presi-dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his supporterscontinued to appeal for the adoption of the pro-posed child labor amendment. Though the amend-ment was not passed, the federal Fair LaborStandards Act of 1938 made significant strides inthe federal regulation of child labor. It is still ineffect today.

Activity AStudents will analyze and debate the benefits anddrawbacks of the Child Labor Amendment.

Directions1. Provide students with the background for andthe accompanying text of the Child Labor Amend-ment. Be sure to include positive and negativeaccounts of the amendment as given in the corre-sponding essay.

2. Have students complete the accompanying ChildLabor Amendment worksheet.

3. Discuss answers as a class. The teacher shouldexplain that advocates of the amendment wantedthe amendment passed because the Constitution isthe highest law in the land and would providefederal protection to children.

4. Hold a debate on the adoption of a child laboramendment.

5. After the debate, have students vote on whethera child labor amendment should be adopted today.

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46 Forge to Fast Food ResourceChapter 3: 'The "gfigk-Water Mark' of Child Labor q(cform

Child Labor Amendment

Child Labor Amendment as proposed by Congress in May 1924:

SECTION 1. The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons undereighteen years of age.

SECTION 2. The power of the several States is unimpaired by this article except that the operation of Statelaws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by the Congress.

Read the Child Labor Amendment, review your notes, and answer the questions below.

1. Describe how an amendment is passed.

2. What does Section 1 mean?

3. What does Section 2 mean?

4. Why did proponents of this amendment want an amendment to the Constitution?

5. How do you feel about a child labor amendment to the Constitution?


Background for Activity BThroughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, undercontinued pressure from child labor reformers,New York lawmakers continued to revise thestate's laws to expand protections for child work-ers and to harmonize the state's education lawswith its labor laws. The state's reform efforts,however, continued to pursue a fragmented,subject-by-subject approach dictated by the stategovernment's earlier piecemeal efforts, and thestate's efforts still required the watchful supervi-sion of such reformers as the New York ChildLabor Committee (NYCLC).

Activity BStudents will identify the jobs performed bychildren in these workplaces: factories, commercialestablishments, homework, street trades, andagricultural labor. They will explain difficulties inenforcing child labor laws. Students will create acollage depicting child labor in the above work-places.

Directions1. The teacher should provide background from thechapter 3 essay. Most students should be able toread the section in Bernstein's essay, "New YorkBuilds on Previous Achievements." Divide theclass into base groups and assign each student oneof the five workplaces listed on the accompanyingChild Labor Reform Chart. Discuss the difficultiesof enforcing the regulations in each area.

2. Distribute the chart and have students join theappropriate workplace group to complete thatsection of the handout. After groups have finishedtheir section they should return to their base group,and each "expert" should share her/his notes.When students are in base groups and havecompleted Part I, they can answer the questions inPart II.

3. Have each student create a collage depicting thejobs performed in her/his assigned workplace.Students can display their collages in groupingsaccording to base group membership. Choice ofgrading is up to the teacher.

4. Have students explain why there were nouniform child labor laws.

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48

I. Complete the following chart.

Forge to Fast Food 9ZesourceChapter 3: the 94h-Water Mark: of Chili Labor Reform

Child Labor Reform Chart

Workplace Jobs performed Enforcement Difficulties

Factories

CommercialEstablishments

Homework

Street Trades

Agricultural Labor

II. Questions:

1. What part, if any, did school attendance play in the debate over children at work?

2. Using the information above, explain why it was difficult to enforce child labor laws.

III. Create a collage using pictures or drawings to illustrate the various types of jobs done by children inyour assigned workplace. Include a key for the collage and a caption for the poster. Each student will doher/his own collage.

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Background for Activity CThe century from 1865 to 1960 is filled with numer-ous people, organizations, political battles, laws,and court cases which have a place in the fightagainst child labor abuse.

Activity CStudents will create a History of Child Labor Hallof Fame List: 1865-1960 by each making a placardshowing the importance of a person, law, etc. in thestruggle against abuse of child laborers. Studentswill evaluate the hall of famers. Each student willthen choose three s/he believes had the mostimpact on child labor reform. Students will justifytheir choices.

Directions1. Assign each student a person, organization,attempted amendment, law, or court case from theaccompanying History of Child Labor Hall of FameList. The teacher may use additional persons/topics found in the essays. Students will workindependently on this project. As they will need toaccess the library, it is necessary to allow class timefor research. Remind students to

paraphrase the text from sources;do not copy word for word and

cite each source for informationobtained.

2. Using the accompanying worksheet, History ofChild Labor Hall of Fame: 1865-1960, students willresearch information for their assigned topic. Havestudents review the entire sheet before they begintheir research. The questions on the sheet will helpto keep students focused and encourage them touse other pertinent information they find. Theyshould be thinking about an idea for a visual thatcan be incorporated on their placard.

3. When students have completed their notetaking, they should make several drafts of the textfor the placard. They need to check the text foraccuracy, grammar, etc. Peer editing can beencouraged. They also need to plan out the visualon scrap paper before they begin the final work.Visuals can be pictures, symbols, background, etc.,but they must be pertinent to the subject.

4. Each placard should be 8" x 10" or 11" x 14" andbe made from oaktag, poster board, or construc-tion paper.

5. When completed, the placards should be dis-played for the entire class to view. Students willread and evaluate the information on each personand topic. Each student should choose the threehall of famers that s/he feels had the most impacton child labor reform. They should write a shortessay in which they justify their choices.

Vocabularystatutory regulationsNew Dealhazingexemptionschild laborchild labor advocatesworking papersinvalidatedcommercial establishmentshomeworkstatutory exemptionsprosecutecompensationmigrant laborGreat Depression"blue eagle"omnibus billalleviation

60

50 Forge to Fast Food -Resource

Chapter 3: 'The '51--wh-Water Mark" of Child Labor Reform

History of Child Labor Hall of Fame List: 1865-1960

Children's Aid Society

Factory Act of 1886

New York State Bureau of Labor Statistics

New York Child Labor Committee

National Child Labor Committee

Factory Investigating Commission

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

Feld-Briebart Law

1903 Factory Law

Double Compensation Law 1903

1909 Voss Dangerous Trades Act

1903 Finch-Hill Factory Act

Workingman's Party

Samuel Gompers

Frances Perkins

Charles F. Peck

Florence Kelley

Lillian Wald

Elbridge Gerry

Robert F. Wagner

Federal Children's Bureau

Hammer v. Dagenhart

Child Labor Amendment

Charles Loring Brace

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Harmony Mills Cotton Works of Cohoes, New York

Tarrth Piic

Lewis Hine

Charles Reznikoff

Mother Jones

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Forge to Fast Food 9(esource 51Chapter 3: 'The "gewh-Water Mark" of Chile Labor Reform

History of Child Labor Hall of Fame: 1865-1960

I. Using sources found in the library, you will answer the following questions concerning your assignedHall of Fame person or topic. Write the answers-in your notebook. However, take notes on any pertinentinformation you find. Paraphrase your notes and cite your sources! Your information will be used on aplacard (or poster) which explains why your person or topic was so important in the struggle against childlabor abuse.

