Hard Exploitative Times: To Hear the Wail Of the Children

With a rapacious GOP shredding not just women's/black/queer/poor people's rights but now child labor laws - the number of kids as young as 10 working in America has soared 37% - we mark this weekend's 120th anniversary of Mother Jones' 1903 March of the Mill Children, wherein she led 100 "worn down, defeated waifs...sacrificed on the altar of profit" to ask Teddy Roosevelt to end their abuses "in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones." God bless capitalism: He refused.

After over a hundred years of progression away from Charles Dickens' "bitter world" and "dark, Satanic mills" - see Oliver Twist "dine on a slice of pudding for his twelve hour daily labor" - toward what seemed universal recognition that children deserve to have a childhood and profit margins be damned, child labor is now "making a comeback with a vengeance." According to the International Labor Organization, upwards of 160 million children worldwide - roughly 1 in 10, about two-thirds boys - engage in child and forced labor, with nearly half working under hazardous conditions to produce goods from some 77 countries; in the world's poorest countries, from India to Central America to sub-Saharan Africa, that ratio is 1 in 5. Experts report an increase of over 8 million kids working in the last four years, with numbers still rising, particularly among those 5 to 11 years old. Yes: 5 to 11 years old. An estimated 22,000 child laborers are killed at work each year. This marks an improvement from the 19th century's Industrial Revolution era of Dickens' orphan Twist - born in a workhouse, forced into labor at 9, soon apprenticed to an undertaker - when each day an average of 112 kids died and over 6,000 were injured. Still, not great.

Of course corporate America has eagerly joined this new "economy of exploitation," especially of migrant children, in part thanks to existing loopholes in labor law and enforcement. From 2015 to 2022, with the number of kids at work in the U.S. surging 37%, labor violations involving kids inevitably also rose nearly 70%. That heedless trend follows a long tradition in a country where child labor has been vital since the Industrial Revolution, especially in the textile industry; by 1820, children, often girls, made up 40% of mill workers in New England, bless their young stamina, nimble fingers, and unwillingness to demand decent wages or conditions. Kids, often of immigrant parents, coughed through 10-hour shifts in coal mines or tended fiery glass-factory furnaces. In 1870, a census counted 750,000 child workers under 15; by 1911, there were over two million. Staying true to the spirit of British Elizabethan laws that urged employing kids as "a prophylactic against vagabonds," Daniel DeFoe argued "children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread," and Alexander Hamilton - sorry Lin-Manuel - said those “who would otherwise be idle” could be a good source of cheap labor to ward off the dangers of "idleness and degeneracy.”

Enter labor activist Mary 'Mother' Jones, once dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America," to call bullshit. Born in Ireland, she was 11 when the Great Famine sent her family to Canada. Schooled in Toronto, she taught in Michigan, moved to Memphis where she met and married iron worker George Jones, left teaching to raise four children. In 1867, yellow fever killed her husband and all her children; devastated, she moved to Chicago and started a dress business, destroyed in 1871's Great Fire. She followed Joe Hill's dictate: "Don't mourn - organize." Speaking in mining and mill towns across America, she saw boys picking rocks from coal bins and girls feeding thread into looms for 12 hours a day. In her autobiography, she wrote, "I wondered that armies did not stand forth to free those slaves." In 1897, age 60, she added "Mother" to her name. Wrote a friend of her fierce kinship with workers, "She is flesh of their flesh, blood of their blood. Wherever she goes, she enters into the lives of the toilers and becomes part of them." A powerhouse orator and fighter with a flair for the theatrical, she called herself "not a humanitarian, but a hell-raiser," declaiming, "I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please."

And so she did. In the spring of 1903 she went to Kensington, PA to support 75,000 textile workers, including 10,000 children, taking part in the largest strike in Philadelphia's history; the press barely covered it because mill owners had stock in their papers. "Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle," she wrote in Autobiography of Mother Jones. "They were stooped things, round-shouldered and skinny...from whom all the childhood had gone." Assembling a crowd in Independence Park, she called up a few: "I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children...That their little lives went out to make wealth for others...The officials of City Hall were standing in the open windows. I held the little ones of the mills above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were light to lift...The officials quickly closed the windows, as they had closed their eyes and hearts."

