Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century “photo stories”
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Even today the US is seeing a rise in child labor law violations: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violat...
The number of minors in violation, has been steadily increasing.
To this day, I'm still appalled that child labor laws don't apply to international goods - it's a little nuts that we say we're against it, but we allow the sale of good made from it still. It'd be neat to force manufacturers to prove no child labor to export to no child labor countries. Anyhoot
Maybe keep it simple and put heavy tariffs on countries that don't police their own child/slave labor.
Which appears to be something the US should do, too.
doesn't apply to us goods either.
did everyone already forgot the meat packing plant (top 50 largest company in the world ot something) caught using children to clean the plant at night?
no photographer would get into those plants today though.
> The number of minors employed in violation of child-labor laws last year was up thirty-seven per cent from the previous year, according to the Department of Labor, and up two hundred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. (These are violations caught by government, so they likely represent a fraction of the real number.)
0. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...
Young me thought: If a kid and their family is dirt poor, should the kids just sit home and starve instead of working to earn an income for themselves? What if the kid _wants_ to work? Are lemon-aid stands `child labor`? Is working in the family store/restaurant child labor?
As an adult, child labor laws seem like a distraction from the real evil: The existence of environments where children feel compelled to perform child labor
And that is very much a question about poverty.
How do you make sure that poor families don't feel so poor that they feel the need to push their kids to work? Our public schools have been a huuuuuge step in this direction (despite all their flaws). Guaranteeing the poor and homeless some amount of food helps with this a lot too.
Of course our current implementations are far from perfect. Poverty is still a big problem in many parts of the US. But I now digress.
My main point: Child labor shouldn't be considered inherently bad. An environment where children FEEL COMPELLED to work as laborers IS bad, and we should focus on eliminating that
Children don't personally decide to work, they are told to by parents / authority / etc.. and they are incredibly vulnerable as employees. Comparing child labour to lemonade stands is ridiculous. There are rules about children working in the family store etc.. and child labour laws explicitly account for this. Child labour laws are explicitly about preventing abusive conditions in factories, fields, and other hard, grueling jobs.
There's simply no way that that kind of child labor provides any benefit to the child, unless they were literally starving, in which case one is faced with a different larger problem.
I'm not supporting child labor, just trying to see it from their perspective.
There is, of course, a line - i don’t think working at McDonald’s when you are 17 is trauma. But working physical labor when you are 12 is.
Young actors or athletes can work very demanding jobs without suffering directly, it’s everything around that work which is often problematic. I bring this up because it’s suffering that’s problematic be that at an elite prep school or a factory, however 12 year olds often enjoy being productive when it’s within their capabilities.
uh yeah? because children are the most vulnerable in our society and need to be protected from people who are trying to exploit them? do you make this same argument for age of consent laws?
> a baptism by fire that carved character out of raw-boned desperation and grueling sweat
i prefer our current standards of living. i suspect that five-year-olds do too.
> The system is a diabolical puppeteer, offering up a sanitized, sterile version of life
yes, this is what progress looks like. instead of toiling in mines, our children can be children.
> bereft of the hardened steel that labor forges
citation needed.
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
Years ago (15?) I looked into this and the numbers were between 20K and 40K people per year. This data is available from multiple reputable national and international organizations. This isn’t ideological, the size of the problem and the misery it creates are matters of verifiable facts anyone can dig up.
Today the problem is massively worse. 100K/year? 200K? Nobody knows with certainty because our government, for some unspeakable reason, seems to think the human misery is worth the political gains.
Anyone who is willing to do some honest digging can get a good picture if the tragedy that has unfolded.
Basically the Republican party (specifically, the House GOP caucus led by Newt Gingrich) created the current system in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), because the right wing of their base was mad about the immigration amnesty that took place during the Reagan administration (a compromise with Congress). They've refused to countenance any sort of compromise since then, insisting on a total border shutdown.
The Democratic party is nominally opposed to this, but its reform proposals have been limited to tinkering around the edges (eg DACA) because when you get down to it, they're terrified of the far right and less aggressive about pursuing their legislative goals. They like to say they're for comprehensive immigration reform, but I'm not aware of any bills they've introduced that spell out specific policies, again because they're terrified of being attacked by the far right.
Americans, if I am to generalize, are pretty ignorant of the world. As an immigrant this much is brutally evident. Even though I have now lived in the US for most of my life, I can't say that I truly get how Americans (born, not naturalized) think of immigration.