Person/Topic

1. Of what importance was this person/topic in the struggle against child labor?

2. When did this take place?

3. Where did it take place?

4. What contribution was made whether it was lasting or not?

5. Was the person/topic successful in the struggle against child labor abuse? Why?

II. When you have finished note taking, write six to ten sentences explaining why this person/topic wasimportant in the history of child labor. This will be the text for your placard. Write two drafts of the textbefore you write the final draft. Check your work for accuracy of information and grammar, spelling, etc.

III. Design a visual for your placard which represents or symbolizes your person/topic.

IV. Completed placards will be displayed in the classroom. Each student must analyze the information onthe placards. Choose the three persons/topics you believe had the most impact on child labor issues. Takenotes from the placards which justify your choices.

V. Write a short essay which explains why you have chosen these three persons/topics. Include two orthree reasons to justify your choice for each person/topic.

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Chapter 4: The Resurgence of Child Labor1960 to the Present

Context: Defining the Place ofChild Labor in Modern Life

In the past fifteen years, the issue of child laborhas returned to national prominence. The issue isnot whether children should ever work. Nor doesanyone challenge the consensus that older children(aged fourteen to sixteen) benefit intellectually,psychologically, morally, and financially from workexperience scaled to their age, capacity, and otherresponsibilities. To the contrary, now as throughoutthe history of the child labor question in America,the issue is one of deciding whether, when, how,and for what compensation children should work.As Jeffrey Newman, executive director of theNational Child Labor Committee, told the ChristianScience Monitor in 1986, "Work teaches kids a lot ofthings that are part of the ethics and values of oursociety. You learn about lots of people and you learnabout yourself."' Working also teaches the childworker valuable lessons about working and theeconomy that can build a foundation for later life.2Advocates of child labor reform therefore urge thatthe law provide coherent, nuanced answers to thisset of questions, keyed to children's growing intel-lectual and physical capacities, designed (i) to keepout of the workplace children too young to be thereand (ii) to encourage those children who can assumethe responsibilities of work to do so with responsi-bility and foresight.

In 1993, U.S. News and World Report captured thecentral dilemmas facing teenagers who want towork and their parents.' Parents find attractive theprospect that their teenagers might take part-timejobs for two reasons. First, "a teenager who holdsdown a job learns important lessons about responsi-bility and independence. "' Second, working teenag-ers can pay for incidentals and luxuries themselvesrather than having to ask their parents to do so andcan help save for college and other family expenses,thereby relieving their parents' burdens. The eco-nomic importance of wage-earning teenagers to theAmerican economy is enormous; as one 1988 studyreported, teenagers had $31 billion in incomederived from jobs, allowances, and other money

from their parents, with the average teenager earning$61.50 per week.' The challenge facing parents ofworking teenagers is to help their children strike thebest balance between work and schooling, so thatneither activity injures the other.6 The benefits thatteenage workers reap from their jobs if they maintainthat balance include financial independence and anincreased sense of self-worth and responsibility. Therisks that teenage workers face if they do not strikethat balance include damaging their performance inschool, cutting back on their educational ambitiondue to work pressures, and general burnout. More-over, teenagers should not see so-called "fast-foodjobs" as offering a proven route to advancement inthe adult world of employment. Parents thereforeneed to help their teenagers see which jobs will offerwhat kinds of benefits, both in the short term and inthe long run.'

Observers of child labor note that children oftenwork because they have to; in particular, they workto help their parents make ends meet; indeed,parents often must make the difficult decision thattheir children must work to contribute to the familyfinances. These painful truths often exacerbatearguments about child labor.

Younger workers also enter the workforce becausethey meet the economy's needs. Beginning in the1970s, repeated economic shocks have underminedAmericans' settled expectations, subjected somesectors of the national economy (for example, thesteel and automobile industries) to extraordinarystrains, and induced rapid growth in other sectors (inparticular, the service economy) that draw teenagerslooking for part-time work.' Owners and operators ofservice-sector businesses are desperate to cut laborcosts and to cope with what Bill Cross of the OregonRestaurant Association described as "a terrible laborsqueeze."9 As the Chicago Tribune pointed out in a1991 analysis of teen workers, many of the jobscreated in the 1970s and '80s were in the service andretail fields. Most adults shun these so-called "sec-ondary" jobs, characterized by low wages, irregularshifts, evening and weekend hours, minimal fringebenefits and few opportunities to advance to man-agement.

63

Secondary jobs, on the other hand, often fitthe needs of teenagers looking for after-schooland weekend work. Because the greatmajority of teenagers are seeking immediatespending money rather than a start on along-term career, the lack of chances foradvancement makes little difference to them."

The Tribune also identified fast-food restaurantsand other service employers as avid would-beemployers of teen workers. But increasing num-bers of restaurant owners and operators arecoming to recognize, in the words of SteveMadigan, CEO of the Indianapolis-based Ultra-Steak Inc., that "We need to be good employers, tonot interfere with kids' education. . .. This is aproblem that isn't going away, and we have to finda solution."11

The Issue ResurgentIn 1982, Thomas A. Coens, a Chicago labor

attorney, proclaimed in an article for the Labor LawJournal, "Today, more than forty-four years afterthe enactment of federal protection in the FairLabor Standards Act, [the] conditions [thatprompted the enactment of child labor laws] havelargely disappeared."" Coens titled his article,"Child Labor Laws: A Viable Legacy for the1980s," giving voice to the satisfaction shared byreformers after four decades of successful legisla-tive, administrative, and judicial efforts against theabuses of child labor.

