August 10, 2021 • 52 mins
Child labor is no laughing matter. Even though we've taken care of it in the USA (mostly), it's still an issue around the globe. Listen and learn!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out
there hovering around in the digital um weird audio ether
(00:22):
and this is stuff you should know. This is gonna
be a good, uplifting, fun one and bouncy light one.
I think so. And it's you know, hot off the
presses from our My daughter just wrote this episode for us. Yeah, yeah,
in record time too. I was impressed. He didn't pay her,
(00:42):
did you no? But it's funny. I went to look up.
You know, I've talked before about the end of the
fact that I started working when I was thirteen at
a barbecue restaurant and uh, minimum wage when I started
working was three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. Wow,
how far we've come at are they've doubled it whatever?
(01:04):
Forty years? Isn't that nuts? Dude? Yeah, and you know
we'll get to that. But I have a list of
kind of where we ended up with minimum wage along
the years. But yeah, JJ's barbecue three thirty five an hour, baby,
that's pretty great. My first um uh job was even
younger than that. I was like nine or ten when
I was a paper boy. Yeah, I mean I couldn't
(01:27):
have made more than because that was only It's not
like I was working every units, working weekends. I probably
made like less than fifty dollars a week. M hmm.
But I mean your third teen, where were you spending
on thirteen? And like a good clean Christian kid, you
weren't spending that on anything. Archie comic except has a
lot of Archie comics do, Yes, it does, although they
(01:47):
have a lot of variations, so you could easily spend
fifty dollars a week on Archie comics back then, though
those those things were cheap. I was living high on
the hog. But so it sounds like a man. It's
so our buddy Dave helped us out with this one,
Dave Ruse, and he makes a really good point that
you and I sitting around talking about you know, you
(02:07):
made fifty bucks a week. I was a paper boy.
Like whatever stresses and troubles that we ran into post
you know, seventies something, um, As far as our first
jobs go when we were younger, that does not qualify
as child labor. That's that's not really what we're talking
about here. Today's exactly it's called you just stop your
(02:29):
griping right now, because there are actual kids out there
who are like real deal child laborers who work in
like dangerous conditions for little to know pay, who don't
get to play, who may not socialize with other kids
their age. They may live and work in a mining
camp with nothing but adults and grown ups, um like
(02:51):
like the there there. They would they would kill for
you know, a JJ's barbecue job. Basically, yeah, And this
is a good time to be talking about that particular
because this is is the International Year for the Elimination
of child labor. And as you'll see throughout this episode,
we've made a lot of strides here in the US,
(03:11):
but like you said, it's not not that way everywhere,
and it should and I should say it's probably a
little off the mark to say that a child laborer
would kill for a better job. They would probably kill
the just not have to work at all in general,
and just to get get to be a kid. And
I think ultimately, for people who are activists against child labor,
(03:32):
that's the goal. It's not like get better, better working
conditions for six year olds it's to like just make
six year olds not have to work any longer. And
we'll talk about how to solve that, how that that
UM International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor aims
to do that. They have some pretty pragmatic ideas UM
(03:52):
and so hopefully they'll this this episode of a nice
bow on the end. But we're gonna have to slog
through some misery to get there, Chuck, take it a way.
There's no better place to slog through misery than the
founding of this country, way back in the old days,
when the New World was new and settlers came over,
(04:14):
and they very much believed And why why did I
think this was ed? You said, this is Dave. Yeah,
I'm almost positive it was Dave. Was It reads like
a Dave to me. But oh man, if it's dead,
I'm sorry. Sorry to both. Sure, you need to get
those guys together one day. I think maybe we should
keep them far apart exactly they might they might turn
(04:35):
against us. Uh. Yeah, So they believe very much that
the idol's hands were the Devil's workshop, that old saying.
And you know, this is one of those It was
kind of hard for me to you know, let's let's
just lop off, you know, developing nations today, which is
clearly awful. I found myself as an adult more and
more with the cultural relativism, thinking like, obviously, five year
(04:58):
old shouldn't be working in factory. But when I read
about like twelve and thirteen year olds working hard back then,
I was kind of like, it's not great, but it was.
That's just kind of how it was at the time.
If you had parents that were farmers, you're not gonna,
you know, be just hanging out until your sweet sixteenth
(05:18):
birthday having a good time. You're gonna be working from
a pretty young age. And I found myself more and
more thinking like, you know, in certain situations, that wasn't
the worst thing, but then you get to the industrial revolutions,
and you know, that's what things really got bad. But
kind of early on, that's really what we were talking
about was a lot of kids working on the farms,
(05:40):
a lot of boys working on the farm, girls working
in the house alongside their sisters and mom. And you know,
this kind of started when they were about thirteen years old.
They were sort of expected to either go work and
get a job and work full time, or to become
an apprentice and unpaid apprentice, uh to work for food
and board and training. And I think also in addition
(06:03):
to that Protestant work ethic of them, like in like
just completely in the fabric of America that was just
coming out in you, it's also this idea of like
what else are you gonna do? It's not like you
consider around and play video games or watch TV or
do almost anything else except just play outside. Um But Chuck,
(06:24):
I went back and looked to see if it was
always this way, And apparently in medieval England you played
basically until you hit puberty, and then you started to
get put to work when you hit puberty at four right,
more like fourteen. But like there was like a childhood,
and it seems to have been somewhat wiped out by
(06:45):
that Protestant work ethic that the Puritans brought over um.
Or at the very least it was set back a
little more, you know, agewise, where you started working maybe
a little sooner than you would have had you been
in medieval England at the time. Right, I think, I
guess I'm just trying to draw a line between life
in the sixteen forties and then life in nineteen thirty
(07:08):
eight when we eventually did something about it in the US. Yeah, no, totally.
And there is an enormous distinction between that because it
was it was like widespread, but it just it seemed
like they were mostly working with their families and it
was just kind of the way that things were. That
was how life was. But able to try and like
keep your family alive. It's not like you know, they were.
They were trying to just all survive basically, right, And
(07:30):
that's actually the reason why it's still around in other
parts of the world today. It's not not even necessarily
like a like a work ethic where children should should
work because idle hands are the devil's playthings, like the
Puritans thought. He said, it's like this is an extra
worker we can have go out and make money to
keep the rest of the family alive. We just don't
(07:51):
have a choice in not doing that. And that's that's
what drives it still today. Right. Uh. When the Industrial
Revolution came around, and we're talking about basically cotton factories
in a big, big way, Uh, there are a lot
of little kids working there, and people like George Washington
and Alexander Hamilton's thought that was awesome they did. And like,
(08:13):
we're going to be skewered for even suggesting that Hamilton's
said this, but he did. He said that women and
children in America would be quote rendered more useful by
manufacturing establishments than the otherwise would be. Um, and I
think what are you're saying is like, I'm not even
(08:33):
going to paraphrase what do you say? And I think
it's it. You can understand it on its face. Yeah,
he's saying, well, you know, they're not doing much use
for us, these kids. And he's mainly talking about kids
here who would other what quote, who would otherwise be idle? Uh,
this isn't Lynde mal Manuel Miranda saying this we all
love him. No, this isn't he didn't say this in
a charming wrap. No, this is the real Alexander Hamilton's. Uh.
(08:56):
And again it was just a different time. Um. But
even way back then in the early eighteen hundreds, not
everyone thought this was a great thing. Uh. There was
a future mayor of Boston named Josiah Quincy who toured
a cotton factory, a cotton spinning factory, and they had
(09:16):
you know, four year old working there all the way
to ten, uh, maybe ten twelve hours a day for
anywhere from twelve to cents a day, not an hour.
And he said, uh, compassion calls us to pity these
little creatures plying in a contracted room among flyers and
(09:37):
cogs at an age when nature requires for them air
space and sports. There was a dull dejection and the
countenance of all of them. And uh, you know, we'll
get to some of these photos of some of these
kids later on. When you look at them, they look
like beaten down miniature adults. Yeah, they really do. They
(09:58):
look like us exact. They look ready to retire, they
look unhappy, they look um yeah, just beaten down. But
their miniature and their kids, their children. And it's really
upsetting to see that a photograph of that. I'm sure
it's even more upsetting to see it in real life. Um.
And that's actually how a lot of this, a lot
of changes came through, was just people being exposed to
(10:21):
seeing that and kind of being shocked, having their conscience shocked.
But as as potentially like bad as it was for
the children of colonial America who were forced to work, um,
it got way way worse when the Second Industrial Revolution
kicked off. The one powered by steam and steel and
railroads and and unbridled capitalism. When you inject unbridled capitalism
(10:46):
into uh a um an economy that allows for child labor,
you can imagine that things are going to get much
much worse for the children before it finally gets better.
That's right. And things did get worse when you're when
all those sudden you have a robust steel industry and
coal mining industry, um you have railroads that need this
(11:07):
stuff in a big, big way, and they uh, you know,
partially kind of ran out of workers and partially just
saw what was right underneath their noses, which is these
kids who they at this point they had long known
that they could work and farm and work hard. So
they said, you know what, a lot of these families
in rural America, farming dried up a bit, so they
(11:27):
moved to the city. A lot of it was immigrant labor,
as millions of people came into the country from Europe
fleeting their poverty famine stricken countries, and no matter where
they came from, it was all under the thumb of
the robber barons, which was I can't remember when we did.
It feels like a few two or three years ago,
(11:48):
but pretty good podcast on the Robber Barons. Yeah, and
we also talked about them, uh in our book keeping
Up with the too. But yeah, so like these the
robber Aaron's got rich through innovation, through consolidation, through some
pretty clever stuff. A lot of them invented new techniques
or processes or procedures, so like they definitely were doing something.
(12:12):
They were being productive, but they also got to be
filthy rich off of the backs of immigrant labor, child
labor that they directly exploited. And um, it was basically
like there was just nobody looking out for anybody else
at this time. It was just such a period of
(12:34):
such enormous economic insurgents that there weren't there weren't anybody,
or there wasn't anybody who was sitting there saying like wha, everybody,
we need to stop and really think about this and
do this in a much more directed, smarter, healthier way
for our society. It was like it was like just go, go,
let's see where this takes us. And a lot of
people got trampled underfoot, and that definitely included children labors
(12:57):
or child laborers. That's right, And uh, I think that's
a good time for a break. Ya ya, that's two
yea's Anna's m So we'll be back and we'll talk
a little bit about what some of these jobs might
have been in the late nineteenth century for these kids.
