Hey, everybody, this is Joshuam. For this week's select, I've chosen our August twenty twenty one episode on child Labor. It's one of those rare episodes that contains a mention of an episode that we should do that we actually did the Newsy Strike, So it's significant for that reason. And it is a fairly bleak episode, as you might guess, but it also goes to show how far we've come.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there hovering around in the digital weird audio ether and.
This is stuff you should know.
This is gonna be a good, uplifting, fun one bouncy light one.
I think so.
And it's you know, hot off the presses from our uh my daughter just wrote this episode for us.
Yeah, yeah, in record time too. I was impressed. He didn't pay her, did you no?
But it's funny. I went to look up.
You know, I've talked before about, you know the fact that I started working when I was thirteen at a barbecue restaurant and minimum wage when I started working, was three dollars and thirty five cents an hour.
Wow, we how far we've come at Yeah, not far.
They've doubled it here at past whatever forty years.
Isn't that nuts, dude?
Yeah, and you know we'll get to that.
But I have a list of kind of where we ended up with minimum wage along the years. But yeah, JJ's barbecue three thirty five an hour, baby.
Wow, that's pretty great. My first job was even.
Younger than that.
I was like nine or ten when I was a paper boy.
Yeah.
I mean I couldn't have made more than because I was. It's not like I was working every night. I was working weekends. I probably made like less than fifty dollars a week.
But I mean, you're thirteen. What were you spending on thirteen?
And like a good clean Christian kid, you weren't spending that on anything.
Archie comics. It buys a lot of Archie comics, Yeah.
It does, Yes, it does, although they have a lot of variations, so you could easily spend fifty dollars a week on Archie comics.
Back then, though those things were cheap. I was living high on the hog, but thirteen.
So it sounds like a man. So our buddy Dave helped us out with this one. Dave Rus and he makes a really good point that you and I sitting around talking about, you know, you made fifty.
Bucks a week.
I was a paper boy, like whatever stresses and troubles that we ran into post you know, nineteen seventy something. As far as our first jobs go when we were younger, that does not qualify as child labs. That's not really what we're talking about here today.
It's called the kid having a job exactly.
It's called you just stop your griping right now, because there are actual kids out there who are like real deal child laborers who work in like dangerous conditions for little to no pay, who don't get to play, who may not socialize with other kids their age.
They may live and.
Work in a mining camp with nothing but adults and grown ups, like like they would kill for you know, a JJ's barbecue job.
Basically, yeah, and this is a good time to be talking about that in particular because this is twenty twenty one, is the International Year for the Elimination of Child labor. And as you'll see throughout this episode, we've made a lot of strides here in the US, but like you said, it's not not that way everywhere, and it should be.
And I should say it's probably a little off the mark to say that a child laborer would kill for a better job.
They would probably kill to just not have.
To work at all in general, and just to get to.
Be a kid.
And I think ultimately, for people who are activists against child labor, that's the goal is to not like get better working conditions for six year olds, it's to like just make six year olds not have to work any longer. And we'll talk about how to solve that, how that that International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor aims to do that. They have some pretty pragmatic ideas and so hopefully they'll this this episode of a nice bow
on the end. But we're gonna have to slog through some misery to get there, Chuck, take it away.
There's no better place to slog through misery than the founding of this country, way back in the old days, when the New World was new and settlers came over and they very much believed.
And why did I think this was ed? You said, this is Dave.
Yeah, I'm almost positive it was Dave was ed. It reads like a Dave to me, but oh man, if it's Ed, I'm sorry.
Sorry to both.
Well, sure you need to get those guys together one.
Day, I think the year.
Maybe we should keep them for our Yeah exactly, they might they might turn against us.
Yeah.
So they believe very much that the idol's hands were the devil's workshop, that old saying, And you know, this is one of those It was kind of hard for me to you know, let's just lop off, you know, developing nations today, which is clearly awful.
I found myself.
As an adult more and more with the cultural relativism, thinking like, obviously, five year olds shouldn't be working in factories. But when I read about like twelve and thirteen year olds working hard back then, I was kind of like, it's not great, but it was. That's just kind of how it was at the time. If you had parents that were farmers, you're not gonna, you know, be just hanging out until your sweet sixteenth birthday having a good time. You're going to be working from a pretty young age.
And I found myself more and more thinking, like, you know, in certain situations that wasn't the worst thing. But then you get to the industrial revolutions, and you know, that's what things really got bad.
But kind of.
Early on, that's really what we were talking about, was a lot of kids working on the farms, a lot of boys working on the farm, girls working in the house alongside their sisters and mom.
And you know, this kind of started when they were about thirteen years old.
They were sort of expected to either go work and get a job and work full time, or to become an apprentice and unpaid apprentice to work for food and board and training.
And I think also in addition to that Protestant work ethic of like just completely in the fabric of America that was just coming out in you, it's also this idea of like what else are you going to do? It's not like you consider around and play video games or watch TV or do almost anything else except just play outside.
