Solution of the Child Labor Problem/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE SOCIAL COST OF CHILD LABOR
I. Child Labor and Social Ideals
There is a child labor problem, first because a large number of children are at work, and second because the probable result of their work will be the stunting of body or mind. All child workers do not have stunted bodies. As one great man of the nation, towering to his full six feet two, exclaimed, "I went to work in a factory when I was seven, and look at me." There is only one answer,—thousands of other children have gone to work at seven and look at them. At ten they bear the factory stamp, and they carry it through life.
In the vast majority of cases, the factory child of seven does not become great. He disappears among the "submerged tenth," an inefficient, fagged-out worker. The child worker does not as a rule develop into the skilled artisan, the expert business man, or the picked soldier. What child labor employer is there who would exhibit the children in his factory as ideal types of American children? How many employers of child labor give their own children the advantages of a life of factory toil?
Child labor is really harmful to the child. Even if its body is not stunted, and its mind blunted, by the work performed, the child loses an opportunity for mind training in the schools, which can never be duplicated in later life.
What then?
The child is the embryo citizen. The citizen is the unit of society, and the society of to-morrow, composed of its individual citizens, will depend for its standard upon the training received by the children of to-day. If the men and women of to-day decide to advance civilization, to build strong and safe for the future, to know that the coming generation is working out some of the problems which have so vexed the present age,—in short, if the men and women of to-day have social ideals, they must protect the children of to-day for the society of the future. There are those who deny that there is any obligation on the present generation to provide for the future. A certain member of the English Parliament is reported to have demanded,—"What should we do for posterity? What has posterity ever done for us?" Generally speaking, however, the whole matter resolves itself, for each individual, into one question, "Have you social ideals?"
What are social ideals?
When men speak of heaven they voice a social ideal; when they dream of prosperity they anticipate a social ideal; brotherhood is a social ideal, and so are education, art, literature, and every other great and good hope or prophecy for the future. No matter what the basis, no matter what the form of the ideal, its goal is a state of society in which every man, woman, and child will have rights, privileges, and opportunities, equal to those of every other man, woman, and child.
Child workers are debarred from this equality. Long hours of monotonous toil under unvaryingly wearisome conditions; the loss of play time; the loss of adequate schooling; the lack of any character-building influence, such as is supplied in the home or school,—these things are involved in child labor. They prove for the child worker a handicap which in the majority of cases is never overcome.
A wealthy nation, provided with an income sufficient to give to every citizen a comfortable living, cannot honestly believe in a social ideal and permit the existence of child labor. Each generation should hand down to the next generation a higher type of social structure if progress is to be insured. A social structure honeycombed and weakened by child labor can scarce be considered worthy of transmission to the future.
So much may be said in general terms of the undesirability of transmitting to the future children stunted and worn by premature toil. There are two very concrete ways in which child labor injures the society of the present and thus indirectly that of the future. In the first place it helps to destroy family life; and in the second place, it helps to raise taxes.
II. Child Labor and Family Life
"The Peril and Preservation of the Home" is the title of one of Jacob Kiis's books. To him it is of great importance, if national integrity is to be preserved, that the home be maintained at a high standard. In this position he is vigorously supported by the best sentiment of every Anglo-Saxon community. It is, then, of the utmost importance, in dealing with the cost of child labor, to determine what changes in the status of the home have been made by the entrance of children into industrial competition.
How can child labor influence family life?
There are two ways in which the influence may be felt. It may be either an influence exerted by the child in the family group to which it belongs as a child, or it may be an influence exerted by the child, grown to adult years, upon the family of which he or she is the head. Child labor may influence the family by taking children away from the home for eleven hours a day and giving them an attitude wholly independent of home control, or it may stunt them physically or mentally, thus making them incapable of fulfilling the functions of fathers and mothers, of home-makers and home-keepers. In either case, child labor thwarts the purpose of the home.
In some localities all of the members of the family work in the mill. Many such instances are furnished in the South, where industry is developing for the first time. There it is customary for the children to work in the mill with both parents. If one remains outside of the mill, it is apt to be the father. Under these conditions the mother has no opportunity to maintain a family standard. She starts out with the children early in the morning, and, after spending ten or eleven hours at the factory, returns to the home to partake of the hastily and probably badly prepared meal, remains only long enough to sleep and eat, and then hurries back to the mill. If the children have any leisure time, they spend it on the streets, for the home presents no attractions.