Right after this. I wonder how many gallons of coffee
(13:43):
everyone who has listened to this this show since the
beginning has heard me drink. I didn't even hear you drinking.
Oh you didn't. When I said I had, I had
a mouthful of cafe. Oh interesting, I have no shirt on. Nice.
That's awesome, man, you just top mine. True. I think
(14:10):
you should have left it mysterious, Chuck, because there were
a few people out there who were about the email
and say I was offended that Chuck said he wasn't
wearing a shirt. Yeah. Now, I put it on right
before we recorded. I had it off. It's it's a
little hot. I felt like I needed to dress up.
But the teacher, right, I do you are you worried
one of those tuxedo shirt? You ever had one of those?
(14:31):
Did you ever know? I didn't know. I didn't either.
You didn't. You didn't wear them with your rainbow suspenders.
Now that's that stuff was a little too cute cee
even for me. Okay, what about the one that looks
like I would wear it? What about one that looks
like a like a ripped like chest and abdomen? Have
(14:52):
you warrn T shirt like that? No? Those are fun,
though I think for certain people they're fun. They're also
like really good at boost your ego. Quietly sure, there's
nothing like me looking in a mirror at my beer
belly covered in spray painted abs. It really works your brain.
The brain is so dumb that it falls for it
(15:13):
every time I can attest um. All right, So we
were gonna talk about what some of these jobs might be,
and it kind of really depended on where you were living. Um,
if you lived in the city or if you lived
in a company town where they have these factories, you
were gonna be working in factories flipped out. In the
rural areas, you gonna be working on farms. And most
most Americans still lived on farms at the time, so
(15:36):
most child labor took place on farms. But if you
were on that farm, you're gonna be picking cotton and tobacco.
You're gonna be picking a lot of stuff and doing
all the sort of stuff that goes on after the picking,
which is semming d C. And all that stuff shucking
(15:57):
and stuff I did. When I was a kid, we
had a big, big garden and my mom took us
to the canary. Uh and it was awful. I hated it.
Took you to the canary to like for a sight
seeing trip or for work too. Can so like there
was a canary that your mom went to. You guys
had so much stuff you had to go to a
second location to cannon. That was a cannary in Decab County,
(16:21):
a sort of industrial cannary for the people. And we
would take green beans and corn and uh, we made
preserves and all kinds of stuff. And they had like
and you know, you could can your own junk there.
It sounds like a lot of utopia. And yeah, and
we would you know, put sharpie, like beans on the
(16:43):
can on sharpie put it in the bandary. That's really
really interesting. I had no idea that there was a
canary in de Cab County. Yeah, not too far from
where I live now. Actually it's like fifteen minutes away.
Probably do you shudder every time you pass it? I
do a little actually, bit I don't pass it much.
But it's over near the dog pound where you can
(17:04):
go adopt a dog, And so I think we adopted
Niko there and I drove by the canary and just like, yeah,
it was hot. Well, you were lucky you weren't five
or six and left there to work all day every day,
aren't you. Yes, for almost no money. Yeah, pennies for
a bucket of whatever you shucked or shelled or did
whatever peeled. Um. Yeah, working at a canary would probably
(17:26):
not have been very fun. Um. They were also furnace
stoking jobs available, whether you wanted them or not. What else, chuck? Uh, Well,
kids did work in canaries. They also worked in textile mills.
They had bob and boys and bob and girls. This
one doesn't sound so bad to me, but I'm sure
I'm missing something that makes it atrocious. Well, I mean
(17:46):
they would climb up on the machine and remove the bobbin's,
the full bobbin's and replacing them with empty ones. So
I don't think that was like the worst job in
the world, But when you're doing that for ten or
twelve hours a day in your six it's probably a
bit of a buzz skill. Yeah, yeah, I have a
problem inherently with child labor in general. Not like having
(18:09):
a job like you or I had first they're got
a problem with that, but child child, any kind of
child labor, even if it is kind of cush comparatively. No,
I agree that one wasn't terrible. It may have been dangerous.
I don't know. There's no Yeah, there's no way it
wasn't dangerous. It had to have been dangerous. We're talking
about the nineteenth century and industry. It was dangerous in
some way. There was no osha no, if that was
(18:35):
if you did live in the city and did work
around factories, Um, you would do that. But there were
also plenty of other jobs you could deliver, like the
essentially they call them telegraph boys, sort of delivering you know,
emails basically by hand to people all over town. You
could shine shoes, You could sell newspapers like you did.
(18:57):
I didn't stand on a street corner. I was in
a newsy. We'll talk a little more about news is
in a second. I was a delivery boy, and not
a not a really great one either. I frequently overslapped,
and um, it was not good at delivering papers. My
mom and my oldest sister would have to do my
route once in a while. Yes, um, and uh. The
(19:19):
thing is is like they also make you shake down
the people for their delinquent subscriptions. So I was like
a strong arm guy too for the Toledo blade as well.
I want my two dollars. Basically, that's exactly right, and
that was right in my wheelhouse too. I was like,
this hits a little too close to home for me.
Laugh at the kid. I know what he's going through.
I've had to put my foot in somebody's door before
(19:41):
to get there two dollars. I didn't ask for a time.
I haven't seen that in a while. That was a
good movie classic. Uh, if you lived in the mountains
of Appalachia, you might have been a breaker boy um
or a mule handler. And breaker boys will get I
guess we can go ahead and tell everyone that is
you would sit around and and break apart lumps of
(20:04):
coal into uniform pieces all day long and break dance
on your brakes. Yeah, break your boys. But that was it.
And they wouldn't let you wear gloves while you were
a break your boy too, because they're like, no, no,
you can't break these things as uniformly if you wear gloves,
you stupid kid. So you you have to basically absorb
all of this coal dust into your skin, get all
(20:27):
sorts of little cuts and callouses and all that by
the time you're six seven eight, um, and just do this.
This is your life. Now, Welcome to Pennsylvania. Right. Uh. Then,
let's say you managed to escape all forms of formal
jobs your parents that they didn't make you go to
the factory. You did live in the city, so you
didn't have to work on a farm, and you might
(20:48):
think you just had it made in the shade. Not so,
because there was plenty of jobs that you could do
right there from your cretty little tenement apartment, like weaving
baskets or making paper flowers, or hand rolling cigars and
cigarettes all day long and selling them. Yeah, it was like,
you know, your whole family worked on a farm, or
(21:08):
if you live in a tenement, your whole family worked,
you know, in what are called tenement industries. So there
was basically not a lot of escape. I get the
impression that you basically had to have wealthy parents to
not be forced into child labor at the time. Yeah,
and I might have mentioned this once before my mom
did a thing for a little while where, uh, we
(21:29):
would make money doing like stuffing envelopes. Did you remember
that stuff? I do? And I don't remember what it
was four. I guess they were for companies. Okay, I
want to say Easter Seals had people do that too,
but I'm sure they didn't pay. So this would be
like a company that would have like a packet they
(21:50):
would send out to had like five things in it,
and we would be responsible for getting all that stuff
in huge boxes, assembling it all into the envelopes that
they could mail, and we would get paid as a
family to do that. That's cute. That's super late seventies
early eighties. Like I can see your mom talking on
the princess phone making all the arrangements for them to
ship that tour and getting the instructions, you know, and
(22:11):
then hanging up in that fifty ft long cord just
kind of coils up on its own quietly on the floor. Yeah.
And I didn't mind that so much because I made
a little money and I could That's something I could
do while I watched television. Yeah, totally. It's just the
perfect job, as we all know. Yeah, not exactly a
high pressure job. It sounds like I wouldn't even know
if that qualifies as a tenement industry, to tell you
(22:33):
the truth. No, not in the seventies. No, you had
a lot of jobs. So as a kid, good for
you that protests wanted my own money, Protestant work ethic
shining through like a city upon a hill. Should we
talk newsies? Yeah we should. And I think also the
newsy Um strike that we're going to mention deserves its
(22:54):
own episode, at least short, if not its own episode. Okay,
so yeah, let's just not talk about newsies. No. Now,
I thought the same thing, And the more I got
into the strike, I was like, this is just too much.
We gotta do something. But the idea was that little
boys would buy a stack of newspapers wholesale for about
(23:16):
fifty cents per girls too, I saw girls that did
it too. Oh, girls did it too, all right, and
they sold them for a penny a piece. That they
would make half a penny per paper. Uh, selling in
the big cities, especially New York City of course. And
then eventually in they did go on strike and it
was a big deal. It kind of ground I mean,
(23:37):
it didn't grind them to a complete halt. But it
really disrupted their their flow in getting newspapers into the
hands of people. Dude. The their sales over this two
weeks strike went down two thirds. Yeah, like they brought
the They brought Pulitzer, Pulitzer and um Herst to their knees,
basically these newsies did. And they got some concessions too. Yeah,
(24:00):
And I think the deal was is that morning subscribers
were generally subscribers, or the morning paper was generally for subscribers,
but it was that afternoon paper, that second edition that
the news he's really raked it in on because most
people didn't subscribe to that, and so they really weren't
selling any second editions hardly. And the one big concession
(24:21):
they got, which was huge, was they got them to
agree to full buy backs on unsold papers, which is
a really really big deal. But it also really kind
of goes to show you how much the newspaper barons
believed news these were scrappy enough that they wouldn't just
sit around and be like, I don't have to sell these,
(24:41):
you know, I don't have to worry about this. You know,
they'll they'll be bought back anyway. I don't have to
work to sell them. Well, but buyback just means they
give them back the money they paid for him. It's
not like they would make any money. They would just
in fact, it incentivize them, I think, to take out
more papers and some more papers because any of they
wouldn't be stuck with them. Yeah, totally, we'll probably edit
(25:04):
that part out. So. Um, one of the things you
mentioned was making cigars like in your family's one room
apartment in say New York or something like that, right, Yeah,
And that was apparently really bad and that not only
did you work long hours for very little pay in
(25:25):
cramped working conditions with with your family on top of
everything else. Um, you would frequently come down with nicotine
poisoning as a little kid because you're rolling cured sometimes
you're handling uncured tobacco, um, and you're ingesting lots of
nicotine through your skin. At that's like you know, in
a single day, and so you might be nauseated, you
(25:47):
might be dizzy, you might just turn green. Um. It
can get worse than that too. You actually can suffer
respiratory distress as well. And apparently this is a big
problem still with child laborers in Zimbabwe, because I think
about twenty years ago that country doubled down on their
tobacco production and now it's like one of the biggest,
um the biggest exports of Zimbabwe. But it's also a
(26:10):
very poor country, so they use child labor a lot,
and so children are still to this day being exposed
to tobacco and they're rolling, uh, they're handling tobacco, they're
rolling stuff, they're rolling cigars, they're sorting it. Um, they're
just the kids in tobacco should not be in the
same room together, basically. Yeah, you know, it never occurred
(26:31):
to me that that. I guess it would be a
transdermal ingestion, right, but sure, I mean you put tobacco
on be stings and all kinds of things, so of
course it's going to get into their skin. Yeah. And
having gotten myself sick on tobacco a time or two
in my life, I can tell you it is not pleasant.
