CHILD LABOR

Exploited Resource

When the United States was a nation of farms, shops, and small mills, the use of children to supplement a family's income was so common that it attracted little notice and even less concern. The nation's rapid and dramatic transformation into an industrialized society, however, changed the environment in which children labored and the conditions to which they were exposed. At the same time, changes were taking place in the way the childhood years were perceived. More and more Americans began to regard children as a national resource that deserved society's protection and guidance. Reformers such as Jacob Riis, author of The Children of the Tenements (1903), and George Creel, who with the assistance of Denver's juvenile court judge, Ben Lindsey, wrote Children In Bondage (1913), helped broaden awareness of the conditions under which many of the nation's poor children were reared. Exhibitions of photographs of children employed in all sorts of economic pursuits, including those considered among the most dangerous and grueling, proved equally successful in pricking the public's conscience. In sharp contrast to these images of child workers worn down by the toil of their labor were the children of the middle class, who led quite different lives and whose progress was measured not in industrial output, but in ways increasingly seen as being vital to their development as productive citizens.

Early Regulatory Efforts

In the 1880s many states had enacted statutes placing restrictions on the use of child labor. These laws had drawn support from a cross section of the public, including associations of tradesmen, who feared that the growing use of child labor threatened their wages and job security. The exploitation of children as a ready and cheap source of labor, however, continued and remained a source of concern well into the next century. Conditions in the canning industry, the glass industry (where boys were hired to mold glass for hours on end before blistering-hot furnaces), anthracite mining (which used trapper and breaker boys to sort, by hand, the mined coal), and the textile industry began to attract the attention of reformers after 1900. In the South the threefold increase in the number of child laborers in the decade ending in 1900 aroused public sentiment for child labor laws and led to the creation of the Southern States National Child Labor Committee. Elsewhere, interest in improving the legislation that affected children and in pressing for its enforcement resulted in the formation in 1904 of the National Child Labor Committee. This committee, later chartered by Congress to promote the welfare of America's working children, investigated conditions in many states; it also served as a model for many local child labor committees, who, through mass mailings and intensive lobbying, were successful in securing legislation that placed restrictions on the use of child labor. It soon became apparent, however, that the effort to secure passage of legislation on a state-by-state basis was proving far less effective than expected. In 1910 it was estimated that there were still in excess of two million children employed in an industrial setting.

Absence of Uniformity

The problem stemmed from the fact that there was no uniformity among the child labor laws passed by the various states. Those states prepared to regulate child labor risked finding themselves in an unfavorable competitive position, since under the Constitution they were unable to protect their own markets or industries by excluding goods from states that allowed children to work at cheaper wages. The defeat of Sen. Albert Beveridge's effort to pass the first national anti-child-labor bill in 1907 convinced many advocates for children that the solution to the problem lay in a more aggressive program of education and cooperative effort among the states. In 1911 the U.S. Commission on Uniform Laws was encouraged to adopt a uniform child labor law, consisting of fifty sections and establishing minimum standards respecting the employment of children in certain industries and in work considered hazardous to their health. The following year Congress enacted the Children's Bureau Bill, which created a new office within the Department of Labor to serve local governments and state legislatures interested in regulating child labor. By 1915 it had become clear that this approach lacked the strength to overcome the resistance and influence of those who employed children in their mines and factories. These disparities among the laws of the different states were widely condemned as irrational and unjust and resulted in even louder and more pressing demands for federal intervention.

Owen-Keating Bill

With the aid of William Draper Lewis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a bill was drafted and introduced in the House by A. Mitchell Palmer (D-Pa.), the future attorney general, and in the Senate by Robert L. Owen (D-Ok.). The proposal moved quickly through the House, but, lacking the support of the president, who had deep reservations about the federal government's jurisdiction in such matters, made no progress in the Senate. The following year the bill was reintroduced by Owen in the Senate and Edward Keating, (D-Colorado) in the House, where it again passed without any difficulty. On this occasion, however, President Wilson, fearful of losing the political initiative to a newly reunited Republican Party and recognizing that such legislation had been one of the more popular planks in his party's platform, used his influence in the Senate to secure its passage. Members of both parties hailed the law as a measure of the nation's social and economic progress, a symbol of its inherent decency and humanitarian tendency. In actuality, the Keating-Owen Act did little more than prohibit shipment in interstate commerce of goods manufactured or processed by child labor. The act forbade the shipment between the states or in foreign commerce of any minerals where, within thirty days prior to such shipment, children sixteen years old or younger had been employed. It also forbade the shipment of any goods produced in factories that, within thirty days prior to shipment, had employed children younger than fourteen years old or where children between fourteen and sixteen years of age had worked more than eight hours a day or six days a week.

