Recently, two Republican legislators in Wisconsin offered a bill that would eliminate the need for children, ages 14 and 15, to obtain work permits before taking jobs.
To many child advocates such a bill will just make it easy to exploit children by paying them low wages, perhaps encourage school drop-outs and likely exposing them to dangerous and unhealthy jobs. Commented Stephanie Bloomingdale of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO:
“Work permits are an important piece of safety for children in the workforce and we are opposed to any further reduction in the age which would require a work permit.”
Six years ago, the state had removed the permit requirement for children aged 16 and 17 when Republicans controlled the Legislature and Scott Walker, a Republican, was governor.
It’s ironic that Wisconsin is joining a national trend among GOP-led states to loosen restrictions on child labor. The state has a long record of laws protecting child labor, beginning in 1867 when the law passed stating that no employer could “compel” a child under 18 to work more than 8 hours a day.[i] While that law was rarely enforced, it set the precedent that Wisconsin lawmakers recognized the need to protect children from working excessive hours. In 1899, the law was amended to require work permits.
Historically the state felt permits were necessary to verify the ages of the children, and since the permits required the school to sign off to assure that the child was not skipping classes.
Thus, if the current Republican proposal was enacted, it would end the use of work permits – a practice that had been going on for the last 124 years. (I remember getting my first work permit in 1942 at age 13 so that I could become a paperboy. I got another one two years later to work in a drugstore at age 15.)
During the 19th Century and into the early 20th Century, children worked in all types of industries, especially mining, garment-making, and various manufacturing workplaces. The practice was widely condoned, even by parents who felt such work was good for the children, building into their nature a “work ethic” that would serve them well in life. Factory owners were notorious for recruiting younger children from among the orphanages, immigrant families and runaways.
For the most part, labor unions opposed the practice. As early as 1836. The National Trades Union convention called for a minimum age for child laborers. In 1911, child workers joined the adults on the line in the famed Lawrence Textile Strike. In a Congressional hearing about the strike, a child worker told how her hair had been snagged by a machine, ripping off part of her scalp and forcing her to spend seven months in the hospital. Helen Taft, wife of then president William Howard Taft, heard the testimony, spurring her interest – and the country’s – in seeking reforms on the practice of hiring child workers.[ii]
Helping to spur the national outcry against child labor was Oshkosh, Wisconsin-born social worker and photographer, Lewis Hine (1874-1940). He was hired by the muckraking National Child Labor Committee, formed in 1904 to take photographs in the campaign for child labor reform. Hine journeyed to farms and mills in the industrializing South and the streets and factories of the Northeast. He used a Graflex camera with 5-by-7-inch glass plate negatives and employed flash powder for nighttime and interior shots, hauling upwards of 50 pounds of equipment on his slight frame.
To gain entry into factories and other facilities, Hine sometimes disguised himself as a Bible, postcard or insurance salesman. Other times, he’d wait outside to catch workers arriving for or departing from their shifts. Along with photographic records, Hine collected his subjects’ personal stories, noting their ages and ethnicities. He documented their working lives, such as their typical hours and any injuries or ailments they incurred because of their labor.
Notably, the National Child Labor Committee’s efforts resulted in Congress establishing the Children’s Bureau in 1912 and passing the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, which limited working hours for children and prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor.
Although the Supreme Court later ruled it and the subsequent Child Labor Tax Law of 1919 unconstitutional, momentum for enshrining protections for child workers had been created. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which finally established restrictions and protections on employing children.[iii]
Yet, child labor violations continue to this day. Recently a Wisconsin food safety sanitation services provider paid $1.5 million in penalties for illegally employing more than 100 children, ages 13 to 17, in hazardous occupations including overnight shifts at meat processing plants in eight states, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
A Department of Labor investigation found that Packers Sanitation Services, based in Kieler in Grant County, employed children working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment including back saws, brisket saws and head splitters. At least three minors suffered injuries in the hazardous work, according to investigators.[iv]
The children of migrant farmworkers are particularly victimized to work in the fields because of family circumstances, as was described in the third reading from Jesus Salas’ new book, Obreros Unidos. He further described how the repetitious, tiring work threatened to deaden the spirit and curiosity of the children.
“This system was most cruel . . . to those of us who were healthy of body and independent of mind and spirit.
“There was no other role for us, there were no other choices and the only variety to our lives was the different crops we harvested. It was as if we had been born to be society’s beasts of burden. . . . While the sickly and weak struggled, migrant fieldwork was most oppressive for those of us who had our own mind and desired a different life.”
I have known Jesus since the 1968 Grape Boycott marches and over beers through the years he has described his childhood. Based in Crystal City, Texas, the family would drive to harvest seasons each year in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and finally Wisconsin. Some years, he said, he attended seven different schools. His father finally bought a farm in Central Wisconsin and later opened a restaurant in Wautoma, and the family settled down.
While conditions in the work camps have improved through the years, there’s little evidence to show that children aren’t still being victimized.
Child labor violations actually declined greatly in the years before 2015. Since then, violations have been on the rise since 2015, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division.[v]
In 2015 — the low point in the data — the Wage and Hour Division found 1,012 minors employed in violation of child labor laws, with an average of 1.9 per case. In 2022, that number more than tripled to 3,876, averaging 4.6 per case.
Beyond the federal law, all states have similar child labor laws, some stronger and more effective than the federal statute. Wisconsin’s permitting process has worked for more than a century, but the laws are being weakened, largely by Republican leaders influenced by factory owners, restaurant operators, owners of large industrial farms and others who are seeking to more easily put children to work. They claim such work is good for the soul, but it’s obvious their motives are purely to make greater profit, the health and safety and education of the child be damned.
[i] https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=4584&context=mulr
[ii] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-2-the-reform-movement.htm
[iii] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-photographer-who-forced-the-us-to-confront-its-child-labor-problem-180982355/
[iv] https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/02/28/wisconsin-company-employed-100-children-in-meat-packing-plant-jobs/69953196007/
[v] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules
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