I was a child laborer
The Gist: Capitalism empowered children not to labor, but many would still benefit
Without a government permission slip, I worked construction sites before I was 14 (doing very unskilled labor) for money. I ran lemonade stands throughout my childhood - and dearly remember the very first time I did, for I excitedly told my father when he got home about how much money I made and he inquired what I paid for my supplies. Nothing! I had taken them from the pantry. My father took his costs out of my revenue and I learned what a profit was. One summer in middle school, I found my best friend at a camp that banned caffeine and sugar: he ran a business that provided the illicit goods and I procured customers; we split the profits.
Back in school, I answered all the questions in our history textbook and a friend sold the result as a study guide until we were shut down. I did still other tasks for cash but I also interned for free for profit-making enterprises, including a professional fundraiser. All these things enjoy questionable legality and I hope that the statute of limitations has passed to spare the employers and customers for whom I continue to be grateful!
I am not alone. Thomas Sowell notes
“There was a certain irony in a recent news story about the government cracking down on Sears because the department store chain was accused of having hired some workers who were not quite old enough to be working, according to the child labor laws. Richard Sears, who founded the company, was younger than these workers when he began working. So was Aaron Montgomery Ward… John Jacob Astor, who would eventually become the richest man in America, left home and began working at lowly jobs as a teenager. So did future Wall Street financier Jay Gould, future steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, future oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, future founder of the American automobile industry Henry Ford and future radio pioneer David Sarnoff, who created RCA and NBC.”
Doug French continues, in a review of the Case against Adolescence:
“Louis Braille, if he were a blind kid today, would be cooped up in special-needs classes. Fortunately, he lived in the early 1800s and had perfected the Braille system by the time he was 15 years old. Samuel Colt invented the multiround, revolving-head pistol when he was 16. Edgar Allen Poe had his first book published at 18, including poems he had written at age 12 and 13.”
The public school teacher and dissident John Taylor Gatto insists:
“if David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do.”
Figure 1. A Senator in the early 20th century complained that social workers would have "taken Abraham Lincoln from his parents' care. ... Some committee ... would have gone down there and said, 'What, allow that child to lie down there and eat corn pone and hoecake by the hearth; he can not possibly amount to anything; we want to take him down to the headquarters, where we are drawing salaries for taking care of that kind of people."
There are nearly 1.7 million Girl Scouts - as young as 5 years old - and everyone delights in the opportunity to buy their cookies as they come to your door or volunteer their time outside a grocery store. Admittedly, plenty of selling is done by parents. But the program is hailed as an American tradition that builds entrepreneurialism, business ethics, money management, etc. Robin Hansen explains the quirk of child labor law:
“Kids work hard at school, housework, sports, practicing music, supporting clubs, etc. and none of this cruelty is prevented by ‘child labor’ laws. Such laws only prevent getting paid to work; they don’t even stop kids interning for free. If child labor laws come from our revulsion at miserable kids, why are there no laws preventing tiger moms from making their kids practice music for hours straight without a bathroom break, or against parents who make their older kids work full time taking care of younger kids? If job safety is our worry, why not just regulate that more directly?”
Figure 2. The union struggle of our time is organized child labor - time to fight for not just fair wages but any wages! Fight for 15 (year olds)! Child workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chores!
Of course, some kids can get legally paid based on exemptions from the governing 1938 law. Newspaper delivery boys, for instance. Warren Buffett, my father, and countless others got value out of the profession before the internet became predominant - now the boys who could be up at dawn working are snoozing. Can they really not deliver Instacart groceries? (Note, unlike ever before, their location can be constantly tracked!) Actors and influencers can get paid - possibly because of the popularity of Shirley Temple - and as a result, our children only have famous “role models” in a small, peculiar profession rather than countless peers working valued tasks in their local community.
Jeffrey Tucker notes that “Kids under the age of 16 are forbidden to earn income in remunerative employment outside a family business. If dad is a blacksmith, you can learn to pound iron with the best of 'em. But if dad works for a law firm, you are out of luck.” Importantly, you could not go work for another family business. And, of course, “federal law allows states to allow kids to work for a state or local government at any age, and there are no hourly restrictions.” I as a teen worked for money for the U.S. House of Representatives (who I’ll note exempts itself from OSHA).
