Thought by many to be a relic of a bygone era, child labor catapulted back into the national headlines recently with several high-profile stories. First, a Labor Department investigation found more than 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 illegally employed in meatpacking plants across the Midwest on overnight shifts, cleaning saws and other dangerous equipment with caustic chemicals. Next, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law the Youth Hiring Act, effectively rolling back key child labor protections in the state.
These are not isolated events. A March 2023 report by the Economic Policy Institute identified over 600 active Labor Department investigations into violations of child labor laws — described in some cases as “systemic” — against a backdrop of an over 283 percent increase in child labor employment between 2015 and 2022. Arkansas is just one of 10 states where bills have been enacted or introduced to lift a variety of restrictions on children’s employment, often at ages and in jobs long considered hazardous to their health and development, undercutting protections that have been in place at the federal level since Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
The push by state legislatures to unwind child labor protections harks back to child labor debates in the United States over a century ago. Deploying a rationale strikingly similar to those of today’s corporate lobbyists and state officials, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries industrializing states across the South rescinded and stymied meaningful child labor laws in the name of economic progress.
After the Civil War, the United States underwent an unprecedented period of industrial expansion. In the ensuing decades, ever-increasing numbers of children throughout the country worked in textile factories, coal mines, meatpacking plants and food canneries, as well as in fields picking produce, in city tenements manufacturing piece-goods and on urban streets as peddlers, newsboys and messengers. The number of 10- to 14-year-olds employed in industrial jobs increased more than threefold between 1870 and 1900, from just over 350,000 to nearly 1.1 million.
These developments spurred organized labor and Progressive reformers across the industrial North to work aggressively for the passage of child labor protections. Unions advanced economic arguments about the depressive effect of child labor on adult workers’ wage rates, while reformers trained their attention to moralistic arguments — often positioned in racist and nativist terms — about working children who were being exploited in equal turns by employers and greedy parents. The result was that through the turn of the 20th century a variety of age, hours and compulsory education laws were put in place in states from New England to the Midwest.
At the same time in the South, however, child labor came to be inexorably tied to state and regional economic development, especially in textile manufacturing, which became the largest industrial employer in the region. Business and political leaders worked to position their states as industry-friendly and regulation- and union-free in a chase for industrial investments. Economic boosters promoted the region as a pro-business alternative to states where labor and industrial legislation regulating hours, overnight work and child labor were solidly in place. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, these efforts focused especially on persuading textile companies based in New England to build factories there.
Alabama’s experience was notable in this respect. Alabama’s actions in the winter of 1894 came to be a regional touchstone in this race for runaway capital. Until then, the state had been an outlier among other southern states. In 1887, a state child labor law had gone into effect mandating age and hours regulations for children working in mines and manufacturing, although it was considered weak and unenforceable.
During the next legislative session in 1889, a bill was enacted that carved out exceptions for two counties where textile mills had been built, although this law remained in place elsewhere in the state. Then, to secure assurances from one of the largest New England textile companies that it would build a factory in the state, the legislature repealed the law altogether in December 1894, proving, according to the would-be investors, “that Alabama was governed in a common sense and economical way, and that we had less to fear here from hostile legislation.” By 1895 the editor of the Lynchburg News mused on “the investments of large sums of money in the far South by the greatest cotton-mill corporations of New England,” whose “object in coming South is to get away from the meddlesome and restrictive laws enacted.”
In Alabama and elsewhere in the South thereafter, legislating children out of the mills was a non-starter. This was true not only for factory owners and business-aligned politicians, but for parents across the region, as well. Through the first decades of the 20th century, then, White children — southern mills hired White workers almost exclusively — commonly worked in southern textile mills.
Why? The family-wage system became entrenched across the textile South as employers calculated wage rates based on an assumption that all members of a family would be gainfully employed from childhood through adulthood. So while mill owners championed mill employment as a means of “uplift” and path out of poverty for otherwise destitute White families in the highly racialized South, this system functionally drew children into the mills to sustain household incomes. Yet conversely the family system was a key factor that kept wages for adults at poverty levels, helped maintain a low-wage labor pool and fueled a relentless cycle where child labor was an economic necessity for most mill families.
Still, even as child labor proliferated across the South, local, state and regional anti-child labor organizations formed in the first decades of the 20th century. They advocated for and were instrumental in securing passage of nascent child labor laws in the region during the early 1900s. But because state laws were perfunctory at best and lacked uniformity, many southern reformers joined the growing national movement advocating for federal child labor legislation.
The result of this national movement was the passage of the 1916 Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, the nation’s first federal child labor law. A conservative U.S. Supreme Court declared this new law unconstitutional two years later, and it was only when the labor market sharply contracted during the Great Depression — when adults nationwide could not secure employment and children had already been largely pushed out of the industrial workforce — that the federal government effectively legislated a nationwide ban on industrial child labor.
Thus, we have seen economic and political debates over labor regulations play out before, and they are cyclical: that is, they are outgrowths of a race to the bottom in working conditions as employers in low-wage industries chase the lowest production costs. It occurred as manufacturing moved from North to South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then globally through the late 20th century.
This process, the historical record shows, marginalizes and disadvantages workers, and often inhibits widespread economic growth and mobility. We may expect similar outcomes for workers — including, as others have pointed out, children made vulnerable to exploitation by a harmful immigration system — as once again, child labor becomes a focal point of economic boosterism.
As the labor market remains tight, it should come as no surprise we are seeing rollbacks of child labor protections as a strategy to find workers while keeping wages low, and positioned within the context of pro-business, anti-regulation political rhetoric. While the impacts of state-level actions remain to be seen, if history is a guide, other states will follow Arkansas’ lead in unwinding regulations on child labor, and the clawing back of these protections will be hard-fought in the courts, on union picket lines and in editorials in the nation’s press.