But Chuck, I went back.
And looked to see if it was always this way, and apparently in medieval England you played basically until you hit puberty and then you started to get put to.
Work when you hit puberty at four.
Right, more like fourteen.
But like there was like a childhood and it seems to have been somewhat wiped out by that Protestant work ethic that the Puritans brought over, or at the very least it was set back a little more, you know, age wise, where you started working, maybe a little sooner than you would have had you been in medieval England at the time.
Right, I think, I guess I'm just trying to draw a line between life in the sixteen forties and then life in nineteen thirty eight when we eventually did something about it in the US.
Yeah, no, totally, And there is an enormous distinction between that, cause it was like widespread, but it just it seemed like they were mostly working with their families and it was just kind of the way that things were.
That was how life was.
But it will try and like keep your family alive. It's not like, yeah, you know, they were trying to just all survive basically.
Right, And that's actually the reason why it's still around in other parts of the world today. It's not even necessarily like a like a work ethic where children should should work because idle hands are the devil's playthings. Like the Puritans thought, it said, it's like this is an extra worker. We can have go out and make money to keep the rest of the family alive. We just don't have a choice in not doing that. And that's what drives it still today.
Right when the Industrial Revolution came around, and we're talking about basically cotton factories in a big, big way, there are a lot of little kids working there, and people like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton thought that was awesome.
They did, And like, we're going to be skewered for even suggesting that Hamilton said this, but he did. He said that women and children in America would be quote rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be. And I think what you're saying is like I'm not even going to paraphrase, what do you say? And I think it's you can understand it on its face.
Yeah, he's saying, well, you know, they're not doing much use for us, these kids. And he's mainly talking about kids here who would otherwite quote who would otherwise be idle. This isn't Manuel Miranda saying this we all love him.
No, this isn't he didn't say this in a charming rap.
No, this is the real Alexander Hamilton. And again it was just a different time. But even way back then, in the early eighteen hundreds, not everyone thought this was a great thing. There was a future mayor of Boston named Josiah Quincy Joe Quimby, who toured a cotton factory, a cotton spinning factory, and they had, you know, four year olds working there all the way to ten, maybe ten twelve hours a day for anywhere from twelve to
twenty five cents a day, not an hour. And he said, compassion calls us to pity the little creatures plying in a contracted room among flyers and cogs at an age when nature requires for them air space and sports. There was a dull dejection and the countenance of all of them. And you know, we'll get to some of these photos as some of these kids later on. When you look at them, they look like beaten down miniature adults.
Yeah, yeah, they really do. They look like us exactly.
They look ready to retire, they look unhappy, they look, yeah, just beaten down. But their miniature and their kids, their children, And it's really upsetting to see that a photograph of that, I'm sure it's even more upsetting to see it in real life. And that's actually how a lot of this, a lot of change came through was just people being exposed to seeing that and kind of being shocked, having their conscience shocked.
But as.
Potentially like bad as it was for the children of colonial America who were forced to work, it got way way worse when the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off, the one powered by steam and steel and railroads and little hands and unbridled capitalism. When you inject unbridled capitalism into an economy that allows for child labor, you can imagine that things are going to get much much worse for the children before it finally gets better.
That's right.
And things did get worse when you're when all of a sudden you have a robust steel industry and coal mining industry, you have railroads that need this stuff in a big, big way, and they, you know, partially kind of ran out of workers and partially just saw what was right underneath their noses, which is these kids who they at this point they had long known that they
could work and farm and work hard. So they said, you know what, a lot of these families in rural America, farming dried up a bit, so they moved to the city.
A lot of it was immigrant labor, as millions of people came into the country from Europe fleeting their poverty, famine stricken countries, and no matter where they came from, it was all under the thumb of the Robber Barons, which was I can't remember when we did it, feels like a few two or three years ago, but pretty good podcast on the Robber Barons.
Yeah, and we also talked about them in our book. We talked about Keeping Up with the Joneses. They played a big role in that too. But yeah, so like these the Robber Barons got rich through innovation, through consolidation, through some pretty clever stuff. A lot of them invented new techniques or processes or procedures, so like they definitely were doing something, they were being productive, but they also got to be filthy rich off of the backs of
immigrant labor, child labor that they directly exploited. And it was basically like there was just nobody looking out for anybody else at this time. It was just such a pe read of such enormous economic insurgents that there weren't there weren't anybody, or there wasn't anybody who was sitting there saying like whoa, everybody, we need to stop and really think about this and do this in a much
more directed, smarter, healthier way for our society. It was like yeah, it was like just go go, let's see where this takes us. And a lot of people got trampled underfoot, and that definitely included children labors or child laborers.
That's right, And I think that's a good time for a break. Yeah, yay, that's two ya's any and a's So we'll be back and we'll talk a little bit about what some of these jobs might have been in the late nineteenth century for these kids.