THE CHILDREN'S COURT

In 1914 the Children's Court of New York City prepared and distributed a report that offered a glimpse into an area of the law about which little had been known, juvenile delinquency and dependency. Progressive reformers were eager to make changes in society and seemed to take a particular interest in documenting the conditions they found. Respecting the treatment of children brought into the court system, they were able to determine that 25 percent of the children appearing before the court had been referred to it for petty offenses; 38 percent were in need of the court's protection because of the lack of proper care or the abuse to which they had been subjected; and 37 percent had been arrested for the commission of serious offenses such as burglary. Of the three thousand children included in the study, 35 percent were the product of "broken homes," where one parent was dead or the parents were separated or divorced. This percentage did not include children who were being raised in extreme poverty or by parents who were ill or alcoholic. The statistics thus compiled allowed the court to identify certain factors that, if addressed, could possibly reduce the numbers of children requiring the court's attention.

The authors of the study concluded that a child's first appearance in juvenile court was his most important one; susceptibility to the rehabilitative influence of the court rapidly diminished with each new appearance (20 percent of the 9,019 children arraigned in the previous year, it was noted, had been in court on prior occasions). Furthermore, children between the ages of fourteen and fifteen were members of the group most likely to engage in delinquent acts (at that age, it was theorized, boredom with school was at its peak and the children were too young to be involved in meaningful work). The study also found that peer pressure was a serious and sometimes decisive factor in whether a child became a delinquent—fully 54 percent of the children detained for the commission of a crime had been involved with others when apprehended.

Source:

Outlook (11 July 1914): 580.

Question of Constitutionality

No sooner had the act been passed than opposition to its enforcement appeared. Its first test came when Junius Parker, formerly the general counsel of the American Tobacco Company, was retained to represent Roland Dagenhart, who, together with his two children, ages thirteen and fifteen, was employed by the Fidelity Manufacturing Company in Charlotte, North Carolina. Following his employer's announcement that it intended to abide by the provisions of the Keating-Owen Act, Dagenhart sued to enjoin the company and the government from complying with and enforcing the act. Dagenhart was successful in obtaining his injunction, and the matter was taken up on appeal. The government's position in argument before the Supreme Court was prepared under the direction of Solicitor General John Davis, who also presented the case. Describing the social, economic, and medical costs associated with the employment of children, Davis argued that the public deplored child labor locally, but had been helpless to regulate it, because the problem was essentially national in scope. The states, he explained, were not free to take whatever action they might choose, because they were united under a Constitution providing for and protecting a national market. The problem, he insisted, would require a solution of broad application. Justice William R. Day, however, writing for the majority of the justices, concluded otherwise. There was nothing intrinsically harmful about the goods shipped in interstate commerce, he noted. On the contrary, the objections that had been raised concerned only the manner in which the goods were being produced. Under the Tenth Amendment, Congress had no authority to control the conditions of production in the individual states. Writing in dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. challenged the validity of the distinction Justice Day had made between the products of child labor and any other goods shipped in interstate commerce. Had not the Court recently upheld the right of Congress to prohibit the use of commerce for evil or immoral purposes? Holmes asked. For him, the Court's decision was based not on solid reasoning and precedent, but on its reluctance to extend federal power beyond those limits within which it had traditionally been confined.

Stunned Nation Reacts

The Court's ruling took the public by complete surprise. It did not, however, diminish public support for the Keating-Owen Act. The New York Times concluded that child labor, like the sale of alcoholic beverages, might better be left to the control of the local authorities; but many others regarded the decision as a blow to justice. Clearly, the Court remained unconvinced that child labor was in itself a social evil. Congress reacted angrily, acting, only months after the opinion had been issued, to amend the Revenue Bill of 1919 to include a prohibitive tax on the products of child labor, a provision later ruled invalid by the child labor tax case of 1922 (Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company). During World War I the War Labor Policies Board, under the direction of Felix Frankfurter, inserted a clause in all federal contracts making the provisions of the Keating-Owen Act mandatory for anyone selling equipment and other war matériel to the government. Before long, advocates of child labor reform discovered another alternative by which to achieve a national policy restricting child labor—an amendment to the Constitution. In 1924 an amendment was submitted to the states for consideration but was not ratified. Once again, conditions had begun to change. The introduction of new technologies and innovative manufacturing techniques encouraged the employment of better-motivated and better-educated workers. Hostility toward the use of child labor continued to grow, but the passage of higher state mandatory educational requirements and vigorous enforcement of truancy laws made employing children increasingly burdensome and uncertain. The 1920 census reflected this situation by recording a decline in child labor, a decline that continued into the 1930s with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which, along with establishing minimum wage and hour standards nationwide, discouraged the employment of minors. By setting minimum wages, it decreased incentives to hire children.