Addressing the current state of child labor laws,Coens identified issues that those administeringthose laws ought to consider. His new issuesincluded restrictions on agricultural labor, workerexposure to pesticides, the scope of federal enforce-ment, the nature and range of civil and criminalpenalties that government could impose on em-ployers, and proposed adjustments to the federalminimum wage. Yet another issue was the grow-ing pressure by employers and economic theoriststo make federal and state child labor laws andregulations more flexible; such changes, theymaintained, would accommodate the desires andneeds of teenagers to move more fully into thenation's labor force." Sympathetic to the argu-ments of those advocating flexibility, Coensrecognized that "[A]rguably, increased flexibilityin child labor standards would benefit manyteenagers who need to work."14 But Coens'ssupport for this goal had limits; he pointed out that

Chapter 4: The Resurgence of Child Labor 53

more flexible laws and regulations would haveonly a "minimal[] impact"" on those older teenswho experienced the greatest pressures to findwork. Further, he urged that "in modifying thestandards, the legislators and the administrativeagencies should not compromise the traditionalgoals of child labor laws." While warning thatsuggested revisions of the child labor laws andregulations should be viewed with caution, Coensclosed his article with the happy prediction that"child labor laws should continue to meet thesocietal expectation of protecting children in theworkplace."17

Coens's article was ironically timedthough hedid not intend the irony. It appeared at the begin-ning of the period during which, many students ofthe child labor problem agree, the nation began asteady backslide to conditions approximating thosewhen the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 becamelaw. As Jeffrey Newman of the National ChildLabor Committee told The New York Times in 1992,"I see the same kind of exploitation that occurredthen, in sweatshops, in unscrupulous businesspractices that occur behind closed doors. It's verysad and it doesn't speak well to our understandingand commitment to children."18

Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s,virtually all Americans who read newspapers ormagazines, listen to radio, or watch television haveseen at least one major news report about theresurgence of child labor in America. The reportmay focus on rural migrant labor, suburban servicejobs, or urban "sweatshop" work. This last settingis invariably tied to the immigrant experience, andits story usually begins the same way.

The time is now; the place is a loft factorysomewhere in New York City, whether inChinatown or midtown Manhattan or in thelabyrinthine neighborhoods of Brooklyn orQueens. The scene is an airless room packed withtoo many people, who are operating sewingmachines or folding and packing clothing. If it issummer, the room lacks air conditioning, fans, orother ventilation; the room's temperature rangesfrom one hundred to one hundred twenty degrees,justifying the designation "sweatshop." If it iswinter, the room is unheated and the workershuddle in their coats, wreathed by the steam oftheir condensing breath. Whatever the season, theworkplace usually lacks emergency exits or firedoors; even if those doors are present, they areusually blocked by machinery or by huge stacks of

64


heavy cartons. There is no exit if a fire breaks out,no escape through a door or a window. Theconditions subsisting in these modern sweatshopsoffer eerie and terrifying parallels to the conditionsthat culminated in the notorious 1911 TriangleShirtwaist Company factory fire!'

The story's central figure is a boy or girl, nearlyalways an illegal immigrant, sometimes Chineseand sometimes Latin American, usually betweenten and fifteen years old (but claiming to be at leasttwice that age) though sometimes younger. In 1990,Bruce D. Butterfield of the Boston Globe published aprize-winning five-part investigative series onchild labor; the children he introduced to hisreaders included ten-year-old Kem Shi, who sathuddled in a dirty third-floor loft factory onDivision Street in Chinatown, and fourteen-year-old Maria Casarrubias, who labored next to hermother in a midtown Manhattan sweatshop.2°Children like these work at least ten hours per day,side by side with adultssometimes alone, some-times with a parent or other relativeand expectand receive treatment no different from that givento their adult coworkers. As Butterfield reported,"an estimated 7,000 work daily in New York'sgarment industry. . . "21

Now, however, the child at the story's focuscowers in fright and despairfor inspectors from agovernment agency (the U.S. Department of Labor,the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or theNew York State Department of Labor), representa-tives of the National Child Labor Committee, andjournalists enter the room. This intrusion paralyzesthe adult workers into self-protective silence; theyhang their heads, standing mute as the inspectorsand reporters ask quiet but insistent questions.Sometimes the child tries to make himself orherself invisible from the questions and the photo-graphs; sometimes he or she scrambles to hideunder a pile of cloth remnants or fellow workers'coats; sometimes he or she tries to make a run forit.

And this story usually ends the same waythechild refuses to cooperate with the investigators,frustrating attempts to enforce complaints againstthe employer. Even if the child were willing tocooperate, the employers are not on the premisesand the investigators know that they have littlechance of tracking them down. As the inspectorsand the reporters leave, the child creeps back to hisor her place and resumes work. Nothing haschanged, the inspectors tell the reporters, and

nothing is likely to change. The child they justsaw, cringing in fear and whispering half-heartedexplanations, is trapped in that nightmare. AsTom Glubiak, head of the New York State ApparelIndustry Task Force, told a reporter for CableNetwork News in late 1993, "It's basically a lifewhere they are almost a piece of the machinerythemselves. They lose their hopes and aspirationsfor the future."22 In sum, illegal immigration hasbrought to American shores a labor force particu-larly vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulousemployers who use the immigration laws as aweapon of intimidation against desperate workers.

These sweatshops may seem distant andirrelevant to the lives of most Americans, but theymake many of the clothes on our backs. Ironically,some manufacturers who affix the label "Made inthe U.S.A." to the clothing they market neveradmit to themselves or to their customers thatsome American contractors still employ childlabor in conditions that are not supposed to existin the United States. Most Americans do notrealize that clothing "made in the U.S.A." iscompetitively priced largely because of cheaplabor. To illustrate the degree to which child andadult laborers are exploited in the manufacture ofAmerican clothes, U.S. News & World Report brokedown the labor costs of a skirt that the nationalretailer, The Limited, sold for $54; the contractorreceived $4.25 for each skirt, $3.00 of which hepaid to his workers:23

Clothing FeatureWaistband

with facing:Hem, skirt:Hem, lining:Serging, skirt:Serging, lining:Cutting threads:Belt loops (4):Sowing belt loops

on skirt (4):Zipper:Pressing:Ironing loops:

Labor Cost Per Feature

72 cents6 cents7 cents14 cents4 cents5 cents10 cents

8 cents17 cents15 cents15 cents each

There are other emblematic stories of childlabor in America today besides the sweatshopstories that fill American newspapers and maga-zines. The setting also could be a fast-food restau-rant anywhere in suburban America. The child

