Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0
America’s social studies textbooks urgently need an update — on child labor. Our textbooks, ever since the middle of the 20th century, have been applauding the reform movement that gradually put an end to the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the early Industrial Age. Now those horrors, here in the 21st century, are reappearing.
The number of kids employed in direct violation of existing child labor laws, analysts at the Economic Policy Institute this past March reported, has soared 283 percent since 2015 — and 37 percent in just the last year alone. Last week brought the alarming news that three Kentucky-based McDonald’s franchises had kids as young as 10 working at 62 stores in four different states. Some of these under-working age children were working as late as 2 a.m.
Lawmakers at the state level, meanwhile, are moving to weaken — and even eliminate — existing limits on when and where kids can be working. One bill in Iowa introduced earlier this year, EPI researchers note, would let kids “as young as 14” labor in workplaces ranging from meat coolers to industrial laundries. In Arkansas, legislation recently signed into law axes requirements that the state “verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job.”
Amid this rush to undo protections for kids, adds a New York Times analysis, pending legislation that would “crack down on companies’ use of child labor has gone nowhere.”
How do cheerleaders for erasing protections for kids justify their anti-child-labor-law offensive? Jobs for the youngest among us, they argue, build character.
“We have sheltered our kids so much they’ve forgotten how to do one of the things we’re all training them to do,” says Dan Zumbach, a Republican state senator in Iowa, “and that’s how to work.”
Over a century ago, in the initial push against child labor, no American did more to protect kids from sophistry like that than the noted educator and philosopher Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture Society. In 1887, under that society’s auspices, Adler sounded the child labor alarm before a packed house at Manhattan’s famed Chickering Hall.
The “evil of child labor,” Adler related to some 1,500 onlookers, “is growing to an alarming extent.” In New York City alone, some 9,000 children as young as eight were working in factories. The entire state of New York had only two inspectors looking out for the welfare of working kids. Many of those kids, as a result, “could not read or write” or even knew “the state they lived in.”
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
Sam Pizzigati | Radio Free (2023-05-16T05:57:48+00:00) To Protect Our Children, Let’s Tax Our Rich. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/16/to-protect-our-children-lets-tax-our-rich/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.