Sources:

Editorials, Outlook, 94 (29 January 1910): 231-233; 99 (21 October 1911): 401-402; 105 (27 September 1913): 151;

Robert Schnayerson, The Illustrated History of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Abrams, 1986);

John E. Semonche, Charting the Future: The Supreme Court Responds to a Changing Society, 1890-1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

Child Labor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Child labor is work done by persons under age eighteen (or younger, depending on applicable national law) that is harmful to them for being abusive, exploitive, hazardous, or otherwise contrary to their best interests. It is a subset of a larger class of children’s work, some of which may be compatible with children’s best interests (variously expressed as beneficial, benign, or harmless children’s work). Broadly defined, child labor recognizes that childhood is a culturally specific concept and that the particular contexts within which children’s work is assigned and organized tend to determine both its costs and its benefits (Ennew, Myers, and Plateau 2005). While in most cultures some work by children is viewed as healthy for maturation and socialization, child labor is not. It is understood to violate human rights law and policy.

The number of children who are engaged in child labor globally is uncertain. The answer to this question varies according to activity, place, society, and other factors. It is estimated that in 2007 there exist some 250 million child workers worldwide (predominantly in developing countries), with perhaps as many as 75 percent of them working in agriculture and related activities, most of the remainder in the nonagricultural informal sector, and only a small portion in the formal sector. Yet unknown is the exact percentage of these working children who experience child labor specifically.

It nevertheless is widely accepted that large numbers of the world’s working children toil in appalling conditions, are ruthlessly exploited to perform dangerous jobs with little or no pay, and are thus often made to suffer severe physical and emotional abuse—in brick factories, carpet-weaving centers, fishing platforms, leather tanning shops, mines, and other hazardous places, often as cogs in the global economy; in domestic service, vulnerable to sexual and other indignities that escape public scrutiny and accountability; on the streets as prostitutes, forced to trade in sex against their will; and as soldiers in life-threatening conflict situations. Working long hours, often beaten or otherwise abused, and commonly trafficked from one country to another, their health is severely threatened, their very lives endangered. Many, if they survive, are deformed and disabled before they can mature physically, mentally, or emotionally. Typically, they are unable to obtain the education that can liberate and improve their lives, a condition that is deemed generally to constitute child abuse in and of itself (Bissell 2005; Bissell and Shiefelbein 2003).

The causes of child labor, while steeped in culture, are linked to economics—primarily poverty, necessitating that children contribute to family income. Likewise, the reduction and eradication of child labor is tied fundamentally to economics. In North America and western Europe, for example, major economically based trends (e.g., industrial development, higher wages, technological innovation, more accessible and prolonged education, lower birth rates, the entry of women into the workforce) best explain, along with state regulation and changing popular ideas about childhood, most of the long-term declines in child labor. Labor movements and other forms of social action also have played an important role, shaping public perceptions and values about children and child rearing.

Because of this variety and complexity, economists and other experts point out that effective policies to combat child labor require flexibility to accommodate the many and diverse factors involved in its reduction and eradication. They especially emphasize the critical importance of presenting poor families and children with economic opportunities and incentives that can free them from having to rely on child labor for survival (Basu 1999; Basu and Tzannatos 2003; Anker 2000, 2001; Grootaert and Patrinos 1999).

Human rights discourse and activism—especially since the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—have likewise become influential in combating child labor, advancing the case for at least minimal standards of socioeconomic and political justice to hasten its elimination. Increasingly child labor is understood to be a multidimensional human rights problem in violation of a broad panoply of entitlements with which all members of the human family are endowed (Weston and Teerink 2005a, 2005b). The Convention on the Rights of the Child ensures that children specifically, including working children, are not overlooked in this regard. Thus does Article 3(1) stipulate that “in all actions concerning children … the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”; and thus, to this end, does Article 32(1) recognize “the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral, or social development.”