Right after this, I wonder how many gallons of coffee everyone who has listened to this this show since the beginning has heard me drink.
I didn't even hear you drinking.
Oh you didn't. When I said I had a I had a mouthful of cafe.
Oh interesting, we have no shirt on.
Nice. That's awesome, man, you just topped mine.
Said, that's true. I think you should have left a mysterious Chuck, because there were a few people out there who were about to email and say I was offended that Chuck said he wasn't wearing a shirt.
Yeah, No, I put it on right before we recorded. I had it off.
It's a little hot.
I felt like I needed to dress up.
Put the T shirt right. You are you wearing one of those tuxedo shirt shirt?
Have you ever had one of those? Did you ever have?
I didn't.
I didn't either.
You didn't. You didn't wear them with your rainbow suspenders?
No, that's that stuff was a little too cute, see even for me?
Gotcha?
Okay, what about the wine of those that looks like I would wear it?
Okay?
What about one that looks like a like a ripped like chest and abdomen?
Have you warr a T shirt like that? No?
Those are fun, though.
I think for certain people they're fun. They're also like really good at boosting your ego quietly.
Sure, there's nothing like me looking in a mirror at my beer belly covered in spray painted abs.
It really works your brain.
The brain is so dumb that it falls forward every time I can attest.
All right, So we were going to talk about what some of these jobs might be, and it kind of really depended on where you were living. If you lived in the city or if you lived in a company town where they had these factories, you were going to be working in factories. Flipped out in the rural areas, you can be working on farms.
And most Americans still lived on farms at the time, So yeah, most child labor took place on farms.
But if you were on that farm, you're gonna be picking cotton and tobacco. You're gonna be picking a lot of stuff and doing all the sort of stuff that goes on.
After the picking, which is all that stuff shucking.
Good stuff.
I did when I was a kid, we had a big, big garden, and my mom took us to the cannery.
And it was awful. I hated it.
Took you to the cannery, like for a sight seeing trip or for work to can. So like there was a cannery that your mom went to. You guys had so much stuff you had to go to a second location to can it.
That was a cannery and Decab County a sort of industrial cannery for the people, okay, And we would take green beans and corn and we made preserves and all kinds off and they had like and you know, you could can your own junk.
There. Sounds like it's like a lot of utopia.
And yeah, and we would you know, put sharpie like beans on the can and Sharpie.
Put it in the bantry. Huh, that's really really interesting.
I had no idea that there was a cannery into Cab County.
Yeah, not too far from where I live now. Actually it's like fifteen minutes away.
Probably do you shudder every time you pass it?
I do a little. Actually I don't pass it much.
But it's over near the dog pound where you can go adopt a dog, and so I think we adopted Nico there.
And I drove by the cannery and just like.
Yeah, I'll bet it was hot.
Well, you were lucky you weren't five or six and left there to work all day every day.
Aren't you?
Yes, you know, for almost no money.
Yeah, pennies for a bucket of whatever you shucked or shelled or did whatever peeled. Yeah, working at a canary would probably not have been very fun. They were also furnace stoking jobs available, whether you wanted them or not.
What else, chuck?
Uh? Well, kids did work in canneries. They also worked in textile mills. They had bobbin boys and bob and girls.
This one doesn't sound so bad to me, but I'm sure I'm missing something that makes it atrocious.
Well, I mean they would climb up on the machine and remove the bobbins, the full bobbins, and replace them with empty ones. So I don't think that was like the worst job in the world. But when you're doing that for ten or twelve hours a day and you're six, it's probably a bit of a buzzkill.
Yeah. Yeah, I have a problem inherently with child labor in general. Not any I mean, not like having a job like you or I had first job. They've got no problem with that, but child any kind of child labor, even if it is kind of cush comparatively.
No, I agree that one wasn't terrible. It may have been dangerous, though I don't know.
There's no Yeah, there's no way it wasn't dangerous. It had to have been dangerous. We're talking about the nineteenth century and industry. It was dangerous in some way. There was no osha, no knowing.
If he was.
If you did live in the city and did work around factories, you would do that. But there were also plenty of other jobs you could deliver, like be essentially they call them telegraph boys, sort of delivering you know, emails basically by hand to people all over town. You could shine shoes, you could sell newspapers like you did.
I didn't stand on a street corner. I was in a Newsy which we'll talk a little more about Newsy's in a second. I was a delivery boy, and not a really great one either. I frequently overslappt and it was not good at delivering papers. My mom and my oldest sister would have to do my route once in a while.
It's a bike deal, yes, okay.
And the thing is is like they also make you shake down the people for their delinquent subscriptions. So I was like a strong arm guy too for the Toledo blade as well.
I want my two dollars.
Basically, that's exactly right, and that was right in my wheelhouse. I was like, this hits a little too close to home for me to laugh at the kid. I know what he's going through. I've had to put my foot in somebody's door before to get their two dollars. Didn't ask for a dime.