And to do it against your will just because you're
(26:52):
handling it for your job that you don't even want,
is that sounds torturous? Actually? Yeah, I love that's Uh,
should you retell it for people haven't heard it? Are
you talking about eighth grade in the tree fort is
that when you like smoked a whole pack of cigarettes
and got sick. It was more like a pack and
a half. Okay, it was right after I first started smoking,
(27:16):
and I was like, I was like, I really like
how this makes me feel. Let's see how like thirty
of these things make me feel. And I was saying
reading comic books up in the tree fort in the
woods that my friends and I had built, and uh,
I just went too far. Man. I felt so bad. Man,
Like like I felt like I looked green. It was.
(27:39):
It was bad news. That's one of those moments where
you like, you really wish you could have like video
footage kind of what I look like. I kind of
hope when when I die, it's a little bit like
defending your life so they can shoot. I'll be like,
show me that one. Well, we can go over the
other stuff. I really want to see that clip. Yeah,
ripped torn will be there. Yeah. The upside of this, though,
(28:00):
is do not ever start smoking. I deeply regret ever
having started smoking as a kid. As an adult, it
doesn't matter, Like, just don't ever start smoking and do
yourself a real favor. You did a great job quitting, though,
and you never looked back. Nope, I didn't. Good job
it was. It was surprisingly easy because I was like
(28:21):
one one more thing. I think, if there are people
out there who are considering smoking right now and are
worried about the time they're going to have, one of
my big worries was that I was going to spend
every day of the rest of my life wishing for
a cigarette. And that's just not how it goes. Like
you spend a week, two weeks if it's really bad,
maybe three weeks really longing for a cigarette, and then
it starts to get easier and easier, and then eventually
(28:43):
you're grossed out by the thought of cigarettes and people
smoking cigarettes around you, and you don't ever want to
see one again. So if that's what's keeping you from quitting,
don't let it, because that's not how it is. I
like that. Good Thanks man. Thanks. I think before we break,
maybe we'll just go over some of the final stats here.
Uh at the basically the peak and about nineteen hundred
(29:07):
UM by eighteen ninety one out of every five kids
under sixteen was working. UM one point seven million kids
under sixteen was six percent of the total workforce in
the nine hundred census, and that's just kids who were
registered to work in these factories, like that does not
(29:28):
include these kids rolling scars in their house or the
kids on the family farm. So it was much much
higher than that. Yeah, because I think two thirds of
kids um in general in the in the country worked
in agriculture. So yeah, if they were not counting agriculture,
they missed out on a lot of kids in that number.
And that's still a staggering number in and of itself,
(29:48):
one point seven million. Yeah. And if you're wondering back
then what effect this had on education, just a snapshot
from Philadelphia in nineteen hundred, fifteen percent of thirteen year
old boys had less school to work. And I think
half a fifteen year old boys were not in school
anymore because they were working or the and like a
(30:09):
significant portion because they were naughty, right, yeah, and they
just didn't want to do anything. But get this, this
is the staggering one to me, seventeen year old boys
only ten percent of them were still in school in
nine in Philadelphia. That is that does not bode well
for the future um of a of a of a
an economy. And I think that actually is one reason
(30:32):
why public education became so much more compulsory, and one
reason why people came around to anti child labor laws
is the idea that, no, there's a lot more that
they could be doing than just working in a factory,
almost literally their entire lives, Like, we can do we
can do better, and we can build a better a
better society and a better economy if we invest in
their education instead of robbing them of it. All right,
(30:56):
I guess we'll take a break and talk about when
that started in earnest and it was just then when
you mentioned it, so Chuck Um, it turns out that
(31:31):
there were so the progressive error is one of my
favorite errors, or I should say the people from the
progressive error, or some of my favorite people like Francis Perkins,
although she was a second or third wave progressive performer,
but she was inspired by some of these earlier ones
who were working on things like UM fair wages like
a minimum wage, minimum or maximum work days or working
(31:53):
hours UM. And then they also trained their sights on
things like ending child labor or at the very least
really restricting the amount of work a kid could do,
especially UM in regards to them being in school too.
The idea was to put school first and then if
the kid had the wherewithal or their parents really needed
(32:13):
the money or something like that, they could let them
work in addition to school. But the school needed to
come first. And this is really radical because I mean
it seems radical. We had kids rolling cigars in their
one room apartment in New York, their whole lives, and
now all of a sudden some people are coming up
and be like, no, no, no, it should be in
school and then maybe working, preferably not working. So how
(32:35):
do we make that happen? Yeah, it was a very
big deal. And most of these or a lot of
them were women, people like Jane Adams and Julia Lathrop
and Lillian ward Um anti poverty measures and this is
stuff that you know. They would also go on to
champion uh, women's rights and women's rights and the workforce
(32:56):
and women's rights to vote. So it was the whole
progressive movement was kind of tied up and all these
you know, radical ideas about you know, being fair and
good decent human being, right. Radical? Um, So, uh, here's
the problem is, you've got these robber barons and these
factory owners. And then these industrialists who are like, wait
(33:16):
a minute, we got a good deal going. Because we
don't have to pay these kids much, they're probably not
going to unionize. Like the newsies thing was definitely an
anomaly that didn't happen much. And he said, they were like,
we gotta we got a good thing going, and uh
so we're gonna lobby against this as hard as we can.
But surely they were unsuccessful. Right, No, they were successful.
(33:39):
They did. They blocked a log of legislation early on
for this kind of regulation. Um, federally states, Uh, you know,
it kind of depends on where it was, but states
did establish child labor commissions in some states had some
minimum ages, minimum or maximum hours and minimum wages. It
was they were sparse. I couldn't find what states passed it.
(34:02):
But um, for the most part, there were there was
a probably for the most part, though, there was a
a lot of pushback and enough pushback among the states,
um the residents of the states that that not a
lot got passed. So there was a progressive movement that
started saying like the eighteen nineties and it had to
(34:24):
it basically like any progressive movement, it ran full steam ahead,
hit a huge wall of industry and then had to
slowly just keep pushing and pushing and chugging and chugging
and keeping at it for a few decades before it
was successful. Um. And one of the ways that it
became successful with the way that it kept pushing at
it after it hit that wall of industry is UM
a group called the National Child Labor Committee formed and
(34:47):
I think they formed in back in nineteen o four,
and they were basically they became a lobbying group to
lobby against the lobbying against child labor laws that ended
child labor. Yeah, and they had a pretty smart way
to get attention, and uh that was in hiring a
photographer named Lewis Hine to go around and sneakily document
(35:10):
what was going on with his camera. Yeah, he was
He worked as a sociologist and a teacher and then
later became a photographer. Was also a photographer, and uh,
I think he himself was a kid who was working
twelve thirteen hour days, so he was like, let me
start taking pictures of these kids and maybe that because
you know, that's worth a thousand words, they say at
(35:31):
least five thousand, So that means that he took fifty
thousand words, No, five five thousand. I'm just kidding your confidence.
It was totally wrong. It was purposefully wrong. Though. Let
me just do that real quick, to do carry the one.
(35:53):
He took five million words. That's a lot of words. Um.
And if you go back, you probably seen a bunch
of these pictures. Have you seen pictures of very unhappy
kids outside of a coal mine, or standing on the
mountains of shucked oysters, or standing around factory machines like
little mensture adults? They were probably Lewis Hynes photos. Yeah,
(36:16):
I mean five thousand photos, all archived in the Library
of Congress. Um, from what I understand. Um. And he
had like a really great eye to begin with. Like
they're really great photographs in and of themselves. But you know,
you don't have to sit there and like, you know,
try to really contemplate it. It just hits you immediately
what you're looking at and how sad what you're looking
(36:37):
at is. And so he and the National Child Labor
Committee got these into newspapers. Um. And like you said, uh,
he was very sneaky. He would poses different things. Um.
One of them made sense to me. The industrial machinery photographer. Okay,
got that, but what excuse what a Bible salesman have
(36:59):
for taking photographs of the kids at the factory. I
could not find that save my life. I mean the
only thing I could think is that got him in
the door. And then maybe he was like, and I
just love kids, and can I take some pictures? But
I don't know. And this is a time before stranger danger,
I guess. So they were like, sure, I mean they're
child labors. I don't care about him. Yeah, he also
(37:21):
um he wore a special jacket where he had the
buttons on the jacket aligned in known measurements. So if
he went over and stood like he would take a
kid's picture, and he would ask, you know, they're documented
like their names and their ages and stuff as best
he could. But he would go stand next to them
if he felt like he couldn't outright ask what their
age was, to kind of tip off that maybe he
(37:44):
was not a Bible salesman. Uh. And you know, if
the kid went up to the second or third button,
he would know roughly how tall they were, or no,
he would know how tall they were then roughly how
old they were. The other thing were giants, right right. Yeah,
I'm sure you know he didn't get him all right,
but you know, you can't win them all. But the
other thing that made it, um, that jacket special, chuck,
(38:06):
was that the lining was made of a t shirt
of a ripped chest and abdomen. And it would make
him feel really good about himself when he put that
jacket on. Oh that's good, let's call it. Uh When
did things finally changed though? Uh, well, they started to
kind of change like these These pictures shocked the conscience
(38:27):
of the nation when they when they saw them, when
they made them in the newspapers, and they were accompanied
by muckra getting articles about how bad these conditions were.
And you know, shame on you, America for turning a
blind eye to this kind of thing. Um. But it
wasn't like an instantaneous switch was thrown. It still took decades.
I think. The first proposal for anti child labor um
(38:49):
legislation came in nineteen oh six. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana,
UM was the first to propose. It got taken up
in nineteen sixteen by the Key Eating Act that was
actually passed, but the Supreme Court shut it down. Um.
