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Safe working conditions also took a backseat to sheer survival for children toiling in 19th century mines. That’s no an argument for it being right, but for the need of hash enforcement of labor laws to soften the inevitable edges of a market economy.

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Or is it? Look at cases where SEA countries were pushed to stop using child labor in their factories. It was done more by economic pressure than by law, but the end result was that those children ended up much worse off. To the companies that were pushing the economic pressure, is that a result they were okay with?

What happened? I would naively imagine that if factory owners were forced to stop employing children, they would in turn hire more adults, which would drive wages up for the parents? It sounds like something else happened.

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