Anywhere else in the world --anywhere-- immigration laws are clear as well as strict. This makes sense. You have to have beneficial metrics to the influx. What does this mean? Well, if you are not creating any new jobs that match the skill set of those coming in, you are importing a problem. On the other hand, it is perfectly sensible to be selective and develop entry requirements that align well with internal needs. In lots of countries they have point systems to qualify individuals and families for immigration.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with not being sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate in various parts of the world. It is a simple fact that you cannot take in millions of people without serious consequences if you are not ready for that influx.
For some incomprehensible reason the US has, over the last few years, let in over six million people without much in the way of controls. This, by definition, means, at a minimum, six million unemployed. We are not creating an extra 100K+ jobs per month. This is particularly true of the kinds of jobs these people are likely to qualify for.
What does that mean? Well, at a minimum, any job they land will be taken from someone else. This is what's called a "displacement market"; when you have limited resources, a resource unit taken is a resource unit not available to someone else. This isn't hard to understand.
The other, decidedly ugly, problem, is that millions of people will be exploited in jobs where they will be paid below legal levels. If they are lucky the exploitation ends there.
Sometimes I get the sense that Americans (born, not naturalized) without world and multicultural experience have this idealized sense of immigration through uncontrolled means.
First of all, most people crossing the border illegally are not refugees. Not to go too far, I'm in Mexico as I type this. Wonderful country, despite what US news sources sometimes portray. We are staying at a pretty high end resort. Not cheap. We met this Mexican family who are also staying here. They live in the US. The entire reason for them living in the US is to build a pretty nice house here in Mexico and then move back. I was talking to another guy who was saving money to buy a fleet of trucks and move back to Mexico to start and run a transportation company.
Last week, I was talking to a guy who is going to paint our house. Coincidentally, he is also Mexican. Same thing, he said he flies to Mexico two or three times a year to look after the construction of three homes. One is for him and his family to move into and the other two for rental income.
You can live well in Mexico with $1000 USD per month. The $15/hr minimum wage in the US is a goldmine in this context. Get a bunch of people to share living quarters for a few years and you can save-up (or send) enough money to Mexico to live well.
I am not implying that everyone coming to the US operates this way. That would not be accurate. However, you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world.
Sometimes taking things to ridiculous limits helps understand issues more clearly. We understand zero immigration isn't a good idea. I believe the annual US legal immigration quota is in the order of 1.5 million. Not bad. I would want to understand how people are qualified. I think we need a points system and a process of acceptance that is in sync with our needs. You allocate an additional quota for people who might not qualify through this program. That's fine.
Pushing the limits, if we let in 50 million people --they would absolutely come if we had even less controls-- it would be mayhem. The US has lost most of its industrial base to China. This means we don't really create jobs. Our industrial/manufacturing base isn't expanding at a sufficient rate to justify such influx.
Plainly speaking: Immigration has to be goals-based, limited and controlled. What we have today isn't ANY of those. This isn't good for the US. I have the ugly feeling most Americans don't understand this.
For some incomprehensible reason the US has, over the last few years, let in over six million people without much in the way of controls. This, by definition, means, at a minimum, six million unemployed. We are not creating an extra 100K+ jobs per month.
We create 3-4 times that many jobs, and part of the reason that some states have been loosening child labor regulations is because employers are having a hard time finding people to staff blue collar jobs. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=ne...
at a minimum, any job they land will be taken from someone else.
This is called a 'lump of labor fallacy' by economists. It overlooks the fact that job holders also create additional demand = both personally, as individual consumers who need food, shelter, transport and other necessities (plus some discretionary consumption), as productive workers whose output creates wealth for their employer, which wealth is either reinvested or spent on discretionary consumption, and thirdly as workers whose labor has to be paired with other economic inputs like fuel or tools. Particularly in the agricultural sector, if the labor force isn't available the employer often faces the choice of abandoning a project (eg harvesting crops) crop or not investing to produce it in the first place (eg not planting at the beginning of the season).
However, you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world.
This metaphor implies receiving money without any real effort. Certainly immigrants can make far more money in the US than they would in less developed economies for the same combination of skill and labor. In this sense immigrants are engaging in economic arbitrage, ie supplying demand in one market rather than another. This is normal, and indeed the financial sector handsomely rewards people for doing the exact same thing. If capital can move freely across borders to meet demand, why not labor?
I think we need a points system and a process of acceptance that is in sync with our needs.
This will just make the current dysfunctional system more dysfunctional by adding another thick layer of bureaucracy, political gamesmanship, and potential for fraud or abuse.
The US has lost most of its industrial base to China. This means we don't really create jobs. Our industrial/manufacturing base isn't expanding at a sufficient rate to justify such influx.