And then there was some more legislation that there was
a constitutional amendment actually that got passed but wasn't ratified
(39:11):
by the States. And then it wasn't until the Great
Depression and the New Deal that it finally got passed.
And I think if it were just the New Deal,
it wouldn't have gotten passed. But the Great Depression changed
things socially enough that it opened the door for an
end to child labor in America. Yeah, Like, ironically, I
think massive unemployment with so many adults out of work,
(39:34):
they couldn't turn around and just hire kids to do
these jobs for lower wages. It was I mean, even
at a time when its a bad look didn't really
matter as much as as it does today, they even
knew that that was a really bad look and that
they probably couldn't do something like that. So eventually the
Fair Labors Fair Labor Standards Act of Thank You Francis
(39:58):
Perkins or old Buddy, that's right, among others UM, this
finally set a national minimum wage for the very first time,
maximum number of hours for workers, and then child labor limitations,
notably that if you are under sixteen, you cannot work
in manufacturing and you cannot work in coal mining at
(40:19):
all because they're just too dangerous. Another couple of things
that did it established over time time and a half.
Oh yeah, so if you went over forty hours a week,
you could only work up to forty four, but you
could work four hours at time and a half. And
that very first minimum wage was twenty five cents an hour.
Man uhe went up to thirty forty five, it went
(40:42):
up to forty. Uh in nineteen fifty six, it finally
reached a dollar kitching and it didn't crack six dollars
until two thousand eight. I know, dude, it's just shameful,
isn't that nuts? We definitely need to do a minimum
wage episode two because it's just not as cut and
dried as Yeah, it's raised a minimum wage, like there's
(41:04):
just it's like there's a lot to it. I really
want to do one on that. Yeah. I hadn't really
kept up with it because I before I got salary jobs,
I worked as a waiter for fifteen or twenty years
or something so or as a p A on movie
sets and TV sets, and that's not an hourly thing either,
(41:24):
So like I hadn't had an hourly rate job since college,
so I didn't really know, you know, kind of how
it changed over the years. I did not know it
was two thousand and eight when they cracked six dollars.
That's really low, it really is. It's very it's it's
just not okay, and it's still it's seven something right now.
It's no, it's seven five, actually I think it's yeah,
(41:46):
that's the national minimum wage. Right. Yeah. Again, some of
the states are are raising stuff slowly but surely, but
that's the federal one. Still, this is Alabama doesn't have
a minimum wage. Is that right? Is that possible? Yeah,
that's possible. Man doesn't have to look into that. That's
on the fly. So, um yeah, we'll do a whole
one on minimum wage for sure coming up. But um,
(42:10):
you said that. The the Fair Labor Standards Act was
um past in night and it's still basically governs child
labor um And one of the things that it does, Chuck,
is it it divides uh, child labor into agricultural and
non agricultural jobs. And with agriculture or non agricultural jobs,
(42:32):
there's like a pretty decent amount of protections, like kids
can't work in hazardous stuff until they're eighteen, things like blasting, mining,
forest firefighting, that kind of stuff. Um that if you're
under sixteen, you can only work a maximum of three
hours a day during the school year. Um, there's some exemptions.
(42:53):
Did you see the thing about home based wreathmaking. Yeah,
so you cannot non agriculturally, you cannot work if you're
under fourteen at all. Like I could not have worked
as a bus boy at thirteen, supposedly, but I still did.
Um unless that was passed since then, because this thing
has been ratified a million times or not ratified but amended.
(43:15):
But yeah, if you're a child actor, you can work
if you're under fourteen. Obviously, if you're a newsy you
can still deliver newspapers if you're under fourteen. And home
based wreathmaker, it's so weird. It is weird. And not
only is it, home based wreathmaking is exempted from child
labor laws in the United States. It has to be
(43:35):
a specific kind of reath that has to be mostly
evergreen wreaths. So if you're making reads and it has
to be at home. If you're having your kid make
reads at home and they're not mostly evergreen, that's illegal.
And if they're making things out of Evergreen that are
not reads like say Garland that's illegal, specifically homemade reads
(43:58):
that are mostly Evergreen. It's really really interesting. It's one
of the most bizarre facts we've ever talked about on
this episode. Yes show. Yeah, we're going to keep that
one in my pocket totally. But agricultural though, they have
like very little protection, like almost shamefully little protections. Yeah,
if you're sixteen years old and you live on your
family farm, they can work you. Um, there's no living
(44:22):
on how many hours they can work you. You can
work jobs at the Department of Labor considers hazardous. I
think fourteen year olds also can work unlimited hours if
it's outside the school day, and then the kids as
young as twelve I think actually twelve and younger can
work with parental consent. Yeah, yeah, basically unlimited hours or
(44:45):
at least up to seventy two hours, and that's during
the school year as well. And as a result of this,
of child farm workers graduate from high school here and
you know the in the United States we're talking about,
and the hundred thousand of them are injured on the
job every year. Child farm laborers and a lot of
(45:07):
trying to get changed. Yeah, they're basically saying, like, look,
just just take these things that we apply to non
agricultural jobs and apply to agricultural problems solved, and that
would solve a lot of problems. I'm sure it would
create a lot of problems that you and I are
unaware of, not being farm folk. Um, But it would
solve a lot of the child labor problems that child
labor activists have issues with. It would do nothing for
(45:29):
the the much more rampant problems that are endemic around
the world with child labor, where a lot of it
resembles basically how America was with child labor at the
at the you know, during the Gilded Age. Yeah, hundred
and fifty eight million kids are estimated to be the
(45:49):
victims of child labor around the world. The good news
is that's down from twenty years ago. Um. But the
bad news is is that's a lot of kids. And
I think those are in agriculture, harvesting, fishing, herding, stuff
like that, But there are a lot of kids around
(46:09):
the world. It's still like work in coal mines. Yeah,
like that's too narrow for an adults, too dangerous. You
go in there and do it instead UM, and they'll
work with like they'll work at wildcat gold mines, so
they're having to like separate gold with mercury. So they're
getting mercury poisoning at a young age, which really messes
with your developmentally. UM. On tobacco farms in places like Zimbabwe,
(46:32):
not only are they having to get um, you know,
nicotine poisoning, they're also being poisoned by UM toxic pesticides
that are used on the crops and stuff too. So
like these kids are working in like deplorable working conditions
and UM there's just some really basic stuff that needs
(46:52):
to change that would just free the children of the
world the world around from um what is essentially like
indentured servitude right now. Yeah, and there's four kind of
basic things that the i ll O says we can
do around the country and they, like you said at
the very beginning, they're very pragmatic. They all make sense
and they would really make a difference. And the first
(47:14):
is expand access to education. Get kids in school and
um get rid of fees to be in school and
uh put them. If they're in a school situation, they're
way less likely to join the workforce. That's that's what
our friends at CODE do. They they're like helping get
kids off of family farms and into schools by removing
(47:36):
any barriers between them and in school. Yep, it's all
through education. It's a great, great organization. What else. Uh,
and that's, by the way, the cooperative I always say
that word wrong, cooperative for education. Yeah, look them up.
We've championed them for years and we got a little uh,
a little uh fun thing coming up that we're doing
(47:56):
with them that you guys might be interested in. So
stay tuned for that. Yeah. Uh, let me see what's
the next one? Help families meet basic needs. Uh. This
could be a universal basic income, it could be a
monthly stipend, but basically so families don't have to send
their kids out to work to provide at the most
basic level. Yeah. In a way that you can help
that is through Kiva, UM, by blending making micro loans
(48:20):
to people so that they can they have the capital
to grow from uh initially. Um. There's also like, if
you make sure that adults are getting better wages and
pay and um, their rights are protected, it makes their
children less likely to be forced into the workplace to
begin with, because it's not again, there's not like adults
the world ground saying, you know, our kids need to
(48:43):
be working because they're lazy, like their kids need to
be working because the adults aren't getting paid enough. And
if you, um, make sure that you're you know, if
you're a Western company and you make sure that you're
paying everybody a fair wage, um, there's a good chance
that you can erradic eight child labor from your supply chain.
(49:04):
And then the last thing is just enforcement. They can
put all the laws that they want on the books,
but unless someone's gonna actually work on enforcement, than it
really doesn't matter much. So uh, that's really sort of
the last step is uh funding for enforcement. Yeah, and
Germany actually just passed the law recently that that demands
(49:24):
that it's companies examined, do due diligence and examine their
supply chains to see if there's um child labor involved
and to do something about it. That doesn't have like
as much teeth as Human Rights Watch was saying that
they wish it had, but it's a good first step
and hopefully the way that that you know, progressive nations
will start moving. That's right. Um, Two things big shout out.
(49:45):
I can't remember his name, but the young listener who
was mowing the law and for his dad and rode
into request this episode. I think that's right. I think
he prompted this episode. So hats off to you, young sir.
I hope you can kick up your heels for a
little while. And then also, this was indeed a Dave
Ru's joint, so thanks again to Dave for this one. Right,
(50:08):
that's right. Since Chuck said that's right, everybody means it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this. Uh,
I think it's just thanks. Hey, guys, running in from Louisville, Kentucky.
He say how much I love the show, even though
Josh said the k of C M center was in Lexington.
I'll never live that down. Your correction put a smile
(50:28):
on my face, knowing that there are other stuff you
should know fans near me. I work in long term
care and use your podcasts in many different ways. I
help people with cognitive impairments set up their tablets and
such for enrichment, socialization, and stimulation. One of the first
activities I showed them is how to access entertainment With
the educational podcast. Everyone can find something they want to
learn about on Stuff you Should Know. Also help people
(50:50):
find ways of remembering new information, and use your short
stuff episodes for those with shorter attention spans. And finally,
my own enjoyment is a factor. I listen to many
different podcasts during my drive to and from work, but
only Stuff you Should Know has the ability to get
me into a different headspace. I attribute that to Josh
and Chuck. None of these topics would be nearly as
(51:10):
interesting without you, guys. Grid and laughed sometimes both all
in all of your episodes, even the really Matthey ones,
I feel you on that one. Chuck and Josh, Yeah
that was a dig. Wasn't a dig? Be math guy? No, No,
but I'd like to think I am okay, sorry about that. Uh.
(51:33):
The episode on snake handling is a personal favorite. I
appreciate an episode. I love the show and everyone that
works on it. Thanks for keeping it going. I hope
see y'all in Kentucky. That is from Ellie. Well, thanks again, Ellie,
and Uh. If you want to get in touch with this,
like Ellie did, you can write us an email send
it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
(51:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H m hm
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out
there hovering around in the digital um weird audio ether
(00:22):
and this is stuff you should know. This is gonna
be a good, uplifting, fun one and bouncy light one.