65

workers here are teenagers, and their employmentis usually legal. But all too often they either workhours longer than those the law permits or assumeduties (such as operating dangerous machinery ordriving a delivery truck) that the law forbidsyounger workers to undertake. Dr. PhilipLandrigan, director of environmental and occupa-tional medicine at New York City's Mt. SinaiHospital and co-author of a major 1993 study ofwork-related injuries suffered by New Yorkchildren, noted, "The fast-food industry is the newsweat-shop." In December 1992, the United StatesDepartment of Labor assessed a $500,000 finethesingle largest child labor penalty in historyagainst the national fast-food chain Burger King forletting fourteen-year-old and fifteen-year-oldemployees work hours past the nationally-man-dated cutoff of 7 p.m. on school days.25

Sometimes the setting is a typical city or subur-ban street, where exploitative contractors hirechildren, some as young as seven years old, to sellcandy door-to-door, often under the cover ofpretended fund-raising for charity. BrandyWoodrow, a thirteen-year-old girl in Vallejo,California, described her work to two reportersfrom Fortune magazine:26

We used to sell every day. The van wouldpick me up at 3:30 and I'd work until 10P.M. on weekdays and until midnight onweekends. The driver would have 20 kids inhis van. We'd usually sit on the floor; therewere no seat belts. First we'd sell in Vallejo,and then we went all over. One time we werein Livermore, 50 miles away, and the vanbroke down. I didn't get home until 3:30 inthe morning. I sold the candy for $5 a boxand kept $1 for myself. On a good night Icould sell ten boxes. . . .

Yet another practice that most Americansassociate with the early days of the IndustrialRevolutionindustrial homeworkhas returnedto the United States. In the early 1980s the Reaganadministration agreed to relax government regula-tions against the practice. Some families strugglingto make ends meet have taken on piecework orhomework. In such settings, as in agricultural laboror the sweatshops of the American clothing indus-try, children help their parents or older siblings.They often work long hours, well into the night. AsJay Mazur, president of the International Ladies'Garment Workers Union, protested in 1989,


"inspection [of homework] becomes impossible.There is no way of knowing how many hours areworked, how much is earned per hour, whichmembers of the family are engaged in the labor, orchildren's degree of exposure to dangerous materi-als and machinery."27

Infrequently, though tragically, former childworkers struggle to rebuild lives shattered bycatastrophic work-related injury. The Mt. Sinaistudy of New York children injured on the jobexamined the 9,656 work-related injuries in NewYork State in the period 1980-1987 for which thestate awarded workers' compensation; the types ofinjuries reported included amputations of arms orlegs, gunshot wounds, concussions, broken bones,hernias and ruptures, and severe burning orscarring. The doctors concluded:

Each year, more than 1,200 adolescents areawarded compensation for work-relatedinjury. Each year, an average of 525 adoles-cents suffer some degree of permanentdisability. Each year, on average, fouradolescents die of injuries sustained at work.Our data found an annual occupationalinjury award rate of 28.2 per 10,000 workingadolescents in New York State.28

Two examples give these statistics humanimmediacy. In 1991, "while climbing a 12-foot-highpile of boxes in a freezera prohibited area forminors[Charles Kenney, a sixteen-year-oldemployee of a New York City ice-cream distribu-tor] slipped, caught his ring on the edge of a shelf,and lost his finger." The second example illus-trates that, under child labor laws, the mereexistence of risk of injury is sufficient cause forgovernment action against employers: consider, forexample, the most disturbing of the U.S. LaborDepartment's over one hundred charges settled inearly 1994 against the Grand Union supermarketchain for violating the Fair Labor Standards Actthat Grand Union used children under eighteen tooperate scrap-paper balers, a hazardous activityspecifically prohibited by the federal statute.3°

Sometimes the child worker is an agriculturalworker; such cases are most often found in theMidwestern and Western United States but do turnup in New York State. Some are children of farmerswho work to help their parents keep the familyfarm afloat. They may be following a venerableAmerican agricultural tradition; as BruceButterfield wrote in the Boston Globe, in 1990,

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"Battling to keep their land following a period ofrecord farm foreclosures and stagnant grain prices,America's 1.2 million family farmers are relyingincreasingly on the labor of their children." Butthese children face an ever-present danger, for theyoperate or work near heavy machinery that canmaim or kill them. Otto Petersen, a farmer inCorning, Iowa, whose twelve-year-old son Shaunlost his life when he was pulled into the blades of asweep auger, said: "We've always done things as afamily. It was either we all worked on the farm orwe gave the farm up."31 Other children, such aseight-year-old Guillermo Perez, are migrant work-ers who labor side-by-side with their parents andolder siblings in the nation's vegetable and fruitfields, just as Edward R. Murrow found more thanthree decades ago in his 1961 documentary "CBSReports: Harvest of Shame." Not only do theseworkers suffer injuries from the repetitive tasks ofstooping and picking crops; they are regularlyexposed to pesticides that inflict permanent damageon their health."

Sometimes a child worker (in whatever line ofwork) has no obvious physical injury but suffersindirect, equally long-lasting harm. In these cases,the central figure is a teenager who has worked somany hours, by necessity or by short-term choice,that he or she has sacrificed education to a job, andhas had to abandon dreams of the better life thatsuccessful high school and college education mighthave provided.33 Teenagers, the Boston Globedeclared in 1990, "are part of the nation's newsuburban work force." Although some of theseworking teenagers are highly ambitious both fortheir education and their future business experience,Professor John Bishop of Cornell University'seconomics department observed, "The kids whochoose as teenagers to work typically are morelikely to be kids who dislike school and are doingpoorly in school. They see work as an alternative, anenvironment they prefer to the environment at'school in which they are failing."34 Concerned aboutthe dangers of teenagers emphasizing after-schooljobs over their education, Representative Don Pease(Democrat-Ohio) declared, "We need to keep ourfocus on the fact that the No. 1 job of teenagers is tolearn as much as they can, . . . and any other job thatinterferes with that must take second place."" Asnoted above, educators and parents now face thechallenge of persuading the nation's workingchildren that their education, not part-time employ-ment, is their principal responsibility 36

Sometimes the central figure is a grievingparent, mourning a child killed while on the job.Jeris Petersen, Shaun's mother, told the BostonGlobe: "Now, I'm scared to have any of my childrendo anything. I'm scared all the time. My aunt waskilled on a farm, my dad lost a thumb. Otto hasbeen caught in the power train of a tractor and hishand was ripped open on the harvester. But losinga son is different. I didn't know children could bekilled like Shaun was killed.""