While poverty and other economic factors will continue as driving forces behind child labor, a human rights approach to the individual child and society—holistic and multifaceted—is indispensable to holding the world community and its member states accountable in eradicating the phenomenon (Weston and Teerink 2005a, 2005b). Recognizing child labor as a human rights problem signals that notions of human dignity are central to all aspects of a working child’s life and to the means by which child labor is reduced or eliminated. In this setting, states, multilateral international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and business enterprises are expected to act affirmatively to guarantee that children’s rights are not violated within either the work in which they are engaged or the means by which that work is controlled. In addition, children must be informed of their rights so as to be able to engage their full participation in the realization of their rights. To assert a right of a child to be free from abusive, exploitative, and hazardous work bespeaks duty, not optional—often capricious—benevolence.

SEE ALSO Children’s Rights; Human Rights

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anker, Richard. 2000. The Economics of Child Labour: A Framework for Measurement. International Labour Review 139 (3): 257-280.

Anker, Richard. 2001. Child Labour and Its Elimination: Actors and Institutions. In Child Labour: Policy Options, eds. Kristoffel Lieten and Ben White, 85-102. Amsterdam: Askant.

Basu, Kaushik. 1999. International Labor Standards and Child labor. Challenge 42 (5): 82-93.

Basu, Kaushik, and Zafiris Tzannatos. 2003. The Global Child Labor Problem: What Do We Know and What Can We Do? The World Bank Economic Review 17 (2): 147-173.

Bissell, Susan L. 2005. Earning and Learning: Tensions and Compatibility. In Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, ed. Burns H. Weston, 377-399. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Bissell, Susan, and Ernesto Shiefelbein. 2003. Education to Combat Abusive Child Labor. Washington, DC: USAID Bureau for Economic Growth, Culture, Agriculture, and Trade.

Ennew, Judith, William E. Myers, and Dominique Pierre Plateau. 2005. Defining Child Labor as if Human Rights Really Matter. In Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, ed. Burns H. Weston, 27-54. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Grootaert, Christiaan, and Henry Anthony Patrinos, eds. 1999. The Policy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

United Nations. Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/pdf/crc.pdf.

Weston, Burns H., and Mark B. Teerink. 2005a. Rethinking Child Labor: A Multidimensional Problem. In Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, ed. Burns H. Weston, 3-25. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Weston, Burns H., and Mark B. Teerink. 2005b. Rethinking Child Labor: A Multifaceted Human Rights Solution. In Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, ed. Burns H. Weston, 235-266. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Burns H. Weston

William E. Myers

CHILD LABOR

CHILD LABOR. Before the twentieth century, child labor was rampant. Knowledge of its extent prior to 1870 is fragmentary because child labor statistics before then are not available, but juvenile employment probably existed in the spinning schools established early in the colonies. As the nineteenth century advanced, child labor became more widespread. The census of 1870 reported the employment of three-quarters of a million children between ten and fifteen years of age. From 1870 to 1910, the number of children reported as gainfully employed continued to increase steadily before the American public took notice of its ill effects.

Early Struggles and Successes

Among the earliest efforts to deal with the problem of child labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were those of organized labor. For example, the Knights of Labor conducted a campaign for child labor legislation in the 1870s and 1880s that resulted in the enactment of many state laws. The American Federation of Labor consistently spoke out against child labor as a cause of downward pressure on wages and campaigned for the "family wage" that would allow for a man to be the sole breadwinner. Nonetheless, during the nineteenth century, working children, although hired for their docility, took part in strikes and occasionally even led their elders in walkouts. The fledgling industrial unions in the early twentieth century organized the youngest workers, and there was even a union of child workers: the Newsboys and Bootblacks' Protective Union, chartered by the Cleveland AFL. The union's purpose was "to secure a fair compensation for our labor, lessen the hours of labor" and "educate the members in the principles of trade unionism so when they develop into manhood they will at all times struggle for the full product of their labor."

As opposition to child labor grew, the campaign against child labor—although an uphill battle—began to score victories. Conditions in the canning industry, the glass industry, anthracite mining, and other industries began to attract considerable attention at the turn of the century. In the South, a threefold rise in number of child laborers during the decade ending in 1900 aroused public sentiment for child labor laws. In the North, insistence on stronger legislation and better enforcement led to the formation of the National Child Labor Committee in 1904. This committee, chartered by Congress in 1907 to promote the welfare of America's working children, investigated conditions in various states and industries and spearheaded the push for state legislation with conspicuous success. The 1920 census reflected a decline in child labor that continued in the 1930s.