I think so. And it's you know, hot off the
presses from our My daughter just wrote this episode for us. Yeah, yeah,
in record time too. I was impressed. He didn't pay her,
(00:42):
did you no? But it's funny. I went to look up.
You know, I've talked before about the end of the
fact that I started working when I was thirteen at
a barbecue restaurant and uh, minimum wage when I started
working was three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. Wow,
how far we've come at are they've doubled it whatever?
(01:04):
Forty years? Isn't that nuts? Dude? Yeah, and you know
we'll get to that. But I have a list of
kind of where we ended up with minimum wage along
the years. But yeah, JJ's barbecue three thirty five an hour, baby,
that's pretty great. My first um uh job was even
younger than that. I was like nine or ten when
I was a paper boy. Yeah, I mean I couldn't
(01:27):
have made more than because that was only It's not
like I was working every units, working weekends. I probably
made like less than fifty dollars a week. M hmm.
But I mean your third teen, where were you spending
on thirteen? And like a good clean Christian kid, you
weren't spending that on anything. Archie comic except has a
lot of Archie comics do, Yes, it does, although they
(01:47):
have a lot of variations, so you could easily spend
fifty dollars a week on Archie comics back then, though
those those things were cheap. I was living high on
the hog. But so it sounds like a man. It's
so our buddy Dave helped us out with this one,
Dave Ruse, and he makes a really good point that
you and I sitting around talking about you know, you
(02:07):
made fifty bucks a week. I was a paper boy.
Like whatever stresses and troubles that we ran into post
you know, seventies something, um, As far as our first
jobs go when we were younger, that does not qualify
as child labor. That's that's not really what we're talking
about here. Today's exactly it's called you just stop your
(02:29):
griping right now, because there are actual kids out there
who are like real deal child laborers who work in
like dangerous conditions for little to know pay, who don't
get to play, who may not socialize with other kids
their age. They may live and work in a mining
camp with nothing but adults and grown ups, um like
(02:51):
like the there there. They would they would kill for
you know, a JJ's barbecue job. Basically, yeah, And this
is a good time to be talking about that particular
because this is is the International Year for the Elimination
of child labor. And as you'll see throughout this episode,
we've made a lot of strides here in the US,
(03:11):
but like you said, it's not not that way everywhere,
and it should and I should say it's probably a
little off the mark to say that a child laborer
would kill for a better job. They would probably kill
the just not have to work at all in general,
and just to get get to be a kid. And
I think ultimately, for people who are activists against child labor,
(03:32):
that's the goal. It's not like get better, better working
conditions for six year olds it's to like just make
six year olds not have to work any longer. And
we'll talk about how to solve that, how that that
UM International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor aims
to do that. They have some pretty pragmatic ideas UM
(03:52):
and so hopefully they'll this this episode of a nice
bow on the end. But we're gonna have to slog
through some misery to get there, Chuck, take it a way.
There's no better place to slog through misery than the
founding of this country, way back in the old days,
when the New World was new and settlers came over,
(04:14):
and they very much believed And why why did I
think this was ed? You said, this is Dave. Yeah,
I'm almost positive it was Dave. Was It reads like
a Dave to me. But oh man, if it's dead,
I'm sorry. Sorry to both. Sure, you need to get
those guys together one day. I think maybe we should
keep them far apart exactly they might they might turn
(04:35):
against us. Uh. Yeah, So they believe very much that
the idol's hands were the Devil's workshop, that old saying.
And you know, this is one of those It was
kind of hard for me to you know, let's let's
just lop off, you know, developing nations today, which is
clearly awful. I found myself as an adult more and
more with the cultural relativism, thinking like, obviously, five year
(04:58):
old shouldn't be working in factory. But when I read
about like twelve and thirteen year olds working hard back then,
I was kind of like, it's not great, but it was.
That's just kind of how it was at the time.
If you had parents that were farmers, you're not gonna,
you know, be just hanging out until your sweet sixteenth
(05:18):
birthday having a good time. You're gonna be working from
a pretty young age. And I found myself more and
more thinking like, you know, in certain situations, that wasn't
the worst thing, but then you get to the industrial revolutions,
and you know, that's what things really got bad. But
kind of early on, that's really what we were talking
about was a lot of kids working on the farms,
(05:40):
a lot of boys working on the farm, girls working
in the house alongside their sisters and mom. And you know,
this kind of started when they were about thirteen years old.
They were sort of expected to either go work and
get a job and work full time, or to become
an apprentice and unpaid apprentice, uh to work for food
and board and training. And I think also in addition
(06:03):
to that Protestant work ethic of them, like in like
just completely in the fabric of America that was just
coming out in you, it's also this idea of like
what else are you gonna do? It's not like you
consider around and play video games or watch TV or
do almost anything else except just play outside. Um But Chuck,
(06:24):
I went back and looked to see if it was
always this way, And apparently in medieval England you played
basically until you hit puberty, and then you started to
get put to work when you hit puberty at four right,
more like fourteen. But like there was like a childhood,
and it seems to have been somewhat wiped out by
(06:45):
that Protestant work ethic that the Puritans brought over um.
Or at the very least it was set back a
little more, you know, agewise, where you started working maybe
a little sooner than you would have had you been
in medieval England at the time. Right, I think, I
guess I'm just trying to draw a line between life
in the sixteen forties and then life in nineteen thirty
(07:08):
eight when we eventually did something about it in the US. Yeah, no, totally.
And there is an enormous distinction between that because it
was it was like widespread, but it just it seemed
like they were mostly working with their families and it
was just kind of the way that things were. That
was how life was. But able to try and like
keep your family alive. It's not like you know, they were.
They were trying to just all survive basically, right, And
(07:30):
that's actually the reason why it's still around in other
parts of the world today. It's not not even necessarily
like a like a work ethic where children should should
work because idle hands are the devil's playthings, like the
Puritans thought. He said, it's like this is an extra
worker we can have go out and make money to
keep the rest of the family alive. We just don't
(07:51):
have a choice in not doing that. And that's that's
what drives it still today. Right. Uh. When the Industrial
Revolution came around, and we're talking about basically cotton factories
in a big, big way, Uh, there are a lot
of little kids working there, and people like George Washington
and Alexander Hamilton's thought that was awesome they did. And like,
(08:13):
we're going to be skewered for even suggesting that Hamilton's
said this, but he did. He said that women and
children in America would be quote rendered more useful by
manufacturing establishments than the otherwise would be. Um, and I
think what are you're saying is like, I'm not even
(08:33):
going to paraphrase what do you say? And I think
it's it. You can understand it on its face. Yeah,
he's saying, well, you know, they're not doing much use
for us, these kids. And he's mainly talking about kids
here who would other what quote, who would otherwise be idle? Uh,
this isn't Lynde mal Manuel Miranda saying this we all
love him. No, this isn't he didn't say this in
a charming wrap. No, this is the real Alexander Hamilton's. Uh.
(08:56):
And again it was just a different time. Um. But
even way back then in the early eighteen hundreds, not
everyone thought this was a great thing. Uh. There was
a future mayor of Boston named Josiah Quincy who toured
a cotton factory, a cotton spinning factory, and they had
(09:16):
you know, four year old working there all the way
to ten, uh, maybe ten twelve hours a day for
anywhere from twelve to cents a day, not an hour.
And he said, uh, compassion calls us to pity these
little creatures plying in a contracted room among flyers and
(09:37):
cogs at an age when nature requires for them air
space and sports. There was a dull dejection and the
countenance of all of them. And uh, you know, we'll
get to some of these photos of some of these
kids later on. When you look at them, they look
like beaten down miniature adults. Yeah, they really do. They
(09:58):
look like us exact. They look ready to retire, they
look unhappy, they look um yeah, just beaten down. But
their miniature and their kids, their children. And it's really
upsetting to see that a photograph of that. I'm sure
it's even more upsetting to see it in real life. Um.
And that's actually how a lot of this, a lot
of changes came through, was just people being exposed to
(10:21):
seeing that and kind of being shocked, having their conscience shocked.
But as as potentially like bad as it was for
the children of colonial America who were forced to work, um,
it got way way worse when the Second Industrial Revolution
kicked off. The one powered by steam and steel and
railroads and and unbridled capitalism. When you inject unbridled capitalism
(10:46):
into uh a um an economy that allows for child labor,
you can imagine that things are going to get much
much worse for the children before it finally gets better.
That's right. And things did get worse when you're when
all those sudden you have a robust steel industry and
coal mining industry, um you have railroads that need this
(11:07):
stuff in a big, big way, and they uh, you know,
partially kind of ran out of workers and partially just
saw what was right underneath their noses, which is these
kids who they at this point they had long known
that they could work and farm and work hard. So
they said, you know what, a lot of these families
in rural America, farming dried up a bit, so they
(11:27):
moved to the city. A lot of it was immigrant labor,
as millions of people came into the country from Europe
fleeting their poverty famine stricken countries, and no matter where
they came from, it was all under the thumb of
the robber barons, which was I can't remember when we did.
It feels like a few two or three years ago,
(11:48):
but pretty good podcast on the Robber Barons. Yeah, and
we also talked about them, uh in our book keeping
Up with the too. But yeah, so like these the
robber Aaron's got rich through innovation, through consolidation, through some
pretty clever stuff. A lot of them invented new techniques
or processes or procedures, so like they definitely were doing something.
(12:12):
They were being productive, but they also got to be
filthy rich off of the backs of immigrant labor, child
labor that they directly exploited. And um, it was basically
like there was just nobody looking out for anybody else
at this time. It was just such a period of
(12:34):
such enormous economic insurgents that there weren't there weren't anybody,
or there wasn't anybody who was sitting there saying like wha, everybody,
we need to stop and really think about this and
do this in a much more directed, smarter, healthier way
for our society. It was like it was like just go, go,
let's see where this takes us. And a lot of
people got trampled underfoot, and that definitely included children labors
(12:57):
or child laborers. That's right, And uh, I think that's
a good time for a break. Ya ya, that's two
yea's Anna's m So we'll be back and we'll talk
a little bit about what some of these jobs might
have been in the late nineteenth century for these kids.
Right after this. I wonder how many gallons of coffee
(13:43):
everyone who has listened to this this show since the
beginning has heard me drink. I didn't even hear you drinking.