The strikers were seeking a reduced 55-hour week and the end of night shifts for women and children. She led a march through Philadelphia, but when things quieted down for a while, "I concluded the people needed stirring up again." The Liberty Bell, symbolizing freedom over tyranny, was touring the country, drawing large crowds; if it could go on tour, she decided, "so could child labor." She asked parents if she could take their kids for a week or so, promising to return them safely, and they agreed. On July 7, 1903, the March of the Mill Children, aka The Children's Crusade, 100 children plus chaperones and a marshal, left Philadelphia; they were bound for Wall Street "to show the flesh and blood from which it squeezes its wealth...to call upon the millionaire manufacturers to cease their moral murders," and, ultimately, to the Long Island summer home of Theodore Roosevelt to ask the reportedly reformist president to curb the abuses of child labor. The children carried knapsacks with a knife, fork, plate and tin cup. Taking baths in brooks, with farmers bringing food and trainmen offering free rides, "the children were very happy," she wrote. "I thought when the strike is over and they go back to the mills, they will never have another holiday like this."

They marched for two weeks, over 100 miles; the press mocked the "band of lunatics." It was hot, they had no money, some kids left, returning to work. In Princeton, Jones asked to speak at the University "on higher education." She told a crowd the rich robbed these children of any education "so they might buy automobiles for their wives and dogs for their daughters to talk French to." "Here's a text book on economics," she said, pointing to a 10-year-old "stooped over like an old man from carrying bundles of yarn in a carpet factory that weigh 75 pounds...He gets three dollars a week while the children of the rich are getting their higher education." At Coney Island, the children rode rides and splashed in the surf; she also put them on display to "show their broken bodies." On July 23, they marched into New York City with 60 people, and had a parade up 2nd Avenue where she delivered her "The Wail of the Children" speech. She described kids laboring "day and night in the cotton mills," noting, "They have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?" Also: "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to get there. He had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he'd stolen a railroad, he could be a United States Senator."

Roosevelt refused to see them, even after Mother Jones agreed to take just a few children to his home. By August, "Child Labor was back at work." Still, a mining journal argued, the march swayed public opinion and "helped give child labor a mortal stab." Jones kept organizing into her 80s; after she died in 1930, at a dedication of her gravestone on the Illinois prairie, 50,000 people mourned "the miners' angel." Two proposed federal child labor laws were struck down before FDR's 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or a weakened version, ended the worst abuses: It established a 44-hour work week, mandated overtime pay, set a federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. But it only covered about 25% of the work force, and left gaping, enduring loopholes allowing child labor, especially in agriculture - where hundreds of thousands of mostly immigrant kids continue to toil in tobacco fields and other farm work. Even so, corporate leaders squawked so loudly at the restrictions that Roosevelt called them out in a Fireside Chat, telling Americans, "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day (tell you) that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry." Familiar, much?

Repulsively, they haven't stopped howling since. Despite historians recently declaring U.S. child labor "almost exclusively a thing of the past," an ever-profit-hungry GOP has been feverishly working to bring back a Dickens-lite labor landscape in the face of increased organizing, demands for decent wages, worker shortages thanks to COVID and Immigration restrictions, and MAGA bullshit about Deep State tyranny and "parental rights." "There's no reason why anyone should have to get the government's permission to get a job," argued an idiotic Arkansas pol seeking to eliminate child work permits. "(This is) just about "taking away the parent's decision about whether their child can work." Translated: Child labor pays, we'll do anything to turn a buck, and a little Black Lung never hurt anybody. In the last two years, GOP lawmakers in up to 14 states have rolled back regulations on child labor, invariably with the help of often dystopian lobbying by rich right-wing groups. The Cato Institute's "Case Against Child Labor Protections" argues child sweatshops are "the best available alternative" for poor families and protections "limit their options further." The Koch-funded Foundation for Economic Education: “Let the Kids Work.” The "Christian" Acton Institute: “Work is a gift our kids can handle."

Thanks to that dubious gift, kids today work longer, harder, more dangerously than they have for decades. Scores of undocumented Latinx kids were found working in food plants, garment factories, construction sites in 20 states; the nation's largest meatpacking plant had over 100 teens working in slaughterhouses cleaning bone saws and other lethal rigs amidst hazardous chemicals in Minnesota and Nebraska; over 300 kids as young as 10 were working for multiple McDonald's in Kentucky up to 12 hours a day. Roofers in Florida and Tennessee can be 12; kids bake rolls for Walmart and sew J. Crew socks in L.A.; in Iowa, 14-year-olds can serve alcohol, work in freezers, meat coolers, industrial laundries, assembly lines; in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders quashed requirements for employers to ensure kids are 14, calling them "burdensome and obsolete. The accidents pile up: a 17-year-old lost two fingers to a mowing machine; an 8th-grader's eyes burned from farm pesticides; last week in Wisconsin, where kids aren't legally allowed in sawmills due to their "red mist whirling blades of death," 16-year-old Mikey Schuls died working at a hardwood mill "when horrible tragedy struck." Safety officials are investigating, but, "What in the 1700s?" Mother Jones: "Pray for the dead, and fight like Hell for the living."

Mother Jones and a mother help kids camped out on the Children's March tie their shoesPhoto from Library of Congress