I haven't seen that.
No.
While that was a good movie, yeah classic.
If you lived in the mountains of Appalachia, you might have been a breaker boy or a mule handler, and breaker boys will get I guess we can go ahead and tell everyone what that is. Sure, you would sit around and break apart lumps of coal into uniform pieces all day.
Long, yep, and break dance on your brakes.
Yeah, breaker boys, But that was it.
And they wouldn't let you wear gloves while you were a breaker boy too, because they're like, no, no, you can't break these things as uniformly if you wear gloves, you stupid kid. So you have to basically absorb all of this coal dust into your skin, get all sorts of little cuts and calluses and all that. By the time you're six seven eight, Just do this. This is your life. Now, Welcome to Pennsylvania.
Right then, Let's say you managed to escape all forms of formal jobs your parents. They didn't make you go to the factory. You did live in the city, so you didn't have to work on a farm. And you might think you just had it made in the shade. Not so, because there was plenty of jobs that you could do right there from your pretty little tenement apartment, like weaving baskets or making paper flowers, or hand rolling cigars and cigarettes all day long.
And selling them.
Yeah, it was like, you know, your whole family worked on a farm, or if you lived in a tenement, your whole family worked, you know, in what are called tenement industries. So there was basically not a lot of escape. I get the impression that you basically had to have wealthy parents to not be forced into child labor at the time.
Yeah, and I might have mentioned this once before. My mom did a thing for a little while where we would make money doing like stuffing on beloepes. Did you remember that stuff?
I do?
And I don't even remember what it was for. I guess they were for companies.
Okay, I want to say Easter Seals had people do that too, but I'm sure they didn't pay the paid.
So this would be like a company that would have like a packet they would send out that had like five things in it, and we would be responsible for getting all that stuff in huge boxes, assembling at all into the envelopes that they could mail, and we would get paid as a family to do that.
That's cute. That's super late seventies early eighties. Like I can see your mom talking on the princess phone making all the arrangements for them to ship that tour and getting the instructions, you know, and then hanging up in that fifty foot long cord just kind of coils up on its own, quietly on the floor. Yeah.
And I didn't mind that so much because I made a little money and I could That's something I could do while I watched television.
Yeah, totally, totally, which.
Is the perfect job, as we all know.
Yeah, not exactly a high pressure job. It sounds like I wouldn't even know if that qualifies as a tenement into street to tell you the truth.
No, not in the nineteen seventies.
No, you had a lot of jobs though as a kid. Good for you.
I always wanted my own money.
Protestant work ethic shining through like a city upon a hill.
Should we talk newsies?
Yeah we should.
And I think also the Newsy strike that we're gonna mention deserves its own episode, at least, I shortly agree, if not its own episode. Okay, so yeah, let's just not talk about newsies.
No.
No, I thought the same thing, And the more I got into the strike, I was like, this is just too much.
We got to do something.
But the idea was that little boys would buy a stack of newspapers wholesale for about fifty cents per one hundred girls too.
I saw girls that did it too.
Oh, girls did it too, all right, and they sold them for a penny apiece, so they would make half a penny per paper selling in the big cities, especially in New York City of course. And then eventually in eighteen ninety nine they did go on strike, and it.
Was a big deal.
It kind of ground. I mean, it didn't grind them to a complete halt, but it really disrupted their flow and getting newspapers into the hands of people.
Dude.
Their sales over this two week strike went down two thirds. Yeah, Like they brought the they brought pulitzer, pulitzer and hearst to their knees, basically, these newsies did.
And they got some concessions too.
Yeah.
And I think the deal was is that mourning subscribers were generally subscribers, or the morning paper was generally for subscribers. But it was that afternoon paper, that second edition that the newsies really raked it in on because most people didn't subscribe to that, and so they really weren't selling any second editions hardly. And the one big concession they got, which was huge was they got them to agree to full buybacks on unsold papers, which is a really really big deal.
But it also really kind of goes to show you how much the newspaper barons believe Newsy's were scrappy enough that they wouldn't just sit around and be like, I don't have to sell these, you know, I don't have to worry about this. You know, they'll be bought back anyway. I don't have to work to sell them.
Well, but buyback just means they give them back the money they paid for them. It's not like they would make any money. They would just in fact, it incentivize them, I think, to take out more papers. Yeah, and sell more papers because any of they wouldn't be.
Stuck with them.
Yeah, totally. We'll probably edit that part out.
So one of the things you mentioned was making cigars like in your family's one room apartment in say New.
York or something like that.