Oh you didn't. When I said I had, I had
a mouthful of cafe. Oh interesting, I have no shirt on. Nice.
That's awesome, man, you just top mine. True. I think
(14:10):
you should have left it mysterious, Chuck, because there were
a few people out there who were about the email
and say I was offended that Chuck said he wasn't
wearing a shirt. Yeah. Now, I put it on right
before we recorded. I had it off. It's it's a
little hot. I felt like I needed to dress up.
But the teacher, right, I do you are you worried
one of those tuxedo shirt? You ever had one of those?
(14:31):
Did you ever know? I didn't know. I didn't either.
You didn't. You didn't wear them with your rainbow suspenders.
Now that's that stuff was a little too cute cee
even for me. Okay, what about the one that looks
like I would wear it? What about one that looks
like a like a ripped like chest and abdomen? Have
(14:52):
you warrn T shirt like that? No? Those are fun,
though I think for certain people they're fun. They're also
like really good at boost your ego. Quietly sure, there's
nothing like me looking in a mirror at my beer
belly covered in spray painted abs. It really works your brain.
The brain is so dumb that it falls for it
(15:13):
every time I can attest um. All right, So we
were gonna talk about what some of these jobs might be,
and it kind of really depended on where you were living. Um,
if you lived in the city or if you lived
in a company town where they have these factories, you
were gonna be working in factories flipped out. In the
rural areas, you gonna be working on farms. And most
most Americans still lived on farms at the time, so
(15:36):
most child labor took place on farms. But if you
were on that farm, you're gonna be picking cotton and tobacco.
You're gonna be picking a lot of stuff and doing
all the sort of stuff that goes on after the picking,
which is semming d C. And all that stuff shucking
(15:57):
and stuff I did. When I was a kid, we
had a big, big garden and my mom took us
to the canary. Uh and it was awful. I hated it.
Took you to the canary to like for a sight
seeing trip or for work too. Can so like there
was a canary that your mom went to. You guys
had so much stuff you had to go to a
second location to cannon. That was a cannary in Decab County,
(16:21):
a sort of industrial cannary for the people. And we
would take green beans and corn and uh, we made
preserves and all kinds of stuff. And they had like
and you know, you could can your own junk there.
It sounds like a lot of utopia. And yeah, and
we would you know, put sharpie, like beans on the
(16:43):
can on sharpie put it in the bandary. That's really
really interesting. I had no idea that there was a
canary in de Cab County. Yeah, not too far from
where I live now. Actually it's like fifteen minutes away.
Probably do you shudder every time you pass it? I
do a little actually, bit I don't pass it much.
But it's over near the dog pound where you can
(17:04):
go adopt a dog, And so I think we adopted
Niko there and I drove by the canary and just like, yeah,
it was hot. Well, you were lucky you weren't five
or six and left there to work all day every day,
aren't you. Yes, for almost no money. Yeah, pennies for
a bucket of whatever you shucked or shelled or did
whatever peeled. Um. Yeah, working at a canary would probably
(17:26):
not have been very fun. Um. They were also furnace
stoking jobs available, whether you wanted them or not. What else, chuck? Uh, Well,
kids did work in canaries. They also worked in textile mills.
They had bob and boys and bob and girls. This
one doesn't sound so bad to me, but I'm sure
I'm missing something that makes it atrocious. Well, I mean
(17:46):
they would climb up on the machine and remove the bobbin's,
the full bobbin's and replacing them with empty ones. So
I don't think that was like the worst job in
the world, But when you're doing that for ten or
twelve hours a day in your six it's probably a
bit of a buzz skill. Yeah, yeah, I have a
problem inherently with child labor in general. Not like having
(18:09):
a job like you or I had first they're got
a problem with that, but child child, any kind of
child labor, even if it is kind of cush comparatively. No,
I agree that one wasn't terrible. It may have been dangerous.
I don't know. There's no Yeah, there's no way it
wasn't dangerous. It had to have been dangerous. We're talking
about the nineteenth century and industry. It was dangerous in
some way. There was no osha no, if that was
(18:35):
if you did live in the city and did work
around factories, Um, you would do that. But there were
also plenty of other jobs you could deliver, like the
essentially they call them telegraph boys, sort of delivering you know,
emails basically by hand to people all over town. You
could shine shoes, You could sell newspapers like you did.
(18:57):
I didn't stand on a street corner. I was in
a newsy. We'll talk a little more about news is
in a second. I was a delivery boy, and not
a not a really great one either. I frequently overslapped,
and um, it was not good at delivering papers. My
mom and my oldest sister would have to do my
route once in a while. Yes, um, and uh. The
(19:19):
thing is is like they also make you shake down
the people for their delinquent subscriptions. So I was like
a strong arm guy too for the Toledo blade as well.
I want my two dollars. Basically, that's exactly right, and
that was right in my wheelhouse too. I was like,
this hits a little too close to home for me.
Laugh at the kid. I know what he's going through.
I've had to put my foot in somebody's door before
(19:41):
to get there two dollars. I didn't ask for a time.
I haven't seen that in a while. That was a
good movie classic. Uh, if you lived in the mountains
of Appalachia, you might have been a breaker boy um
or a mule handler. And breaker boys will get I
guess we can go ahead and tell everyone that is
you would sit around and and break apart lumps of
(20:04):
coal into uniform pieces all day long and break dance
on your brakes. Yeah, break your boys. But that was it.
And they wouldn't let you wear gloves while you were
a break your boy too, because they're like, no, no,
you can't break these things as uniformly if you wear gloves,
you stupid kid. So you you have to basically absorb
all of this coal dust into your skin, get all
(20:27):
sorts of little cuts and callouses and all that by
the time you're six seven eight, um, and just do this.
This is your life. Now, Welcome to Pennsylvania. Right. Uh. Then,
let's say you managed to escape all forms of formal
jobs your parents that they didn't make you go to
the factory. You did live in the city, so you
didn't have to work on a farm, and you might
(20:48):
think you just had it made in the shade. Not so,
because there was plenty of jobs that you could do
right there from your cretty little tenement apartment, like weaving
baskets or making paper flowers, or hand rolling cigars and
cigarettes all day long and selling them. Yeah, it was like,
you know, your whole family worked on a farm, or
(21:08):
if you live in a tenement, your whole family worked,
you know, in what are called tenement industries. So there
was basically not a lot of escape. I get the
impression that you basically had to have wealthy parents to
not be forced into child labor at the time. Yeah,
and I might have mentioned this once before my mom
did a thing for a little while where, uh, we
(21:29):
would make money doing like stuffing envelopes. Did you remember
that stuff? I do? And I don't remember what it
was four. I guess they were for companies. Okay, I
want to say Easter Seals had people do that too,
but I'm sure they didn't pay. So this would be
like a company that would have like a packet they
(21:50):
would send out to had like five things in it,
and we would be responsible for getting all that stuff
in huge boxes, assembling it all into the envelopes that
they could mail, and we would get paid as a
family to do that. That's cute. That's super late seventies
early eighties. Like I can see your mom talking on
the princess phone making all the arrangements for them to
ship that tour and getting the instructions, you know, and
(22:11):
then hanging up in that fifty ft long cord just
kind of coils up on its own quietly on the floor. Yeah.
And I didn't mind that so much because I made
a little money and I could That's something I could
do while I watched television. Yeah, totally. It's just the
perfect job, as we all know. Yeah, not exactly a
high pressure job. It sounds like I wouldn't even know
if that qualifies as a tenement industry, to tell you
(22:33):
the truth. No, not in the seventies. No, you had
a lot of jobs. So as a kid, good for
you that protests wanted my own money, Protestant work ethic
shining through like a city upon a hill. Should we
talk newsies? Yeah we should. And I think also the
newsy Um strike that we're going to mention deserves its
(22:54):
own episode, at least short, if not its own episode. Okay,
so yeah, let's just not talk about newsies. No. Now,
I thought the same thing, And the more I got
into the strike, I was like, this is just too much.
We gotta do something. But the idea was that little
boys would buy a stack of newspapers wholesale for about
(23:16):
fifty cents per girls too, I saw girls that did
it too. Oh, girls did it too, all right, and
they sold them for a penny a piece. That they
would make half a penny per paper. Uh, selling in
the big cities, especially New York City of course. And
then eventually in they did go on strike and it
was a big deal. It kind of ground I mean,
(23:37):
it didn't grind them to a complete halt. But it
really disrupted their their flow in getting newspapers into the
hands of people. Dude. The their sales over this two
weeks strike went down two thirds. Yeah, like they brought
the They brought Pulitzer, Pulitzer and um Herst to their knees,
basically these newsies did. And they got some concessions too. Yeah,
(24:00):
And I think the deal was is that morning subscribers
were generally subscribers, or the morning paper was generally for subscribers,
but it was that afternoon paper, that second edition that
the news he's really raked it in on because most
people didn't subscribe to that, and so they really weren't
selling any second editions hardly. And the one big concession
(24:21):
they got, which was huge, was they got them to
agree to full buy backs on unsold papers, which is
a really really big deal. But it also really kind
of goes to show you how much the newspaper barons
believed news these were scrappy enough that they wouldn't just
sit around and be like, I don't have to sell these,
(24:41):
you know, I don't have to worry about this. You know,
they'll they'll be bought back anyway. I don't have to
work to sell them. Well, but buyback just means they
give them back the money they paid for him. It's
not like they would make any money. They would just
in fact, it incentivize them, I think, to take out
more papers and some more papers because any of they
wouldn't be stuck with them. Yeah, totally, we'll probably edit
(25:04):
that part out. So. Um, one of the things you
mentioned was making cigars like in your family's one room
apartment in say New York or something like that, right, Yeah,
And that was apparently really bad and that not only
did you work long hours for very little pay in
(25:25):
cramped working conditions with with your family on top of
everything else. Um, you would frequently come down with nicotine
poisoning as a little kid because you're rolling cured sometimes
you're handling uncured tobacco, um, and you're ingesting lots of
nicotine through your skin. At that's like you know, in
a single day, and so you might be nauseated, you
(25:47):
might be dizzy, you might just turn green. Um. It
can get worse than that too. You actually can suffer
respiratory distress as well. And apparently this is a big
problem still with child laborers in Zimbabwe, because I think
about twenty years ago that country doubled down on their
tobacco production and now it's like one of the biggest,
um the biggest exports of Zimbabwe. But it's also a
(26:10):
very poor country, so they use child labor a lot,
and so children are still to this day being exposed
to tobacco and they're rolling, uh, they're handling tobacco, they're
rolling stuff, they're rolling cigars, they're sorting it. Um, they're
just the kids in tobacco should not be in the
same room together, basically. Yeah, you know, it never occurred
(26:31):
to me that that. I guess it would be a
transdermal ingestion, right, but sure, I mean you put tobacco
on be stings and all kinds of things, so of
course it's going to get into their skin. Yeah. And
having gotten myself sick on tobacco a time or two
in my life, I can tell you it is not pleasant.