Perhaps the US should have instituted capital controls several decades ago instead of letting the monied class fatten itself on the short-term windfalls of outsourcing to markets with an oversupply of cheap labor. But to do so would have been to question market orthodoxy and by extension, the whole notion of capitalism as an organizing principle for a civilization - political heresy in America, not withstanding the absence of any particular economic ideology from its founding documents. Again, it's unclear to me why capital should be allowed to move freely in search of maximum return but labor markets should be subjected to arbitrary controls. There is no coherent economic argument in favor of this unless to include autarkical systems like Juche.
US manufacturing is actually doing great and outpacing the rest of the world, in part because China shut its economic engine down to such a degree during COVID. This trend looks likely to continue for some time given the large subsidies still coming down the pipe for green energy and chip production, both of which the US is trying to re-domesticate to lessen its strategic dependence on China and other low-cost labor markets.
> We create 3-4 times that many jobs
You are confusing job recovery with job creation. In an economy that was devastated by the pandemic, politicians (and statistics) love to show job creation, when, in reality, it's job recovery.
Job creation is easy to define: First get to the point where no person who is able to work has a job. Any job openings beyond that point represent new jobs created for which there might not be people to fill them.
> job holders also create additional demand
I love economists. They know so much about money and economics that every single millionaire and billionaire is has a degree in Economics. It's amazing, really.
Look my friend, if you are going to grab onto wonderful-sounding theories pushed by economists, you might just have to learn the hard way just how stupid these people and their theories can be.
In my world, the instant someone starts quoting economists is the moment they lose a lot of points with me. Just a personal view. I have almost no respect for them. Pick a country, almost any country, and I'll show you economists who have mucked-up the machinery beyond recognition. Almost every country in Latin America has a "favorite" economist people can name as the root of all evil. Sometimes more than one.
>> you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world. > This metaphor implies receiving money without any real effort.
That isn't what I said at all. I stated a fact. Personal money transfers amount to well over $150 billion per year. Mexico alone receives some $60 billion of that. China, about $20 billion. Etc. These are not trivial amounts of money.
This is money doing noting in the US economy and lots elsewhere. The US isn't in good shape. Things are not good. $150 billion dollars is a tremendous amount of money to have exit the economy. That's one hell of an ATM machine for those countries. And, yes, from the perspective of the recipients, it is an ATM machine.
> Perhaps the US should have instituted capital controls several decades ago instead of letting the monied class fatten itself on the short-term windfalls of outsourcing to markets with an oversupply of cheap labor.
That statement (the the bit that follows) betrays an almost complete understanding of what happened and how business actually works. Our politicians have failed us for probably fifty years when it comes to foreign economic policy. That much is evident from the results delivered not just to the US, to the world. This has nothing to do with the popular American academic's ideological hatred of capitalism, which is utterly laughable to the core.
> US manufacturing is actually doing great and outpacing the rest of the world
Sorry my friend, you are as wrong as can be. I have been in manufacturing --across a range of domains, from commercial and industrial to aerospace-- for about 40 years. The fact that we have people in this country believing that manufacturing is "doing great" is sad to watch. it would be funny if it was not tragic.
This is one of the main reasons for which I say we are not creating enough jobs to be importing millions of unemployed. Because, well, we are not.
Sometimes it helps to go through some basic numbers, imperfect assumptions as they might be, just to get a sense of proportion. Assume you bring in 6 million people to work in manufacturing. For simple numbers, let's assume a factory can take 6K workers. That means you need a THOUSAND new factories of that scale to support those workers. You show me where we have built anywhere close to a THOUSAND new factories --of that scale-- and I'll change my mind. Filling-in jobs lost at existing factories isn't new job creation.
> This trend looks likely to continue for some time given the large subsidies still coming down the pipe for green energy and chip production
Yeah, good luck. Keep an eye on that. I sincerely hope you figure it out one day. It might take time.
Do me a favor. Drop the immigration lawyer goal. We don't need more lawyers, we need more entrepreneurs willing to risk life, limb and treasure to create things people need and, as a result, yes, create jobs and make everyone's lives better. Lawyers don't create shit. They are parasites feeding on society. If you really want to understand how reality works, go create something. You won't find the answer in books. And, yes, get as far away from economists as you can as fast as you can.
This should have been:
"First get to the point where EVERY person who is able to work has a job"
I am in the process of designing and planning a new factory. It will likely be located in TX or AZ, because CA is just bat-shit-crazy.
Sounds great, until I explain that our objective is to have this be as automated as possible. Production capacity will be up to 100K units per month (sorry, I can't talk about what we will manufacture). The production line --and the products-- will be designed for nearly 100% automation. Assemblies and components that cannot meet the automation requirements will be outsourced, manufactured abroad and brought-in in automation-ready form. As a result, if everything works out, this will be a lights-out manufacturing line employing just enough engineers and technicians to make it go.
