Child Labour In America

America’s Unseen Child Labor Issue.
In 19th century America hundreds of thousands of children toiled to bring home a paycheck to their families. Now, workers in the U.S. who are less than 16 years of are protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. These, known as child labor laws help insure that children are not harmed in unsafe jobs and have the opportunity to attend school. Although child Labor in America seems to have been "solved" or eradicated, American companies are still outsourcing labor to children in other countries with poor working conditions and low pay that children in the 19th century experienced.
The book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is about a Lithuanian Family that moved to America in hopes of prosperity. In this book, one of the children is sent to work to support the family. “At the end of the week [little Stanislovas] would carry home three dollars to his family, being his pay at the rate of five cents per hour...” If a week’s pay for a child was $3 a week for an 8-9 hour work day, according to the Dollar Times inflation Calculator, in 2015 they would be bringing home about $70 per week. In a full time (40 hour) one week, the median weekly income for an adult in 2015
is $801 dollars. This is 91.2% more than Stanislovas would make; a wage that is not livable.
Despite low pay and long hours, these children kept at it to support their families. They often worked in factories, mills, mines, or peddlers. By the 1870s, there were 750,000 children working in America. Most of the children working were uneducated, and were sent to work instead of going to school. Two more characters from The Jungle were in this exact situation. “So it was finally decided that two more of the children would have to leave school. ...Vilimas, who was 11, and Nikalojus, who was ten. Both of these were bright boys, and there was no reason why their family should starve when tens of thousands of children no older were earning their own livings.” Nowadays it is considered immoral for children to be deprived of an education, being that they hold so much potential. This is just one of the many examples of children leaving school to go to work. It wasn’t until 1836 until children in Massachusetts were required to be in school for at least three months a year.
Labor laws didn’t come into play until after labor unions were formed.
At the time, the country saw no problem with children going to work until unions brought into light the conditions working children faced. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was formed, and advocated for abolishing child labor. It really wasn’t until the start of the great depression until the country’s political views on child labor shifted. It was decided that jobs that children were holding should instead be occupied by adults. So with the help of the NCLC and other aggressive unions against child labor, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1936 became federal law. This was the first time in the U.S that age and pay restrictions were governed by federal law in the United
States.
Yet even though child labor are illegal in the U.S., several years later companies became sly to the lack of child labor laws in other countries, thus exporting labor to places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Kenya. By exporting labor, companies can get away with paying children exceptionally low wages in poor working conditions. And because this labor is exported to other countries, the statement that child labor is not completely eradicated in the U.S in reinforced.
It's no secret that American Companies take advantage of cheap labor overseas, and in the 2000s American companies increased employment overseas by 2.4 million. Children all over the world are reportedly found working for large name brand clothing companies like Nike, Hanes, J.C. Penney, and Puma. These children work 12-14 hours a day making 6 cents an hour. This pay is a lot like what workers of workers in 19th century America, off by only one cent. The shocking thing about how much Halima makes compared to Little Stanislovas, from The Jungle is that Halima makes nearly the same wage that Little Stanislovas made in the 19th Century.
Not only is the low pay strikingly similar, but so are the working conditions. 11 year old Halima who works at the Harvest Rich factory in Bangladesh was interviewed by the Institute of Global Labor and Human Rights. She says, “The wages I make are not fair. When we make mistakes, the shout at us and beat us.” The honest truth about child labor in America is that it's not completely “abolished.” It is said that America is proactive and progressive for making so much progress by not allowing its country’s children to join the workforce. But how much progress is actually made if companies are simply outsourcing cheap labor overseas? Fact of the matter is: if there is no distinguishable difference between the two time periods, then something needs to change. Bibliography
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York City: Barnes & Noble Books, 1906.