And to do it against your will just because you're
(26:52):
handling it for your job that you don't even want,
is that sounds torturous? Actually? Yeah, I love that's Uh,
should you retell it for people haven't heard it? Are
you talking about eighth grade in the tree fort is
that when you like smoked a whole pack of cigarettes
and got sick. It was more like a pack and
a half. Okay, it was right after I first started smoking,
(27:16):
and I was like, I was like, I really like
how this makes me feel. Let's see how like thirty
of these things make me feel. And I was saying
reading comic books up in the tree fort in the
woods that my friends and I had built, and uh,
I just went too far. Man. I felt so bad. Man,
Like like I felt like I looked green. It was.
(27:39):
It was bad news. That's one of those moments where
you like, you really wish you could have like video
footage kind of what I look like. I kind of
hope when when I die, it's a little bit like
defending your life so they can shoot. I'll be like,
show me that one. Well, we can go over the
other stuff. I really want to see that clip. Yeah,
ripped torn will be there. Yeah. The upside of this, though,
(28:00):
is do not ever start smoking. I deeply regret ever
having started smoking as a kid. As an adult, it
doesn't matter, Like, just don't ever start smoking and do
yourself a real favor. You did a great job quitting, though,
and you never looked back. Nope, I didn't. Good job
it was. It was surprisingly easy because I was like
(28:21):
one one more thing. I think, if there are people
out there who are considering smoking right now and are
worried about the time they're going to have, one of
my big worries was that I was going to spend
every day of the rest of my life wishing for
a cigarette. And that's just not how it goes. Like
you spend a week, two weeks if it's really bad,
maybe three weeks really longing for a cigarette, and then
it starts to get easier and easier, and then eventually
(28:43):
you're grossed out by the thought of cigarettes and people
smoking cigarettes around you, and you don't ever want to
see one again. So if that's what's keeping you from quitting,
don't let it, because that's not how it is. I
like that. Good Thanks man. Thanks. I think before we break,
maybe we'll just go over some of the final stats here.
Uh at the basically the peak and about nineteen hundred
(29:07):
UM by eighteen ninety one out of every five kids
under sixteen was working. UM one point seven million kids
under sixteen was six percent of the total workforce in
the nine hundred census, and that's just kids who were
registered to work in these factories, like that does not
(29:28):
include these kids rolling scars in their house or the
kids on the family farm. So it was much much
higher than that. Yeah, because I think two thirds of
kids um in general in the in the country worked
in agriculture. So yeah, if they were not counting agriculture,
they missed out on a lot of kids in that number.
And that's still a staggering number in and of itself,
(29:48):
one point seven million. Yeah. And if you're wondering back
then what effect this had on education, just a snapshot
from Philadelphia in nineteen hundred, fifteen percent of thirteen year
old boys had less school to work. And I think
half a fifteen year old boys were not in school
anymore because they were working or the and like a
(30:09):
significant portion because they were naughty, right, yeah, and they
just didn't want to do anything. But get this, this
is the staggering one to me, seventeen year old boys
only ten percent of them were still in school in
nine in Philadelphia. That is that does not bode well
for the future um of a of a of a
an economy. And I think that actually is one reason
(30:32):
why public education became so much more compulsory, and one
reason why people came around to anti child labor laws
is the idea that, no, there's a lot more that
they could be doing than just working in a factory,
almost literally their entire lives, Like, we can do we
can do better, and we can build a better a
better society and a better economy if we invest in
their education instead of robbing them of it. All right,
(30:56):
I guess we'll take a break and talk about when
that started in earnest and it was just then when
you mentioned it, so Chuck Um, it turns out that
(31:31):
there were so the progressive error is one of my
favorite errors, or I should say the people from the
progressive error, or some of my favorite people like Francis Perkins,
although she was a second or third wave progressive performer,
but she was inspired by some of these earlier ones
who were working on things like UM fair wages like
a minimum wage, minimum or maximum work days or working
(31:53):
hours UM. And then they also trained their sights on
things like ending child labor or at the very least
really restricting the amount of work a kid could do,
especially UM in regards to them being in school too.
The idea was to put school first and then if
the kid had the wherewithal or their parents really needed
(32:13):
the money or something like that, they could let them
work in addition to school. But the school needed to
come first. And this is really radical because I mean
it seems radical. We had kids rolling cigars in their
one room apartment in New York, their whole lives, and
now all of a sudden some people are coming up
and be like, no, no, no, it should be in
school and then maybe working, preferably not working. So how
(32:35):
do we make that happen? Yeah, it was a very
big deal. And most of these or a lot of
them were women, people like Jane Adams and Julia Lathrop
and Lillian ward Um anti poverty measures and this is
stuff that you know. They would also go on to
champion uh, women's rights and women's rights and the workforce
(32:56):
and women's rights to vote. So it was the whole
progressive movement was kind of tied up and all these
you know, radical ideas about you know, being fair and
good decent human being, right. Radical? Um, So, uh, here's
the problem is, you've got these robber barons and these
factory owners. And then these industrialists who are like, wait
(33:16):
a minute, we got a good deal going. Because we
don't have to pay these kids much, they're probably not
going to unionize. Like the newsies thing was definitely an
anomaly that didn't happen much. And he said, they were like,
we gotta we got a good thing going, and uh
so we're gonna lobby against this as hard as we can.
But surely they were unsuccessful. Right, No, they were successful.
(33:39):
They did. They blocked a log of legislation early on
for this kind of regulation. Um, federally states, Uh, you know,
it kind of depends on where it was, but states
did establish child labor commissions in some states had some
minimum ages, minimum or maximum hours and minimum wages. It
was they were sparse. I couldn't find what states passed it.
(34:02):
But um, for the most part, there were there was
a probably for the most part, though, there was a
a lot of pushback and enough pushback among the states,
um the residents of the states that that not a
lot got passed. So there was a progressive movement that
started saying like the eighteen nineties and it had to
(34:24):
it basically like any progressive movement, it ran full steam ahead,
hit a huge wall of industry and then had to
slowly just keep pushing and pushing and chugging and chugging
and keeping at it for a few decades before it
was successful. Um. And one of the ways that it
became successful with the way that it kept pushing at
it after it hit that wall of industry is UM
a group called the National Child Labor Committee formed and
(34:47):
I think they formed in back in nineteen o four,
and they were basically they became a lobbying group to
lobby against the lobbying against child labor laws that ended
child labor. Yeah, and they had a pretty smart way
to get attention, and uh that was in hiring a
photographer named Lewis Hine to go around and sneakily document
(35:10):
what was going on with his camera. Yeah, he was
He worked as a sociologist and a teacher and then
later became a photographer. Was also a photographer, and uh,
I think he himself was a kid who was working
twelve thirteen hour days, so he was like, let me
start taking pictures of these kids and maybe that because
you know, that's worth a thousand words, they say at
(35:31):
least five thousand, So that means that he took fifty
thousand words, No, five five thousand. I'm just kidding your confidence.
It was totally wrong. It was purposefully wrong. Though. Let
me just do that real quick, to do carry the one.
(35:53):
He took five million words. That's a lot of words. Um.
And if you go back, you probably seen a bunch
of these pictures. Have you seen pictures of very unhappy
kids outside of a coal mine, or standing on the
mountains of shucked oysters, or standing around factory machines like
little mensture adults? They were probably Lewis Hynes photos. Yeah,
(36:16):
I mean five thousand photos, all archived in the Library
of Congress. Um, from what I understand. Um. And he
had like a really great eye to begin with. Like
they're really great photographs in and of themselves. But you know,
you don't have to sit there and like, you know,
try to really contemplate it. It just hits you immediately
what you're looking at and how sad what you're looking
(36:37):
at is. And so he and the National Child Labor
Committee got these into newspapers. Um. And like you said, uh,
he was very sneaky. He would poses different things. Um.
One of them made sense to me. The industrial machinery photographer. Okay,
got that, but what excuse what a Bible salesman have
(36:59):
for taking photographs of the kids at the factory. I
could not find that save my life. I mean the
only thing I could think is that got him in
the door. And then maybe he was like, and I
just love kids, and can I take some pictures? But
I don't know. And this is a time before stranger danger,
I guess. So they were like, sure, I mean they're
child labors. I don't care about him. Yeah, he also
(37:21):
um he wore a special jacket where he had the
buttons on the jacket aligned in known measurements. So if
he went over and stood like he would take a
kid's picture, and he would ask, you know, they're documented
like their names and their ages and stuff as best
he could. But he would go stand next to them
if he felt like he couldn't outright ask what their
age was, to kind of tip off that maybe he
(37:44):
was not a Bible salesman. Uh. And you know, if
the kid went up to the second or third button,
he would know roughly how tall they were, or no,
he would know how tall they were then roughly how
old they were. The other thing were giants, right right. Yeah,
I'm sure you know he didn't get him all right,
but you know, you can't win them all. But the
other thing that made it, um, that jacket special, chuck,
(38:06):
was that the lining was made of a t shirt
of a ripped chest and abdomen. And it would make
him feel really good about himself when he put that
jacket on. Oh that's good, let's call it. Uh When
did things finally changed though? Uh, well, they started to
kind of change like these These pictures shocked the conscience
(38:27):
of the nation when they when they saw them, when
they made them in the newspapers, and they were accompanied
by muckra getting articles about how bad these conditions were.
And you know, shame on you, America for turning a
blind eye to this kind of thing. Um. But it
wasn't like an instantaneous switch was thrown. It still took decades.
I think. The first proposal for anti child labor um
(38:49):
legislation came in nineteen oh six. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana,
UM was the first to propose. It got taken up
in nineteen sixteen by the Key Eating Act that was
actually passed, but the Supreme Court shut it down. Um.
And then there was some more legislation that there was
a constitutional amendment actually that got passed but wasn't ratified
(39:11):
by the States. And then it wasn't until the Great
Depression and the New Deal that it finally got passed.