Right, Yeah, that was apparently really bad in that not only did you work long hours for very little pay in cramped working conditions with your family, on top of everything else, you would frequently come down with nicotine poison. As a little kid, because you're rolling cured sometimes you're handling uncured tobacco, and you're ingesting lots of nicotine through your skin at the like, you know, in a single day, and so you might be nauseated, you might be dizzy,
you might just turn green. It can get worse than that too. You actually can suffer respiratory distress as well. And apparently this is a big problem still with child laborers in Zimbabwe, because I think about twenty years ago that country doubled down on their tobacco production and now it's like one of the biggest, the biggest exports of Zimbabwe, but it's also a very poor country, so they use
child labor a lot. And so children are still to this day being exposed to tobacco and they're rolling, they're handling tobacco, they're rolling stuff, they're rolling cigars, they're sorting it. They're just the kids in tobacco should not be in the same room together.
Basically.
Yeah, you know, it never occurred to me that that, I guess it would be a transdermal ingestion, right.
Yeah, totally, but sure.
I mean, you put tobacco on bee stings and all kinds of things, so of course it's going to get into their skin.
Yeah, And having gotten myself sick on tobacco a time or two in my life, I can tell you it is not pleasant. And to do it against your will just because you're handling it for your job that you don't even want, is that sounds torturous?
Actually?
Yeah, I love that story. Should you retell it for people haven't heard it?
Are you talking about eighth grade? In the tree fort?
Is that when you'd like smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and got sick?
It was more like a pack and a half.
Okay, it was right after I first started smoking, and I was like, I was like, I really like how this makes me feel. Let's see how like thirty of these things make me feel. And I was seeing reading comic books up in the tree fort in the woods that my friends and I had built, and I just went too far.
Man. I felt so.
Bad, oh man, like green, Like I felt like I looked green.
It was. It was bad news.
That's one of those moments where you like, you really wish you could have like video footage.
Kind of what I kind of hope.
When when I die. It's a little bit like defending your life so they could. I'll be like, show me that one.
We can go over the other stuff. I really want to see that clip.
Yeah, rip torn will be there.
Yeah.
The upside of this, though, is do not ever start smoking. I deeply regret ever having started smoking as a kid. As an adult, it doesn't matter, Like, just don't ever start smoking and do yourself a real favor.
You did a great job quitting, though, and you never look back. Nope, I didn't good job.
It was.
It was surprisingly easy because I was ing on one more thing. I think if there are people out there who are considering smoking right now and are worried about the time they're going to have, one of my big worries was that I was going to spend every day of the rest of my life wishing for a cigarette.
And that's just not how it goes. Like.
You spend a week, two weeks, if it's really bad, maybe three weeks really longing for a cigarette, and then it starts to get easier and easier, and then eventually you're grossed out by the thought of cigarettes and people smoking cigarettes around you, and you don't ever want to see one again. So if that's what's keeping you from quitting, don't let it, because that's not.
How it is. I like that. Good PSA, thanks man, Thanks.
I think before we break, maybe we'll just go over some of these final stats here at the basically the peak, and then about nineteen hundred, By eighteen ninety one out of every five kids under sixteen was working. One point seven million kids under sixteen was six percent of the total workforce in the nineteen hundred census. And that's just kids who were registered to work in these factories like that does not include these kids rolling cigars in their house or the kids on the family farm.
So it was much much higher than that.
Yeah, because I think two thirds of kids in general in the country worked in agriculture. So yeah, if they were not counting agriculture, they missed out on a lot of kids in that number. And that's still a staggering number in and of itself, one point seven million.
Yeah.
And if you're wondering back then, what affect this had on education, Just a snapshot from Philadelphia in nineteen hundred, fifteen percent of thirteen year old boys had left school to work. And I think half of fifteen year old boys were not in school anymore because they were working.
Or like a significant portion because they were naughty.
Right, yeah, they just didn't want to do anything.
But get this, this is the staggering one to me. Seventeen year old boys, only ten percent of them were still in school in nineteen hundred in Philadelphia. That is, that does not bode well for the future of an economy. And I think that actually is one reason why like education became so much more compulsory, and one reason why people came around to anti child labor laws is the idea that no, there's a lot more that they could be doing than just working in a factory, almost literally
their entire lives. Like, we can do we can do better, and we can build a better society and a better economy if we invest in their education instead of robbing them of it.
All right, I guess we'll take a break and talk about when that started in earnest And it wasn't just then when you mentioned it.
So, Chuck, it turns out that there were so the progressive eras one of my favorite errors, or I should say the people from the Progressive era are some of my favorite people like Francis Perkins, although she was a second or third wave progressive reformer, but she was inspired by some of these earlier ones who were working on things like fair wages like a minimum wage minimum or
maximum work days or working hours. And then they also train their sights on things like ending child labor or at the very least really restricting the amount of work a kid could do, especially in regards to them being in school too. The idea was to put school first, and then if the kid had the wherewithal or their parents really needed the money or something like that, they could let them work in addition to school, but the school needed to come first.
And this is really radical. I mean it seems radical.
We had kids rolling cigars in their one room apartment in New York their whole lives, and now all of a sudden, some people are coming up and be like, no, no, no, kids should be in school and then preferably not working.