Figure 3. Of course, there is one type of family business that is happy to employ non-blood relations without consideration of the law.
Agricultural work remains the major exemption, without which the original federal law would have failed and which, at one time, covered a large portion of children who got valuable work experience - but now, as agriculture has gotten so productive and concentrated - employs fewer and fewer. (Though my wife feels compelled to note that plenty of kids husk corn in her native Midwest.)
But let’s go back a ways. Richard Fulmer argues that “Throughout most of human history, child labor wasn’t a ‘problem,’ it was simply what children had to do to survive. Only when capitalism magnified the ability of one person to produce enough to support a family was child labor no longer a necessity.” But capitalism did something even before then: Robert Hessen argues that “the introduction of the factory system offered a livelihood, a means of survival, to tens of thousands of children who would not have lived to be youths in the pre-capitalistic eras. The factory system led to a rise in the general standard of living, to rapidly falling urban death rates and decreasing infant mortality—and produced an unprecedented population explosion.” Specifically, England’s population rose from six million in 1750 to 12 million in 1820 - “The proportion of those born in London dying before five years of age” fell from 74.5 percent in 1730-49 to 31.8 percent in 1810-29.”
Ludwig von Mises notes:
“The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.”
Bill Kauffmann tells the story as we move across the pond. In the 1910s, 18% of American children were "gainfully employed," 72% of those on a farm, 85% of those for their families. What happened next is quite the legal yarn.
Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate commerce of products produced by child labor… and the Supreme Court struck it down (because Congress’ true intention was to interfere with state police powers). Then Congress passed a law taxing products produced by child labor… and the Supreme Court struck it down. So Congress then passed, with the necessary double chamber 2/3 majority, a constitutional amendment to finally eliminate the scourge of child labor - and sent it to the states for ratification.
A popular revolt ensued. Clarence Martin, the president of the American Bar Association [!] cried out that this was "a communistic effort to nationalize children, making them primarily responsible to the government instead of to their parents. It strikes at the home. It appears to be a definite positive plan to destroy the Republic." When the amendment went to a referendum in Massachusetts, "The Citizens Committee to Protect Our Homes and Children, Harvard president [!] A. Lawrence Lowell at the helm, warned of Congress interfering "in the discipline of every household. [It will] take from parents the right and duty to educate and guide their children."
A publication called the Woman Patriot insisted:
"We are oppressed with white collarism. It is absurd that we Ameri-cans, who are supposed to be a democracy, have a contempt for manual work. . . . We have been a resourceful, self-reliant, energetic people, and I contend that this amendment would result in the practical-minded children becoming idlers and loafers, and by the implied stigma on work in this amendment there would be more overcerebralized young intellectuals, from whom the radicals are recruited and who are the curse of society."
And, indeed, the children themselves had something to say. “Inspector Helen Todd asked five hundred children in twenty Chicago factories, ‘If your father had a good job, and you didn't have to work, which would rather do - go to school or work in a factory?’ To Miss Todd's horror, 412 chose the factory.”
Opposition was most strongly grounded in a defense of the principles outlined in the 4th Amendment, a desire to ensure that government agents would not have a free hand to show up at any house at any time. The British Prime Minister William Pitt once eloquently put it that "The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail - the roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter - but the King of England can not enter; all his forces may not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”
The amendment failed. And yet that didn’t ultimately matter. In the 1930s, banning child labor by statute was just one of FDR’s many constitutional innovations given approval by a tamed Supreme Court. But Tucker notes that “By 1930, only 6.4 percent of kids between the ages of 10 and 15 were actually employed, and 3 out of 4 of those were in agriculture” - hence, to get the law, agriculture had to be exempted. What really happened, Robert Hessen insists, is that “Child labor was not ended by legislative fiat; child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive—when the income of their parents became sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of those children were not legislators or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and financiers.” In other words, the law followed the decline rather than caused it (and indeed left the largest part of contemporary child employment untouched.)