Devising Coherent PolicyNew York continues to keep its laws in pace

with evolving labor conditions; a June 1993 pam-phlet summarizing these measures runs to forty-two closely-printed pages.38 New York law is atleast as stringent as federal child labor laws, andoften more soreflecting New York's continuinghistory as a leading jurisdiction in responding tothe issues of child labor. Recent developmentsevince the state's continuing effort to define thecutting edge of child labor policy in partnershipwith the federal government and private employ-ers. For example, in 1991 the New York legislatureenacted a sweeping set of child labor reforms intwo broad categoriesyounger children (agedfourteen to fifteen) and older children (aged sixteento seventeen). Each set of reforms was designed toadapt New York law to changing employmentconditions:

The 1991 statute tightened NewYork's legal requirements governing theemployment of younger children, usingthe stricter federal laws and regulationsas a standard; these children may notwork more than three hours on anyschool day, more than eight hours onany day when school is not in session,more than eighteen hours a week, morethan six days a week, or after 7 p.m. orbefore 7 a.m.39

The 1991 statute also revised workopportunities available to older children.When school is in session, they may notwork more than four hours on any daypreceding a school day (other than aSunday or holiday) with exceptionspermitting up to six hours of work forstudents enrolled in cooperative workexperience programs. They may work upto eight hours on a Friday, Saturday,

67

Sunday, or holiday. They may not workmore than twenty-eight hours per week,more than six days per week, after 10p.m. at night, or before 6 a.m. Whenschool is not in session, or if the childrenin question are not enrolled in school,older children may work up to eighthours per day to a maximum of forty-eight hours per week, up to six days perweek, but not after midnight or before 6a.m.40

The 1991 statute also provided closermonitoring of the relationship betweenthese children's working and schoollives. Older children now can work laterthan the law formerly allowedup tomidnight on any day preceding a schoolday or any non-school dayif theyobtain written parental permission and iftheir performance in school is certified tobe sufficiently good to justify the change.This reform is extremely importantbecause it is the first state legislation thatties teenagers' work to their schoolperformance. As a result, these provi-sions have become models for state child-labor statutes throughout the nation.4'

As the earlier essays have shown, previousefforts in New York to respond to the issues posedby child labor have been valuable but incrementaland piecemeal. Some laws seek to regulate workingconditions, others to provide remedies for injuries,still others to establish the proper relationshipsbetween education and work. In the 1990s, the stateemphasized the importance of a healthy relation-ship between school and work; and New Yorkgovernmental officials, labor and business leaders,and academics pooled their efforts to produce acoherent and comprehensive policy known as the"School-to-Work Opportunities System."42

At the heart of the School-to-Work Opportuni-ties System is the idea that the relationship be-tween school and work must be a two-waylearning process for students, on the one hand, andteachers and employers, on the other hand. Stu-dents need to understand that, as a 1989 report bythe New York State Department of Labor put it,"[g]oing to school is a child's most important job."Teachers and employers must find ways to imple-ment "contextualized learning strategies" in which


quality work experience can enhance learning.43This program aims to construct a comprehensivesystem that responds to the needs of the three largecategories of the state's schoolchildren: those whowant to or have to join the full-time work forcerather than pursue their educational opportunities;those who want to or have to combine educationwith part-time work, and those who want to earndisposable income through part-time or summeremployment while they pursue their education. Inresponding to the needs of these different groups,the system must devise ways to meet their educa-tional needs, help them acquire the requisiteknowledge and vocational skills, and protect theirrights as part-time workers.

The School-to-Work Opportunities System seeksto prepare all students to function effectively in arapidly changing work place that requires new,more demanding standards for employabilityspecifically, academic and occupational knowledgeand skills. To make this system work, educatorsand their partners in government, business, labor,and reform organizations face the challenge ofcreating high-quality work-based learning experi-ences that will educate students without exploitingthem, and that will expand students' understand-ings of work beyond the mere opportunity to earnmoney.

Conclusion: Coming to Grips withthe Child Labor Issue

The extensive coverage of such abuses of childworkers by the news media has spurred responsesby politicians, governmental officials, labor unions,business leaders, and public-interest groups suchas the National Child Labor Committee. Federal,state, and local authorities continue to pursuevarious remedies to these problemsboth throughenforcing existing laws and regulations andrevising those laws and regulations to adapt themto changing conditions. They establish regulationsdefining and limiting conditions under whichchildren may workmaximum hours (both perday and per week), minimum wages, and otherconditions of labor. They also conduct inspectionsof employers who hire children or teenage workersto determine whether and to what extent employ-ers observeor violatethe rules.

Most Americans consider the stories recountedabove to be throwbacks to their grandparents'dayscenarios supposedly made obsolete, as

88


Coens's 1982 article maintained, by enlightenedlaws, vigorous trade unions, responsible employ-ers, and a dramatic sea change in Americansociety's understanding of what we want ourchildren's lives to be. They would be wrong.Consider the national statistics for 1990, as ex-trapolated by the National Safe Workplace Insti-tute from the 1990 U.S. Census and the work of theU.S. General Accounting Office:"

AgeNational

Population

NationalWorking

Population Percentage

12-13 6,762,450 672,245 10

14 3,243,107 486,466 15

15 3,321,609 930,050 2816 3,304,890 1,685,494 5117 3,410,062 1,739,132 51

Total 20,042,118 5,513,387 28

But the issue of child labor has become moreintricate since the reforms of the first half of thecentury, bringing within its scope a host of issuessuch as: health and safety, the role of youngworkers in the economy, the relation of work tothe young person's social development, and therelationship of child labor to education. As aresult, responding to the modern challenges posedby child labor in America has become correspond-ingly more complex.

Endnotes1. Marilyn Gardner, "Teens and Jobs: Bad for

Each Other?" Christian Science Monitor, November17, 1986.

2. Alan Deutschman (with Mark D. Fefer),"Why Kids Should Learn about Work," Fortune,August 10, 1992, at 86ff.

3. Amy Saltzman, "News You Can Use: 'Mom,Dad, I Want a Job,'" U. S. News and World Report,iviay 17, 1993, at 68ff.

4. Ibid.5. Jill Lawrence, "Part-Time Jobs Often Pay for

Luxuries, Interfere with School Work; Teen-AgeEarning and Learning Don't Always Mix, Educa-tors Discover," Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1989.

6. Parents of teenagers who want to work alsocan and should monitor the conditions underwhich their children will work, working withemployers to define the limits of the job for the

mutual benefit of the teen worker and his or heremployer.