So how do we make that happen?
Yeah, it was a very big deal.
And most of these are a lot of them were women, people like Jane Adams and Julia Lathrop and Lillian Ward anti poverty measures and this is stuff that you know. They would also go on to champion uh women's rights and women's rights in the workforce and women's rights to vote.
So it was the whole progressive moment was.
Kind of tied up in all these you know, radical ideas about you know, being fair and good, decent human beings. Right yeah, so, uh, here's the problem is, you've got these robber barons and these factory owners and then these industrialists who are like, wait a minute, we got a good deal going. Because we don't have to pay these kids much, they're probably not going to unionize. Like the Newsy's thing was definitely an anomaly. Yeah, that didn't happen much.
And he said, they were like, we got a we got a good thing going, and uh so we're gonna lie be against this as hard as we can.
But surely they were unsuccessful, right.
No, they were successful. They did.
They blocked a logic of legislation early on for this kind of regulation federally states. You know, it kind of depends on where it was, but states did establish child labor commissions and some states had some minimum ages, minimum or maximum hours and minimum wages.
It was they were sparse.
I couldn't find what states passed it, but for the most part that there was a probably for the most part though, there was a lot of pushback, and enough pushback among the states the residents of the states that
not a lot got passed. So there was a progressive movement that started saying like the eighteen nineties, and it had to it basically like any progressive movement, it ran full steam ahead, hit a huge wall of industry and then had to slowly just keep pushing and pushing and chugging and chugging and keeping at it for a.
Few decades before it was successful.
And one of the ways that it became successful, or the way that it kept pushing at it after it hit that wall of industry is a group called the National Child Labor Committee formed and I think they formed in back in nineteen oh four, and they were basically they became a lobbying group to lobby against the lobbying against child labor laws that ended child labor.
Yeah. Yeah.
They had a pretty smart way to get attention, and that was in hiring a photographer named Lewis Hine, Yeah, to go around and sneakily document what was going on with his camera. He worked as a sociologist and a teacher and then later became a photographer. Was also a photographer and I think he himself was a kid who was working twelve thirteen hour days, so he was like, let me start taking pictures of these kids and maybe that because you know, that's worth a thousand words, they say.
At least five thousand. Yeah, so that means that he took fifty thousand words.
No, five five thousand, him just getting five hundred. No, I know that was totally wrong. It was purposefully wrong. Though.
Let me just do that real quick, dude, to do carry the one. He took five million words. That's a lot of words. And if you go back, you've probably seen a bunch of these pictures. If you've seen pictures of very.
Unhappy kids outside of a coal mine, or standing on the mountains of shucked oysters, or standing around factory machines like little men. Sure adults, they were probably Lewis Hines photos.
Yeah, I mean five thousand photos, all archived in the Library of Congress from what I understand. And he had like a really great eye to begin with me, Like, they're really great photographs in and of themselves. But you know, you don't have to sit there and like, you know, try to really contemplated. It just hits you immediately. What you're looking at, and how sad what you're looking at is. And so he and the National Child Labor Committee got
these into newspapers. And like you said, he was very sneaky. He would poses different things. One of them made sense to me. The industrial machinery photographer. Okay, yeah, got that. But what excuse would a Bible salesman have for taking photographs of the kids at the factory?
I could not find that.
Don't save my life.
I mean, the only thing I could think is that got him in the door. And then maybe he was like, and I just love kids, and can I take some pictures?
But I don't know.
And this is a time before stranger danger, I guess. So they were like, sure, right, I mean they're child laborers.
I don't care about them.
Yeah.
He also he wore a special jacket where he had the buttons on the jacket aligned in known measurements. So if he went over and stood like he would take a kid's picture, and he would ask, you know, they're documented like their names and their ages and stuff as best he could, but he would go stand next to them if he felt like he couldn't outright ask what their age was to kind of tip off that maybe he was not a Bible salesman, right, And you know, if the kid went up to the second or third button,
he would know roughly how tall they were, or no, he would know how tall they were, then roughly how old they were.
The other things were.
Giants, right right, Yeah, I'm sure you know he didn't get them all right, but you know you can't win them all. But the other thing that made that jacket special, Chuck, was that the lining was made of a T shirt of a ripped chest and abdomen.
And it would make him feel really good about himself when he put that jacket on.
That's good, let's call it that.
When did things finally change, though, well, they started to kind of change like these These pictures shocked the conscience of the nation when they when they saw them, when they made them into newspapers, and they were accompanied by Muckray getting article about how bad these conditions were. And you know, shame on you, America for turning a blind eye to this kind of thing. But it wasn't like
an instantaneous switch was thrown. It still took decades. I think the first proposal for anti child labor legislation came in nineteen oh six. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana was
the first to propose. It got taken up in nineteen sixteen by the Keeting Act that was actually passed, but the Supreme Court shut it down, and then there was some more legislation that there was a constitutional amendment actually that got passed but wasn't ratified by the States, and then it wasn't until the Great Depression and the New Deal that it finally got passed. And I think if it were just the New Deal, it wouldn't have gotten passed.
