Child labor footnote
As we head into the three-day weekend that is the unofficial swan song of summer, our focus should rightly center on safety and celebration. The AAA reminds us that Labor Day is one of the deadliest holidays for travel, and throngs of Americans and Arkansans will be on the roadways between now and Monday.
Who knows whether the cooler-than-average August portends a chillier autumn and harsher winter, but this weekend marks the season’s closing with homage to water, boating and swimming. Whether by pool, river or lake, the September sunshine will be soaked up in one last commemorative ritual before the rigors of school and football retake center stage.
Getting a day off in honor of hard work has been a grand national gesture to employees everywhere for decades now. America has always been a country of individual industry and ingenuity; our free-enterprise system, with all its flaws, is still the envy of the world.
Nobody is old enough to remember the first Labor Day parade in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882, or the prevailing working conditions of that time.
History classes in school do a good job summarizing the rise of labor unions in answer to abuses resulting from the opportunities and demands of the Industrial Revolution. The rancorous discord between management and labor caused strikes and work stoppages at a level we can scarcely comprehend today, and the brutal, bloody tactics deployed against workers are shocking by modern standards.
Labor Day recognizes the myriad efforts, expended many times at risk of life and limb, behind reforming work-force practices and workplace environments.
But one often overlooked and most forgotten aspect of industrial age exploitation, perhaps partly because it’s simply so universally inconceivable now, is that of child labor.
From colonial times, working children alongside adults in farms and trades was accepted as normal. There was near-universal support of the notion that working was good for young children and the country. The focus on child productivity held sway with both Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians: Children served ably as farm hands to further the former’s agrarian vision, and equally so as factory workers to advance the industrial ideals of the latter.
With the boom of manufacturing technology and techniques following the Civil War came even sharper demand for workers, and children continued to fit the bill and fill positions. Long hours (10-12 daily) and workweeks (always six and sometimes seven days) were the norm for children and adults alike.
Rampant lying about ages made underreporting of child labor the norm; even so, with acknowledged understatement of the true statistics, the number of children in the U.S. work force doubled between 1870 and 1900.
At the turn of the century at least one in five American children age 16 and under was in the work force. In some industries, such as Southern cotton mills, 25 percent of the workers were children, and as many as half of them were younger than 12.
Imagine, if you can, primaryschool-age children working every day, all day in demanding jobs. Imagine, also, the often deplorable conditions in which they worked: dark and vaporous mines, sweatshops and unventilated factories, sweltering mills and textile plants.
The legal theory originally brought over from England regarded children as property, and thus off-limits for most governmental regulation. Various states began enacting child-labor reforms and regulations in the late 1800s, however, and by the early 20th century the issue had become a matter of national debate.
As with all issues, some states were leaders and others stragglers, and Congress sought to intercede by enacting legislation to regulate commerce and impose taxes on goods produced by workers under the ages of 14 and 16.
Unfortunately, the Constitution granted Congress no such authority, and the Supreme Court struck such laws down.
Frustrated, the child-labor reform movement leaders decided go over the justices’ heads. They succeeded in proposing in 1924 a constitutional Amendment giving Congress the power to “limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.”
The proposed amendment passed the House of Representatives in April 1924 and cleared the Senate in early June, after which it was presented to the states for ratification.
There is a historical footnote here, which should make all citizens and denizens of the Natural State hold their heads a little higher this holiday weekend.
The first state to step forward, enthusiastically embrace the cause, and ratify the Child Labor Amendment— before the end of June, no less—was Arkansas.
It would be more than six months later before another state, California, voted for ratification. Over the next 12 years, 28 states would ratify the amendment, but by then most states had enacted child labor laws, and New Deal legislation was clearing constitutional hurdles. Specifically, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 essentially opened the door to limitations on and regulations of child labor that the amendment sought to address.
So, as summer winds down, indulge in a little Arkansas pride. Our state was ahead of the times on a very important issue that’s central to the holiday we celebrate Monday.