7. See generally Ellen Greenberger and LaurenceSteinberg, When Teenagers Work: The Psychologicaland Social Costs of Adolescent Employment (NewYork: Basic Books, 1986); Marilyn Gardner, "Teensand Jobs: Bad for Each Other?" Christian ScienceMonitor, November 17, 1986.

8. Froma Joselow, "Why Business Turns to Teen-Agers," The New York Times, March 26, 1989,Section 3, at 1.

9. Beth Lorenzini and Susie Stephenson, "TeenLabor: Worth the Risk?" Restaurants and Institu-tions, February 12, 1992, at 67ff.; Kevin Farrell, "TheChildren's Hour: With More Stringent Enforcementof Child Labor Laws, Operators Need to Be MoreCareful about Work Schedules," Restaurant BusinessMagazine, November 1, 1990, at 80ff.; "LaborCrunch Spurs Violations," Newsday, January 18,1988, at 3.

10. Richard L. Worsnop, "Experts Argue Valueof Teens Taking Jobs," Chicago Tribune, June 30,1991.

11. Quoted in Kevin Farrell, "The Children'sHour: With More Stringent Enforcement of ChildLabor Laws, Operators Need to Be More Carefulabout Work Schedules," Restaurant Business Maga-zine, November 1, 1990, at 80ff.

12. Thomas A. Coens, "Child Labor Laws: AViable Legacy for the 1980s," Labor Law Journal 33(1982): 668-683 (quote at 668, citations omitted).

13. See Michael E. Borus, et al., Pathways to theFuture: A Longitudinal Study of YoungAmericans(Center for Human Resources Research, Ohio StateUniversity, 1980), cited and discussed in Coens,"Child Labor Laws," 682-683 & nn. 87-89, 92.

14. Coens, "Child Labor Laws," 682.15. Ibid., 683, citing U. S. Bureau of Labor

Statistics, Profile of the Teenage Worker (1980).16. Coens, "Child Labor Laws," 683.17. Ibid., 683.18. Gina Kolata, "More Children Are Employed,

Often Perilously," The New York Times, June 21,1992.

19. Susan Headden, "U. S. News InvestigativeReport: Made in the U. S. A.," U. S. News & WorldReport, November 22, 1993. Compare the condi-tions reported in Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962).

20. Bruce D. Butterfield, "Children at Work, I:The Tragedy of Child Labor," Boston Globe, 22 April1990.

69

21. Ibid.22. "True Stories: Blood, Sweat, and FearPart

3," CNN Specials, December 5, 1993, Transcript#250-3.

23. Headden, "U. S. News Investigative Report:Made in the U. S. A. " This study did not providefigures for these workers' hourly wages, nor canwe compute hourly wages based on the datapresented.

24. Leslie Papp, "Teen Workers Hit by Hot-OilBurns . . .," Toronto Star, November 28, 1993. Thestudy is Renate Belville, Susan H. Pollack, H.James Godbold, and Philip J. Landrigan, "Occupa-tional injuries among working adolescents in NewYork State," JAMA: Journal of the American MedicalAssociation 269 (2 June 1993): 2754ff.

25. Brian Dumaine with Rahul Jacob, "IllegalChild Labor Comes Back," Fortune, April 5, 1993;Frank Swoboda, "Burger King Accused of ChildLabor-Law Abuse," Washington Post, March 9,1990.

26. Ibid. For another account of this practice,see Peter T. Kilborn, "Playing Games with LaborLaws: When Work Fills a Child's Hours," The NewYork Times, December 10, 1989.

27. Jay Mazur, "About Work: Families ThatSlave Together," New York Newsday, January 31,1989.

28. Belville, et al., "Occupational Injuries amongWorking Adolescents in New York State," passim.See also "Work-Related Injuries Among Teenagers'A Substantial Problem,' Researchers Say," BNAOccupational Safety and Health Daily, June 8, 1993;Michael Powell, "2 Doctors Gauge the Suffering,"New York Newsday, January 8, 1989.

29. Dumaine with Jacob, "Illegal Child LaborComes Back. "

30. Stephen G. Hirsch, "Grand Union SettlesChild Labor Case Violations at 35 New YorkStores," Bergen Record, January 27, 1994.

31. Bruce D. Butterfield, "Children at Work, II:Youths at Risk on the Family Farm," Boston Globe,April 23, 1990.

32. Bruce D. Butterfield, "Children at Work, V:The New Harvest of Shame," Boston Globe, April26, 1990.

33. See e. g., Joseph P. Ritz, "Crackdown Set onChild-Labor Violations," Buffalo News, May 30,


1993; Bruce D. Butterfield, "Children at Work, III:Long Hours, Late Nights, Low Grades," BostonGlobe, April 24, 1990.

34. Richard L. Worsnop, "Learning May BeBetter Job than Flipping Burgers," Chicago Tribune,January 6, 1991.

35. Kirk Victor, "Kids on the Job," The NationalJournal, July 14, 1990. See also Don J. Pease, "EndChild-Labor Abuse," Christian Science Monitor,April 4, 1990.

36. Jill Lawrence, "Part-Time Jobs Often Pay forLuxuries, Interfere with School Work; Teen-AgeEarning and Learning Don't Always Mix, Educa-tors Discover," Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1989.

37. Quoted in Butterfield, "Children at Work, V:The New Harvest of Shame. "

38. See the compilation, Laws Governing theEmployment of Minors (Albany, NY: New York StateDepartment of Labor, June 1993).

39. N. Y. Labor Law, sec. 142 (McKinney, 1991).40. N. Y. Labor Law, sec. 143 (McKinney, 1991).

The twenty-eight-hour-per-week limit makes NewYork tougher than every major industrial stateexcept California and Pennsylvania, which alsohave a twenty-eight-hour-per-week limit. Bycontrast, New Jersey's weekly maximum is fortyhours; Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Texasadopted forty-eight hours; and Ohio has no limits.Sam Howe Verhovek, "New Limits Set on JobHours for Students," The New York Times, 29 June1991, at 25, 28.