But the Great Depression changed things socially enough that it opened the door for an end to child labor in America.
Yeah, Like, ironically, I think massive unemployment with so many adults out of work, they couldn't turn around and just hire kids to do these jobs for lower wages. It was I mean, even at a time when a bad look didn't really matter as much as it does today, they even knew that that was a really bad look and that they probably couldn't do something like that. So eventually the Fair Labor Standards Act of nineteen thirty eight.
Thank you Francis Perkins or old Buddy that's right. Among others, this finally set a national minimum wage for the very first time, maximum number of hours for workers, and then child labor limitations, notably that if you are under sixteen, you cannot work in manufacturing, and you cannot work in coal mining at all because they're just too dangerous. Another couple of things it did. It established over time time
and a half. Oh yeah, so if you went over forty hours a week, you could only work up to forty four, but you could work four hours at time and a half. And that very first minimum wage was twenty five cents an hour man nineteen thirty nine, I went up to thirty forty five, It went up to forty in nineteen fifty six. It finally reached a dollar kaching and it didn't crack six dollars until two thousand and eight.
I know, dude, it's just shameful, isn't that nuts? We definitely need to do a minimum wage episode two because it's just not as cut and dried as Yeah, just raise a minimum wage, like there's just like there's a lot.
To it, and I really want to do one on that.
Yeah, I hadn't really kept up with it because I before I got salary jobs. I worked as a waiter for fifteen or twenty years or something, or as a PA on movie sets and TV sets, and that's not an hourly thing either. So like I hadn't had an hourly rate job since college, so I didn't really know, you know, kind of how it changed over the years.
I did not know. It was two thousand and eight when they cracked six dollars. That's really low, it really is.
It's very it's just not okay. And it's still at seven something right now it's seventy five. No, it's seven to twenty five, actually.
I think it.
Yeah, that's the national minimum wage, right.
Yeah, again, some of the states are are raising stuff slowly but surely, but that's the federal one.
Still.
Well, this is Alabama doesn't have a minimum wage, is that right? Is that possible?
Yeah, that's possible, man.
You have to look into that. That's on the fly.
So yeah, we'll do a.
Whole one on minimum wage for sure coming up. But you said that The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in nineteen thirty eight, and it's still basically governs child labor. And one of the things that it does, Chuck is it divides child labor into agricultural and non agricultural jobs.
And with agriculture or non agricultural jobs, there's like a pretty decent amount of protections, like kids can't work in hazardous stuff until they're eighteen, things like blasting, mining, forest firefighting, that kind of stuff that if you're under sixteen, you can only work a maximum of three hours a day during the school year.
There's some exemptions. Did you see the thing about home based wreathmaking.
Yeah, so you cannot non agriculturally, you cannot work if you're under fourteen at all. Like I could not have worked as a bus boy at thirteen, supposedly, but I still did unless that was passed since then, because this thing's been ratified a million times or not ratified but amended. But yeah, if you're a child actor, you can work if you're under fourteen, obviously. If you're a newsy you can still deliver newspapers if you're under fourteen.
And home based wreathmaker.
Dude, it so weird. It is weird.
And not only is it, home based wreathmaking is exempted from childlabor laws in the United States. It has to be a specific kind of reath that has to be mostly evergreen wreaths. Wow, So if you're making wreaths and it has to be at home, if you're having your kid make reads at home and they're not mostly evergreen, that's illegal. And if they're making things out of evergreen that are not wreaths, like say garland, that's illegal, specifically homemade wreaths that are mostly evergreen.
It's really really interesting.
It's one of the most bizarre facts we've ever talked about on this episode.
Yeah show, Yeah, for sure, to keep that one in my pocket totally.
But agricultural though, they have like very little protection, like almost shamefully little protections.
Yeah, if you're sixteen years old and you live on your family farm, they can work you. There's no living on how many hours they can work you. You can work jobs that the Department of Labor considers hazardous. I think fourteen year olds also can work unlimited hours if it's outside the school day, and then the kids as young as twelve I think actually twelve and younger can work with parental consent.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically unlimited hours or at least up to seventy two hours, and that's during the school year as well.
And as a result of this, fifty five percent of child farm workers graduate from high school here in you know, the twenty ish.
Yeah, in the United States we're talking about, and the one hundred thousand of them are injured on the job every year, child farm laborers.
Yeah, and a lot of trying to get all this changed.
Yeah, they're basically saying, like, look, just take these things that we apply to non agricultural jobs and apply it to agricultural problems solved, and that would solve a lot of problems. I'm sure it would create a lot of problems that you and I are unaware of, not being farm folk, but it would solve a lot of the child labor problems that child labor activists have issues with.