Importantly, not everywhere around the world is at the American stage of prosperity (certainly not now, not even America of 1938). As Benjamin Powell relates, “Children work because their families are desperately poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives,” - and he’s not besmirching school. Children might wind up working in less remunerative agriculture - or, as was found in Bangladesh, prostitution. Fulmer offers the comparison: “Child labor laws weren’t enacted in the United States until they were largely unnecessary because relatively few children worked. When similar laws were passed in countries where productivity had not yet risen sufficiently, children continued to work because the only other option was starvation. Unfortunately, with no recourse to the law, they were exploited far worse than before.” Caplan concludes: “It’s sad that some parents are so poor that they can’t give their kids a decent childhood. But banning child labor doesn’t make those families any less poor.”
But just because teenagers don’t have to work does not mean they should not. As Sowell notes:
“Labor unions have always supported and promoted laws that keep young people out of the work force, where they would otherwise compete for jobs with the unions' own members. Since these young people have to be warehoused someplace while they are kept idle, unions have also been big supporters of compulsory attendance laws that keep teenagers in school, even when they are learning nothing except irresponsibility and self-indulgent mischief-making… At one time, child labor laws were used to stop youngsters whose ages had not yet reached double digits from working in exhausting and dangerous factories and mines. Today, they are used to keep big healthy teenagers from handling pieces of paper in air-conditioned offices.”
Figure 4. Unclear how the FBI should prioritize this versus investigations into parents protesting local education policies like mask mandates
The law, encrusted in amber, simply doesn’t accommodate the range of professional opportunities that those approaching adulthood might enjoy. What made newspaper delivery and acting (the latter notorious for exploitation) okay but no other possibility now? Why do we trust parents who run their own businesses to look after their children but not trust parents to negotiate alternative labor arrangements? If you don’t trust parents, if you think, as Hansen relates
“we must protect kids from their parents, since job wages make it easier for parents to gain from kid suffering. But the conflict between kids and parents is just as strong when kids do housework, care for younger siblings, or work at the parent’s farm or store. There’s also a big risk of parents pushing kids to work at sports, music, acting, etc. more for parent than kid benefits – this may be a bigger problem than parents stealing kid wages. Working kids at least get work experience; what do overworked kid violinists get?”
Empowering families means allowing them the freedom to introduce their children to the dignity of work. Let’s not prevent modern equivalents of paperboys (or make criminals out of them and their employers). Hold down (or eliminate) the minimum wage to ensure teens are not frozen out of the marketplace. College admissions departments could make it easier on poor families by treating employment on par with other extracurriculars (or, heck, even preferred - notably, state legislatures could require this of public universities). The right test-case - in which an over-zealous federal government goes after a perfectly innocent teen work situation - could very well call into question federal law. For better and worse, child labor regulations are often lightly enforced, especially at the margins, but that simply invites confusion about what can actually be done. And as ever, states should continue to practice their autonomy by crafting their own child labor guidelines that reflect the needs and realities of the communities they govern. In the meanwhile, for your own family, lean into what is available! There’s a lot more room to take advantage of, and my wife informs me that Iowa could use the huskers.
Figure 5. Neither focus exclusively on child labor but each has an excellent essay about the history of child labor. Ironically, Ayn Rand’s contributions to Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal are the weakest. The strongest two are Hessen’s on child labor and Alan Greenspan’s on the gold standard (which he never repudiated!). Kauffman is a superb stylist and in this book he skillfully profiles the opponents of popular causes (child labor laws, women’s suffrage, the interstate highway system, a standing army). His essay on child labor from that book can also be found at this link.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, forward it to a friend: know any potential employers of teenagers? How about any parents or grandparents? Or perhaps someone who was once a child themselves?
For more, check out my archive of writings, including Why homeschool?
If you’ve received this email from a friend and would like more, sign up at www.grantreadsbooks.com or shoot me an email at grant@grantstarrett.com with the subject “Subscribe.” I read over 100 non-fiction books a year (history, business, self-management) and share a review (and terrible cartoons) every couple weeks with my friends. Really, it’s all about how to be a better American and how America can be better. Look forward to having you on board!