And I think if it were just the New Deal,
it wouldn't have gotten passed. But the Great Depression changed
things socially enough that it opened the door for an
end to child labor in America. Yeah, Like, ironically, I
think massive unemployment with so many adults out of work,
(39:34):
they couldn't turn around and just hire kids to do
these jobs for lower wages. It was I mean, even
at a time when its a bad look didn't really
matter as much as as it does today, they even
knew that that was a really bad look and that
they probably couldn't do something like that. So eventually the
Fair Labors Fair Labor Standards Act of Thank You Francis
(39:58):
Perkins or old Buddy, that's right, among others UM, this
finally set a national minimum wage for the very first time,
maximum number of hours for workers, and then child labor limitations,
notably that if you are under sixteen, you cannot work
in manufacturing and you cannot work in coal mining at
(40:19):
all because they're just too dangerous. Another couple of things
that did it established over time time and a half.
Oh yeah, so if you went over forty hours a week,
you could only work up to forty four, but you
could work four hours at time and a half. And
that very first minimum wage was twenty five cents an hour.
Man uhe went up to thirty forty five, it went
(40:42):
up to forty. Uh in nineteen fifty six, it finally
reached a dollar kitching and it didn't crack six dollars
until two thousand eight. I know, dude, it's just shameful,
isn't that nuts? We definitely need to do a minimum
wage episode two because it's just not as cut and
dried as Yeah, it's raised a minimum wage, like there's
(41:04):
just it's like there's a lot to it. I really
want to do one on that. Yeah. I hadn't really
kept up with it because I before I got salary jobs,
I worked as a waiter for fifteen or twenty years
or something so or as a p A on movie
sets and TV sets, and that's not an hourly thing either,
(41:24):
So like I hadn't had an hourly rate job since college,
so I didn't really know, you know, kind of how
it changed over the years. I did not know it
was two thousand and eight when they cracked six dollars.
That's really low, it really is. It's very it's it's
just not okay, and it's still it's seven something right now.
It's no, it's seven five, actually I think it's yeah,
(41:46):
that's the national minimum wage. Right. Yeah. Again, some of
the states are are raising stuff slowly but surely, but
that's the federal one. Still, this is Alabama doesn't have
a minimum wage. Is that right? Is that possible? Yeah,
that's possible. Man doesn't have to look into that. That's
on the fly. So, um yeah, we'll do a whole
one on minimum wage for sure coming up. But um,
(42:10):
you said that. The the Fair Labor Standards Act was
um past in night and it's still basically governs child
labor um And one of the things that it does, Chuck,
is it it divides uh, child labor into agricultural and
non agricultural jobs. And with agriculture or non agricultural jobs,
(42:32):
there's like a pretty decent amount of protections, like kids
can't work in hazardous stuff until they're eighteen, things like blasting, mining,
forest firefighting, that kind of stuff. Um that if you're
under sixteen, you can only work a maximum of three
hours a day during the school year. Um, there's some exemptions.
(42:53):
Did you see the thing about home based wreathmaking. Yeah,
so you cannot non agriculturally, you cannot work if you're
under fourteen at all. Like I could not have worked
as a bus boy at thirteen, supposedly, but I still did.
Um unless that was passed since then, because this thing
has been ratified a million times or not ratified but amended.
(43:15):
But yeah, if you're a child actor, you can work
if you're under fourteen. Obviously, if you're a newsy you
can still deliver newspapers if you're under fourteen. And home
based wreathmaker, it's so weird. It is weird. And not
only is it, home based wreathmaking is exempted from child
labor laws in the United States. It has to be
(43:35):
a specific kind of reath that has to be mostly
evergreen wreaths. So if you're making reads and it has
to be at home. If you're having your kid make
reads at home and they're not mostly evergreen, that's illegal.
And if they're making things out of Evergreen that are
not reads like say Garland that's illegal, specifically homemade reads
(43:58):
that are mostly Evergreen. It's really really interesting. It's one
of the most bizarre facts we've ever talked about on
this episode. Yes show. Yeah, we're going to keep that
one in my pocket totally. But agricultural though, they have
like very little protection, like almost shamefully little protections. Yeah,
if you're sixteen years old and you live on your
family farm, they can work you. Um, there's no living
(44:22):
on how many hours they can work you. You can
work jobs at the Department of Labor considers hazardous. I
think fourteen year olds also can work unlimited hours if
it's outside the school day, and then the kids as
young as twelve I think actually twelve and younger can
work with parental consent. Yeah, yeah, basically unlimited hours or
(44:45):
at least up to seventy two hours, and that's during
the school year as well. And as a result of this,
of child farm workers graduate from high school here and
you know the in the United States we're talking about,
and the hundred thousand of them are injured on the
job every year. Child farm laborers and a lot of
(45:07):
trying to get changed. Yeah, they're basically saying, like, look,
just just take these things that we apply to non
agricultural jobs and apply to agricultural problems solved, and that
would solve a lot of problems. I'm sure it would
create a lot of problems that you and I are
unaware of, not being farm folk. Um, But it would
solve a lot of the child labor problems that child
labor activists have issues with. It would do nothing for
(45:29):
the the much more rampant problems that are endemic around
the world with child labor, where a lot of it
resembles basically how America was with child labor at the
at the you know, during the Gilded Age. Yeah, hundred
and fifty eight million kids are estimated to be the
(45:49):
victims of child labor around the world. The good news
is that's down from twenty years ago. Um. But the
bad news is is that's a lot of kids. And
I think those are in agriculture, harvesting, fishing, herding, stuff
like that, But there are a lot of kids around
(46:09):
the world. It's still like work in coal mines. Yeah,
like that's too narrow for an adults, too dangerous. You
go in there and do it instead UM, and they'll
work with like they'll work at wildcat gold mines, so
they're having to like separate gold with mercury. So they're
getting mercury poisoning at a young age, which really messes
with your developmentally. UM. On tobacco farms in places like Zimbabwe,
(46:32):
not only are they having to get um, you know,
nicotine poisoning, they're also being poisoned by UM toxic pesticides
that are used on the crops and stuff too. So
like these kids are working in like deplorable working conditions
and UM there's just some really basic stuff that needs
(46:52):
to change that would just free the children of the
world the world around from um what is essentially like
indentured servitude right now. Yeah, and there's four kind of
basic things that the i ll O says we can
do around the country and they, like you said at
the very beginning, they're very pragmatic. They all make sense
and they would really make a difference. And the first
(47:14):
is expand access to education. Get kids in school and
um get rid of fees to be in school and
uh put them. If they're in a school situation, they're
way less likely to join the workforce. That's that's what
our friends at CODE do. They they're like helping get
kids off of family farms and into schools by removing
(47:36):
any barriers between them and in school. Yep, it's all
through education. It's a great, great organization. What else. Uh,
and that's, by the way, the cooperative I always say
that word wrong, cooperative for education. Yeah, look them up.
We've championed them for years and we got a little uh,
a little uh fun thing coming up that we're doing
(47:56):
with them that you guys might be interested in. So
stay tuned for that. Yeah. Uh, let me see what's
the next one? Help families meet basic needs. Uh. This
could be a universal basic income, it could be a
monthly stipend, but basically so families don't have to send
their kids out to work to provide at the most
basic level. Yeah. In a way that you can help
that is through Kiva, UM, by blending making micro loans
(48:20):
to people so that they can they have the capital
to grow from uh initially. Um. There's also like, if
you make sure that adults are getting better wages and
pay and um, their rights are protected, it makes their
children less likely to be forced into the workplace to
begin with, because it's not again, there's not like adults
the world ground saying, you know, our kids need to
(48:43):
be working because they're lazy, like their kids need to
be working because the adults aren't getting paid enough. And
if you, um, make sure that you're you know, if
you're a Western company and you make sure that you're
paying everybody a fair wage, um, there's a good chance
that you can erradic eight child labor from your supply chain.
(49:04):
And then the last thing is just enforcement. They can
put all the laws that they want on the books,
but unless someone's gonna actually work on enforcement, than it
really doesn't matter much. So uh, that's really sort of
the last step is uh funding for enforcement. Yeah, and
Germany actually just passed the law recently that that demands
(49:24):
that it's companies examined, do due diligence and examine their
supply chains to see if there's um child labor involved
and to do something about it. That doesn't have like
as much teeth as Human Rights Watch was saying that
they wish it had, but it's a good first step
and hopefully the way that that you know, progressive nations
will start moving. That's right. Um, Two things big shout out.
(49:45):
I can't remember his name, but the young listener who
was mowing the law and for his dad and rode
into request this episode. I think that's right. I think
he prompted this episode. So hats off to you, young sir.
I hope you can kick up your heels for a
little while. And then also, this was indeed a Dave
Ru's joint, so thanks again to Dave for this one. Right,
(50:08):
that's right. Since Chuck said that's right, everybody means it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this. Uh,
I think it's just thanks. Hey, guys, running in from Louisville, Kentucky.
He say how much I love the show, even though
Josh said the k of C M center was in Lexington.
I'll never live that down. Your correction put a smile
(50:28):
on my face, knowing that there are other stuff you
should know fans near me. I work in long term
care and use your podcasts in many different ways. I
help people with cognitive impairments set up their tablets and
such for enrichment, socialization, and stimulation. One of the first
activities I showed them is how to access entertainment With
the educational podcast. Everyone can find something they want to
learn about on Stuff you Should Know. Also help people
(50:50):
find ways of remembering new information, and use your short
stuff episodes for those with shorter attention spans. And finally,
my own enjoyment is a factor. I listen to many
different podcasts during my drive to and from work, but
only Stuff you Should Know has the ability to get
me into a different headspace. I attribute that to Josh
and Chuck. None of these topics would be nearly as
(51:10):
interesting without you, guys. Grid and laughed sometimes both all
in all of your episodes, even the really Matthey ones,
I feel you on that one. Chuck and Josh, Yeah
that was a dig. Wasn't a dig? Be math guy? No, No,
but I'd like to think I am okay, sorry about that. Uh.
(51:33):
The episode on snake handling is a personal favorite. I
appreciate an episode. I love the show and everyone that
works on it. Thanks for keeping it going. I hope
see y'all in Kentucky. That is from Ellie. Well, thanks again, Ellie,
and Uh. If you want to get in touch with this,
like Ellie did, you can write us an email send
it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
(51:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the i heart
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