It would do nothing for the.
Much more rampant problems that are endemic around the world with child labor, where a lot of it resembles basically how America was with child labor at the at the you know, during the Gilded Age.
Yeah, one hundred and fifty eight million kids are estimated to be the victims of child labor around the world. The good news is that's down thirty percent from twenty years ago. But the bad news is is that's a lot of kids, and I think seventy one percent of those are in agriculture, harvesting, fishing, herding, stuff like that. But there are a lot of kids around the world that still like work in coal mines.
Yeah, like that's too narrow for an adult, it's too dangerous. You go in there and do it instead, and they'll work with like they'll work at wildcat gold mines, so they're having to like separate gold with mercury. So they're getting mercury poisoning at a young age, which really messes with you developmentally. On tobacco farms and places like Zimbabwe, not only are are they having to get you know, nicotine poisoning, they're also being poisoned by toxic pesticides that
are used on the crops and stuff too. So like these kids are working in like deplorable working conditions, and there's just some really basic stuff that needs to.
Change that would just free the children of the world the world around from what is essentially like indentured servitude right now.
Yeah, and there's four kind of basic things that the ILO says we can do around the country. And like you said at the very beginning, they're very pragmatic. They all make sense and they would really make a difference. And the first is expand access to education. Get kids in school and get rid of fees to be in school and put them. If they're in a school situation, they're way less likely to join the workforce.
That's what our friends at COED do.
They're like helping get kids off of family farms and into schools by removing any barriers between them in school.
Yep, it's all through education. It's a great, great organization.
Yeap.
What else And that's, by the way, the cooperative I always say that word wrong, Cooperative for Education.
Yeah, look them up.
We've championed them for years and we got a little fun thing coming up that we're dealing with them that you guys might be interested in, So stay tuned for that. Yeah, let me see what's the next one? Help families meet basic needs. This could be a universal basic income, it could be monthly stipend, but basically so families don't have to send their kids out to works to provide at the most basic level.
Yeah.
And a way that you can help that is through Kiva by blending making micro loans to people so that they can they have the capital to grow from Initially.
There's also like, if you make sure that adults are getting better wages and pay and their rights are protected, it makes their children less likely to be forced into the workplace to begin with, because it's not again, there's not like adults the world round saying, you know, our kids need to be working because they're lazy, Like their kids need to be working because the adults aren't getting
paid enough. And if you make sure that you're you know, if you're a Western company and you make sure that you're paying everybody a fair wage, there's a good chance that you can eradicate child labor from your supply chain.
Yeah, and then the last thing is just enforcement.
They can put all the laws that they want on the books, but unless someone's gonna actually work on enforcement, then it really doesn't matter much. So that's really sort of the last step is funding for enforcement.
Yeah, and Germany actually just passed the law recently that demands that it's companies examine do due diligence and examine their supply chains to see if there's child labor involved in to do something about it. That doesn't have like as much teeth as Human Rights Watch was saying that they wish it had but it's a good first step and hopefully the way that you know, progressive nations will start moving.
That's right. Two things, big shout out. I can't remember his name, but the young listener who was mowing the lawn for his dad and wrote in.
To request this episode, I think, oh, that's right. I think he prompted this episode. So hats off to you, young sir. I hope you can kick up your heels for a little while. And then also, this was indeed a Dave Ruse joint, so thanks again to Dave for this one.
Right, that's right.
Since Chuck said that's right, everybody means it's time for listener mayl. I'm gonna call this.
I think it's just thanks. Hey, guys. Running in from Louisville, Kentucky, Do said I much.
I love the show. Even though Josh said the KFCM center was in Lexington, I'll never live that down. Your correction put a smile on my face. Knowing that there are other stuff you should know fans near me. I work in long term care and use your podcast in many different ways. I help people with cognitive impairments. Set up their tablets and such for enrichment, socialization, and stimulation, and one of the first activities I show them is
how to access entertainment. With the educational podcast, everyone can find something they want to learn about on Stuff you Should Know. I also help people find ways of remembering new information and use your short stuff episodes for those with shorter attention spans. And finally, my own enjoyment is a factor. I listened to many different podcasts during my drive to and from work, but only Stuff you Should Know has the ability to get me into a different headspace.
I attribute that to Josh and Chuck. None of these topics would be nearly as interesting without you, guys. I've cried and laughed sometimes both all in all of your episodes, even the really mathy ones.
I feel you on that one, Chuck and Josh.
Yeah, Oh that was a dig.
Wasn't a dig? Be you math guy?
No? No, but I'd like to think I am okay.
Sorry about that.
The episode on snake handling is a personal favorite. I appreciate an episode. I love the show and everyone that works on it. Thanks for keeping it going. I hope see y'all in Kentucky. That is from Ellie.
Well, thanks again, Ellie, And if you want to get in touch with this, like Ellie did, you can write us an email send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.