41. Ibid.42. The term comes from New York State's

application to the United States Departments ofEducation and Labor for an implementation grantunder the federal School-to-Work OpportunitiesAct, signed into law by President Bill Clinton inMay 1994. See the application, "New YorkTheState of Learning: Building a School-to-WorkOpportunities System in New York State. "

43. Paul F. Cole, "Children at Work: Peril orPromise?" (Albany, NY: New York State AFL-CIO,1991), 8.

44. Reported in Anne C. Roark, "Child LaborersStill Exploited, Study Finds," Los Angeles Times,September 6, 1992.

70

60 FROM FORGE TO FAST FOOD'


Background for Activity AThere is no better resource for students than theirpeers to learn about child labor in their owncommunity.

Activity AEach student will interview one or two teenagerswho are currently working outside the home forwages. After compiling information, each studentwill contribute an article to a newspaper on childlabor issues which is prepared by the class.

Directions1. For this activity the students will become re-searchers assigned to investigate teenagers in theworkplace.

2. Distribute the accompanying InterviewWorksheet. Students should be encouraged tointerview friends and family, but the jobs cannot behome chores.

3. Discussing the following strategies will helpstudents prepare for their interview:

Explain to the person why you wantto conduct the interview.

Arrange for a time to speak to theteenager by phone or in person.

Take notes and paraphrase the infor-mation you hear.

Keep in mind your purpose is to askquestions, listen, and take good notes.

Students could ask additional ques-tions to gather pertinent information.

If permission is given, tape recordyour interview.

4. Have students bring interview notes to class. In alarge group or in small groups have studentscompile their information into categories such as:types of work, responsibilities, benefits of work,reasons for work, dangers of work, and restrictionson teen workers, etc. Students should make two ormore conclusions based upon the compiled infor-mation.

5. Have students write a short article on one of theconclusions citing the evidence used to come tothat conclusion.

6. Compile the articles into a class newspaper onchild labor. This paper can be distributed inschool, to local employers and even sent to theNew York State Commissioner of Labor, StateOffice Building Campus, Albany, NY 12240.

7. An alternative is for students to put their articlein the form of a letter and send it to the editor of alocal newspaper for possible publication. Studentscould also make their articles into posters withvisuals for a display in school.

71

Forge to Fast Foot! Resource 61Chapter 4: The Resurgence of Chill Labor

Interview Worksheet

Sample Questions1. How old are you?

2. Where do you work? How many hours in an average week?

3. Why do you work?

4. What job do you perform?

5. What are your responsibilities at work?

6. How much do you earn per hour? What is the minimum wage?

7. Do you have working papers? How did you get them?

8. What are the dangers of your job?

9. What are the benefits of working?

10. What are the drawbacks of working?

11. What are your rights as an employee?

12. What are your responsibilities as an employee?

13. Does your employer limit the work you do? Why?

14. Does your employer know the child labor laws? How do you know?

15. How do your parents feel about you working?

72


Background for Activity BBy now, students have examined child laborhistory and legislation. They also have interviewedteenagers who work. It is important for students tohave this background as they examine current lawsand conditions of teenage employment. It is impor-tant for them to know that today's laws were notcreated in a vacuum and that violations still existdespite the laws.

Activity BStudents will examine current child labor legisla-tion of New York State using the pocket guide,"New York State Labor Law Guide for Minors"and information obtained from the New York StateDepartment of Labor such as "Laws Governing theEmployment of Minors."

Directions1. To distribute the pocket guide, copy it back-to-back, cut at the appropriate places, and have thestudents fold at the appropriate places so they cankeep their guide as a pocket reference after thelesson.

2. Divide the class into small groups and allowtime for students to read the guide and otherpertinent information. They should discuss itscontents in small groups using the questions below

to stimulate discussion. Teachers should point outthat it is New York State employers who areresponsible for meeting these regulations.

3. Questions for discussion:

Did any of the information in thepocket guide surprise you? Why?

Were these regulations met by theemployers of the people you inter- .viewed?

Which regulations do you view aspositive?

Which do you view as negative?

Can you recommend any other laborlaws that should be added to thepocket guide?

Select a regulation and explain why itexists.

4. Have students review the Child Labor PreviewWorksheet from chapter 1. Students should com-pare their answers on that worksheet to the NewYork State Child Labor Regulations. They shoulddiscuss which of their answers would now changeand why.

73

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g sc

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on a

sch

ool d

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a w

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ay28

hou

rs to

tal i

n a

wee

k6

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a w

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at th

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t hou

rsfo

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bre

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and

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mer

vac

atio

ns.

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Yor

k is

the

only

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te in

the

natio

n th

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ses

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nded

wor

k ho

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on p

roof

of

satis

fact

ory

acad

emic

per

form

ance

.

76E

ST

CO

PY

AN

A

For

you

r sa

fety

The

re a

re c

erta

in o

ccup

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ns in

whi

ch m

inor

sar

e no

t allo

wed

to w

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If y

ou a

re u

nder

the

age

of 1

8, y

ou m

ay n

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eem

ploy

ed o

r as

sist

in:

Any

con

stru

ctio

n, d

emol

ition

, roo

fing

,or

exc

avat

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ope

ratio

n of

cir

cula

r sa

ws,

ban

dsaw

s,or

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llotin

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ears

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Wor

king

as

a he

lper

on

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otor

veh

icle

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pow

er-d

rive

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istin

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Background for Activity CBy grades 7 and 8, students need to begin to seelinks between school, work, and career opportuni-ties. Middle school is a good time to discoverabilities and interests and to begin to formulatecareer and educational plans.

Activity CEach student will complete and discuss the accom-panying Career Plan Worksheet. This will givestudents one of their first opportunities to thinksystematically about their future and how to getthere.

Directions1. Distribute the accompanying Career PlanWorksheet.

2. Have students work independently and answerthe questions as best they can. This could be donefor homework.

3. When the worksheet is completed, allow stu-dents to discuss their answers in small groups.Students should be encouraged to discuss theirCareer Plan Worksheet with their parents andguidance counselors.

4. Summarize their answers in a class discussion.


5. Additional discussion questions for groupdiscussion or for a written assignment:

How do the educational opportuni-ties available to you compare withthose of children who lived in the1800s?

How would you compare the workopportunities available to you and tothe children of the late 1800s?

What might life be like for somechildren if there were no child laborlaws?

Enrichment ActivitiesInvite speakers to discuss the skills needed toperform specific jobs. Sources for speakers include:

local unions-representatives who canexplain apprenticeship programsavailable and the type of workmembers do as well as the roleplayed by unions today. Look underlabor organizations in the yellowpages or contact the New York StateAFL-CIO, 100 S. Swan St., Albany,NY 12210.

New York State Department ofLabor; contact the local office.

professional organizations/associa-tions.