Federal Regulation

The backwardness of certain states and the lack of uniformity of state laws led to demands for federal regulation. Early efforts were unsuccessful. In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922), the U.S. Supreme Court set aside attempts at congressional regulation. Child labor reformers, nevertheless, began to push for a child labor amendment to the Constitution. In 1924, such an amendment was adopted by Congress and submitted to the states, but by 1950 only twenty-four had ratified it.

The New Deal finally brought significant federal regulation. The Public Contracts Act of 1936 set the minimum age for employment at sixteen for boys and at eighteen for girls in firms supplying goods under federal contract. A year later, the Beet Sugar Act set the minimum age at fourteen for employment in cultivating and harvesting sugar beets and cane. Far more sweeping was the benchmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FSLA). For agriculture, it set the minimum working age at fourteen for employment outside of school hours and at sixteen for employment during school hours. For nonagricultural work in interstate commerce, sixteen was the minimum age for employment during school hours, and eighteen for occupations designated hazardous by the secretary of labor. A major amendment to the FSLA in 1948 prohibited children from performing farm work when schools were in session in the district where they resided. There were no other important changes in the FSLA until 1974, when new legislation prohibited work by any child under age twelve on a farm covered by minimum-wage regulations (farms using at least five-hundred days of work in a calendar quarter).

Contemporary Problems

Despite the existence of prohibiting legislation, considerable child labor continues to exist, primarily in agriculture. For the most part, the workers are children of migrant farm workers and the rural poor. Child labor and school-attendance laws are least likely to be enforced on behalf of these children. This lack of enforcement contributes, no doubt, to the fact that the educational attainment of migrant children is still half that of the rest of the population. Beyond agriculture, child labor has emerged, or sometimes reemerged, in a number of areas. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been efforts to relax the minimum-age laws for doing certain kinds of work. The most notable challenge has come from Amish families, who have opened small manufacturing shops in response to the reduced availability of farmland and have sought exemptions on the basis of religious freedom to employ their children in these shops. In addition, the employment of children in sweatshops that produce clothes for major labels has returned to American cities. Also, children and young teenagers selling

candy for purportedly charitable purposes have been overworked and exploited by the companies that hire them in work crews. Children have also remained a part of the "illegal economy," forced into child prostitution and child pornography.

Even work performed by teenagers between fourteen and eighteen—regarded as benign and beneficial long after most work by children under fourteen was abolished—has been reexamined and found problematic. When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment (1986), by Ellen Greenberger, has linked teen work to greater teen alcohol use and found that more than twenty hours of work per week can be harmful. The danger of workplace injury is far greater for often-inexperienced teenagers than for older workers, and many common teen work sites such as restaurants become especially dangerous when teenagers are asked to perform tasks (such as operating food processing machines) that are legally prohibited to them. Other workplaces offer unique dangers, for example, convenience stores where holdups at gunpoint occur, and pizza delivery companies whose fast-delivery promises encourage unsafe driving. Finally, the career-building role of teen work may be overestimated, except when linked to internships or vocational education.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fyfe, Alec. Child Labour. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1989.

Greenberger, Ellen. When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Hamburger, Martin. "Protection from Participation As Deprivation of Rights." New Generation. 53, no. 3 (summer 1971): 1–6.

Hobbs, Sandy, Jim McKechnie, and Michael Lavalette. Child Labor: A World History Companion. Santa Clara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1999.

Taylor, Ronald B. Sweatshops in the Sun: Child Labor on the Farm. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Working America's Children to Death. Washington, D.C.: American Youth Work Center and National Consumers League, 1990.

Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Susan RothBreitzer

See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Child Labor Tax Case ; Children's Rights ; Fair Labor Standards Act ; Labor ; Labor Legislation and Administration .

Child Labor. Child labor, long a feature of American rural life, grew enormously and changed character with the industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On farms and in coal mines, on city streets and in tenements, in mills and canneries, almost two million children, some as young as five and six years old, worked long hours for a pittance, often under harsh conditions.