This isn't about greed at all. It simply is impossible to support certain types of jobs in the US when the wage structure is distorted as it is through government interference. Your choices are binary: Automate or outsource. In reality, you, more often than not, have to do both.
Why? Because that's the only way to run manufacturing in the US today. I don't include high-margin aerospace-anything in my definition of manufacturing. When we do aerospace work the financial rules of the game are very different. What's interesting is that neither approach is going to create jobs for dozens of millions of people.
Ocean experience = 0 Having to initiate burning other humans alive experience = 0 Finally, keeping occupier Marines inline and only going to the 'approved' comfort houses (this really made my devout Catholic grandfather who enlisted to 'fight the good fight' sick to see which is ironically why he got stuck in the position) and arresting them when they didn't experience = 0
Maybe world travel, visits to the ocean, mandatory brothel visits, and boating would have helped him do better. Maybe we should send all children on foreign exchange years to seaside towns with brothels, and create mandatory local youth yacht clubs on the off chance they need to be shipped out interact with foreigners versus make them work in factories. About as strong as argument as kids working enabled victory.
This argument would have pissed my grandfather off to no end. Don't justify child labor in their name or off the back of their deeds.
Right: "We used to be great, but now we suck. We should become great again" (though if you ask one, they could prob name things that are better now than they used to be)
Left: "We used to be great in some ways (e.g. income inequality), but now we suck at those. We used to suck in other ways (racism) but now we suck less at those. We should be great at everything instead."
Seems like very similarly shaped desires
Japan’s poor production numbers were not due to lack of successful “pivot” of their workforce, nor of idle hands, nor of lack of skill. Everything was on all cylinders for the war effort.
It was a tiny, resource-poor country of craftsmen and corrupt sycophants fighting an industrial war of attrition, already many years deep in their own theater by the time the US entered. They were doomed even before Pearl Harbor and doubly so afterwards for dozens of reasons aside from their use of child labor prior to the war.
They were towing (handmade, not assembly line) Mitsubishi Zeros out of the jungle by oxen.
The child labor theory is beyond silly.
This thought has a bunch of baked in assumptions that come from your own biases - we certainly have not stood still as a country since 1945. And I don't think shucking oysters or planting crops at age ten would help anyone be a better programmer or physicist or really anything other than manual labor.
I think the equivalent today would be forcing kids to do tech work, as we are out of the industrial age and into the Information Age. But tech work isn’t dirty and going to kill you so there is less incentive to force it on marginalized groups.
That’s why I think it was maybe just a perfect storm of circumstances.
Probably not, or it would have been more difficult or taken longer. That generation is exemplified in Tom Brokaw's truly excellent book The Greatest Generation. He covers the lives of people of that generation and shows how they took life as it came and when adversity struck they managed the best they could and did so without complaint.
I have an interest in the historical aspects of old photographs, those taken in the 19th Century and early 20th, Civil War photos etc. and there's an excellent collection on the Library of Congress web site and among them is a large collection of Lewis Hine's National Child Labor Committee Collection, and I found them very informative—one can learn things from these photos that never make it into the history books. One thing immediately obvious to me was the vast majority of the kids were happy and enjoying themselves. In the photos one sees kids poking fun at other at other ones, a kid in a row behind making fun of one in front of him without his knowledge and so on. They were acting naturally doing what kids do.
The photos depict the harsh life these kids led and their work conditions are clearly unacceptable by today's standards but I'd suggest that for most of human history a kid's life wasn't a bed of roses—a century earlier it'd likely have been worse. One thing is clear from the photos is that these kids had developed an adaption and resilience to life's knocks at a very early age and because they were all in the same boat together they accepted their lives as the norm.
I've mentioned on HN previously that today's kids are much more mollycoddled and protected than even I was as a kid, I was allowed to do things that kids today would never be allowed to do today and my parents weren't harsh, it was just how things were for all kids back then. That freedom meant we experienced more of life's knocks at an early age than today's kids and I reckon it put us in good stead. I worry about today's society where trivial matters are often blown up to seem as if they are life-threatening events.
Incidentally, when browsing through Hine's photographs one thing was very noticeable, many of those kids were dressed in little more than rags but most wore excellent shoes and boots (that is if they wore them, many didn't). I couldn't help thinking I'd like a few pairs of them myself. I've never gotten to the bottom of this, why was the quality of the footwear seemingly so much better a century ago than it is today?
LOC's Child Labor collection: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/