78

66 Forge to Fast Food ResourceChapter 4: ghe Resurgence of Child Labor

Career Plan Worksheet

1. Imagine yourself fifteen years from now. How old will you be? What career do you see yourself in? Why?

2. What kind of education do you need to enter your career? Why?

3. What kinds of skills do you need in order to be successful in that career?

4. List the jobs you could do as a teenager to help prepare yourself for your chosen career? (Think aboutwhat you would learn from jobs such as working in a restaurant, having a paper route, baby-sitting, lawn

work, etc.)

5. Select one of the jobs identified in question 4 and make a list of all the skills you could gain from that jobwhich would be necessary for your career choice.

79

Background for Activity DThe exploitation of child labor has been andremains an international issue, especially intoday's global economy. The abuses found in theUnited States are magnified in countries whichmake the consumer goods purchased by ourprotected youth, and offer few if any protectionsto its child workers. By researching this issuestudents can begin to seethrough the eyes ofchildren around the worldhow Americans areaffected by international economics and politics.

Activity DStudents will use the media center or library toresearch international child labor situations usingthe accompanying worksheet.

Directions1. Have students read a recent news article oninternational child labor to introduce them to theissue of child labor around the world. Manyarticles have been written on this subject. Oneexample is "Asia's Underage Labor," World PressReview, November 1993, p.41. Locate the countryor countries reported on a map. Have studentscompare and contrast the information in the articlewith what they know about child labor in theUnited States.

2. Distribute the accompanying Child LaborGlobal Investigations Worksheet to students. Bythe end of grade 8 they should know how toresearch information using periodicals in thelibrary. If not, this is an opportunity for studentsto learn.

3. After students have finished the worksheet,compile a master list of the places and problems ofchild labor they found. Locate these places on amap. Use the following questions for discussion:


How do other countries view childlabor?

Why do some nations feel it is not aproblem?

What should be the United Statespolicy toward countries which abusechild labor?

What federal and state policies shouldbe adopted toward American compa-nies that trade with and use manufac-turing facilities of these countries?

Should we have economic sanctionsagainst these countries?

How were economic sanctions onceused in our nation to fight the abusesof child labor?

Compare foreign examples of childlabor to what is hap_ pening in ourcountry today.

Vocabularycompensationadvocatesincidentalsservice fieldsretail fieldsfringe benefitsminimum wageexploitationmandatedindustrial homeworkdisability

80

68 Forge to Fast food! source

Chapter 4: The 9Zcsurgence of Child Labor

Child Labor Global Investigations

Use the library or media center to complete the following assignments on international child labor.

Name of source:

Location of source:

Name of country:

Date of publication:

Continent:

Description of the child labor problems found in this country:

Types of industries found there:

Laws or protections for children found there:

Trade unions or advocacy groups for children in this country:

How is this problem viewed by the United States? By the rest of the world?

What are your suggestions to solve this problem?

81


Suggested ResourcesBooks and Other Publications

By the Sweat and Toil of Children: The Use of ChildLabor in American Imports. Bureau of InternationalLabor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor, 1994.

Cole, Paul. Children at Work: Peril or Promise?Albany, NY: New York State AFL-CIO, 1991.

Flagler, John. The Labor Movement in the UnitedStates. New York: Lerner, 1990.

Glazer, Joe. We've Only Just Begun: A Century ofLabor Song. By Collector Records for the AmericanFederation of Teachers, 1982. Sound Recording.

Headden, Susan. "Made in The U.S.A." U.S.News & World Report, November 22, 1993.

How the New York State Labor Law Protects You.New York State Department of Labor, 1993.

Laws Governing the Employment of Minors. NewYork State Department of Labor, 1993.

Meltzer, Milton. Cheap Raw Material. New York:Viking, 1994.

Meltzer, Milton. Bread and Roses. New York:Knopf, 1991.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York:Doubleday, Doran, 1906.

Spargo, John. The Bitter Cry of the Children.Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968.

Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York:Penguin Books, 1978.

Working Papers: Facts for Teenagers Under 18.New York State Department of Labor, 1993.

MoviesHarlan County, U.S.A. Dir. Barbara Kopple. 1977.

C-103. (Documentary)Newsies. Dir. Kenny Ortega, with Christian Bale,

Luke Edwards, et al. 1992.Norma Rae. Dir. Martin Ritt, with Sally Field,

Ron Leibman, Beau Bridges, Pat Hingle, et al. 1979.C-113.

82


About the Authors

Richard B. Bernstein is adjunct associate professorat New York Law School and senior researchfellow of the Council for Citizenship Education,Russell Sage College. He has written or editedtwelve books on American constitutional history,including Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of theConstitution (with Kym S. Rice) and Into the ThirdCentury: The Congress, The Presidency, The SupremeCourt (with Jerome Agel). A graduate of AmherstCollege and the Harvard Law School, he is com-pleting work for a doctorate in American historyfrom New York University and has served on thefaculty at Rutgers University, Newark. He has beenco-curator of the New York Library's ConstitutionBicentennial Project, historian of the New YorkCity Commission on the Bicentennialof the Constitution, co-curator of the CongressBicentennial Project of the Library of Congress,and research director of the New York StateCommission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Con-stitution. He currently serves as assistant editorof The Papers of John Jay and is completing ahistory of the First Congress. He lives in Brooklyn,New York.

Kathleen Cotugno-Surin is an English teacher atNiskayuna Middle School, Niskayuna, New York.She has written curriculum and designed anintegrated English/social studies student portfolio.She developed an extensive unit on the Holocaustfor the middle level using historical literature andprimary source documents in an integrated ap-proach to the teaching of English.

Raymond A. Le Bel is a social studies teacher atNiskayuna Middle School, Niskayuna, New York.He has written curriculum for the Crossroadsproject, a federally funded educational partnershipbetween Niskayuna and The Sage Council forCitizenship Education to develop a comprehensiveand seamless American history curriculum for allgrade levels. Le Bel has also played an active role inNiskayuna's Middle School redesign.

Stephanie A. Schechter has been a social studiesteacher for twenty-three years. She currentlyteaches at Niskayuna Middle School, Niskayuna,New York, where she and Kathy Cotugno-Surindeveloped interdisciplinary units for social studiesand English. Schechter is co-editor for 1993-1996 ofthe Social Science Record, the journal of the NewYork State Council for the Social Studies. She wasa curriculum writer for the Crossroads curriculumand has been a member of the Labor Legacy Projectsince its inception.

83

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