In response, some people began to fight the evil of child labor. In 1901, Edgar Gardner Murphy, a clergyman, organized the Alabama Child Labor Committee, the first organization of its kind in the United States. A year later, Florence Kelley, Lillian Wald, and Robert Hunter created the New York Child Labor Committee. In the early twentieth century, twenty‐eight states restricted child labor by law, but most of the laws were vaguely worded, full of exemptions, and laxly enforced. To achieve better enforcement of these laws on a national basis, reformers in 1904 created the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC, under the leadership of such reformers as Felix Adler, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Alexander McKelway, and Owen R. Lovejoy, led the fight against child labor.

By 1909, despite further success in securing state regulation of child labor, the NCLC sought federal legislation. Despite vigorous opposition from various groups, Congress in 1916 passed, and President Woodrow Wilson signed into law, the Keating‐Owen Child Labor Act, the first federal law addressing the issue. Two years later, however, in Hammer v. Dagenhart, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the measure unconstitutional as an unwarranted exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce granted to the federal government in the Constitution. When Congress quickly passed a second federal child‐labor statute, using its taxing power, the Supreme Court again invalidated that measure as well.

For the reformers, the only remaining course appeared to be a constitutional amendment. Winning broad public support, the proposed amendment sailed through both houses of Congress in 1924 by large majorities. Opponents, however, organized an aggressive counterattack, led by big business (especially the National Association of Manufacturers) in alliance with conservative organizations and publications. Some Catholic church leaders, moreover, opposed the amendment as a threat to parental rights and parochial education. Falling eight states short of ratification, the proposed amendment died.

In June 1938, however, Congress passed, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which effectively prohibited child labor. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the act in February 1941. Even before the 1938 law, however, the use of machines on farms and in factories had diminished the need for unskilled manual labor. As a result, by the 1950s child labor had been largely eliminated in America.

At the end of the twentieth century, however, the practice reappeared. An influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, including illegal aliens, gave new life to tenement sweatshops; the fast‐food industry employed masses of young workers. Simultaneously, a rise in both school‐dropout rates and juvenile delinquency prompted many people to promote paid employment for youngsters as a positive good. Thus, despite legislative and judicial victories, the issue of child labor remained troubling and unresolved.
See also Immigration; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Walter I. Trattner , Crusade for the Children: The National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America, 1970.

Walter I. Trattner

child labor use of the young as workers in factories, farms, and mines. Child labor was first recognized as a social problem with the introduction of the factory system in late 18th-century Great Britain. Children had formerly been apprenticed (see apprenticeship ) or had worked in the family, but in the factory their employment soon constituted virtual slavery, especially among British orphans. This was mitigated by acts of Parliament in 1802 and later.

Similar legislation followed on the European Continent as countries became industrialized. Although most European nations had child labor laws by 1940, the material requirements necessary during World War II brought many children back into the labor market. Legislation concerning child labor in other than industrial pursuits, e.g., in agriculture, has lagged.

In the Eastern and Midwestern United States, child labor became a recognized problem after the Civil War, and in the South after 1910. Congressional child labor laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1918 and 1922. A constitutional amendment was passed in Congress in 1924 but was not approved by enough states. The First Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a minimum age limit of 18 for occupations designated hazardous, 16 for employment during school hours for companies engaged in interstate commerce, and 14 for employment outside school hours in nonmanufacturing companies. In 1941 The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the constitutional authority to pass this act.

Nearly all member nations of the International Labor Organization (ILO) regulate the employment of children in industry, and most also regulate commercial work; some nations regulate work in the street trades, while a few control agricultural and household work. Despite such regulation attempts, as many as 26% of all children between the ages of 5 and 14 (an estimated 246 million children) were engaged in economic activity in 2005, with the highest percentage in developing nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Not all such work is considered child labor, but some 186 million children were estimated to be involved in child labor as defined under international agreements. The 1973 ILO Minimum Age Convention, banning any form of child labor, has been ratified by 117 nations. In 1999, ILO members unanimously approved a treaty banning any form of child labor that endangers the safety, health, or morals of children, but the treaty covered such universally objectionable forms of work as slavery, forced labor, child prostitution, criminal activity, and forced military recruitment and could be seen as a step backward from the 1973 treaty. The treaty was also criticized for permitting voluntary enlistment in the military by persons under the age of 18.

Bibliography: See W. Trattner, Crusade for the Children (1970); also annual reports of the National Child Labor Committee.

Child Labor See Hammer v. Dagenhart.