Again and again writers emphasize the premature independence from family control enjoyed by the child wage-earner. Miss Jane Addams tells of a working-girl who was being anxiously watched by the Hull House authorities. The girl had a good home and a hard-working, conscientious mother, but she was gradually being led into worse and worse ways by the bad company that she kept on the streets at night. Finally a protest was made to the girl's mother. "Why do you allow your daughter to run the streets at night? Don't you know what she is getting into?" they asked her. The mother was heart-broken, and replied that she feared to say anything to her daughter, because she contributed to the family income, and would leave home if crossed in her wild whims. The girl's attitude was plainly expressed when she said: "My ma can't say anything to me,—I pay the rent."
The same point is emphasized by Mr. Emil G. Hirsh, an employer: "If I dared venture into the moral bearings of this part of the subject, I should insist with good reason that nothing tends toward disrupting and undermining the family so perniciously as the premature independence of its immature members."[1] It is not customary to intrust to a child loaded, dangerous weapons, yet no weapons could be more dangerous than the independence of home control which comes with helping to earn the family living.
In addition to coming prematurely into a state of independence from family control, the child worker is surrounded by none of the influences which are ordinarily associated with home life. Ten or eleven hours in a factory, with a half hour to come and go, leaves little of the day that is not taken up with eating and sleeping; and a place in which one eats and sleeps is a lodging-house, not a home.
Not only is the child cut off during its working-hours from any uplifting influence, but it is often surrounded by unbearable monotony, bad air, unlovely companions, and every other form of undesirable influence that may be developed where indiscriminate grouping of men and women occurs. Working under such conditions, and becoming gradually accustomed to such low standard surroundings, the child laborer adopts and accepts a low standard as a matter of course. Accustomed to a low standard of work as a child, the worker fails to demand a high standard as a man. The standards of child work are very low, as anyone who has visited industrial establishments will have observed. Generally, the greater the proportion of women and children in an establishment, the worse the conditions of the light, the air, and the sanitation. Men rebel. Women and children seldom complain except to one another. Thus the child laborer is generally educated as a low standard laborer.
Low standards are imposed upon child labor industries. The child, growing to man-hood, and accepting these low standards, imposes them upon his family, and the gradual acceptance of such low standards lowers the standard of the entire community.
In a community where child labor is extensively employed, the entire family is forced to work for what proves to be a bare living. Looking at the question from the standpoint of the family, it is not therefore economical to have the children at work. Dr. J. E. McKelway, Assistant Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, said in a recent address:—"Child labor reduces wages. Only 30 per cent, of the factory operatives of England are able to support their children through the sixteenth year without putting them to work. And here comes in the economic law that those occupations which admit the labor of women and children pay the whole family what the man alone receives in the occupations in which he is the sole bread-winner."
It will be more readily understood why the child fails to assist the family materially when the rate at which child workers are paid is borne in mind. The wage of the working child is startlingly low. "It ranges from $2.00 to $5.00, seldom $6.00 even in the more agreeable industries." 1 In cities particularly this wage means very little, because of the great demands made upon it for car fare, lunches, and better clothes. "The wage value of the years from fourteen to sixteen is hardly more than the educational value … that he [the child] contributes to the family more than $1.50 is extremely doubtful."[2]
Child workers' wages are very low and, as a rule, add little to family income. Not only is this true, but the child who goes to work at fourteen probably deprives the family of earning capacity. There is little definite information on this point, but the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education concludes:—"The most important fact in the consideration of wages is that the child commencing at sixteen overtakes his brother beginning at fourteen in less than two years. That his total income in four years would equal that of his brother for six years we cannot prove, but the slight data at hand so indicates."
The probable effects of child labor on the home of its parents are, therefore, three:—
is capable of earning less in the aggregate than the child who goes to
work at sixteen.Were these the sole effects of child labor on the family, the problem might well be called a serious one, but the family life of the whole present generation of child laborers is threatened by the existence of child labor. It is sad to think of children growing to manhood and womanhood, incapable of attaining even a normal physical or mental standard; but it is far more terrible to think that a large percentage of these low standard men and women will marry, and in their turn raise children to a similar mode of life.
The standard of the community can be maintained only by maintaining a high standard of home life. The high standard of home life depends for its existence and maintenance upon the standard of the father and the mother. The father must have the capacity to earn for his children a good living. He must likewise have the mental development and the development of character which will enable him to set for them a high standard of example. The absence of these qualities in the father almost inevitably disrupts the home.
Judge Lindsay relates a story of an exceedingly "tough" kid who was brought into his Juvenile Court. After being questioned for some time the boy admitted that the whole trouble lay with his father, who constantly beat and abused him, until in self-defense the boy ran away from home, became a tramp, and, never having learned to work, he stole in order to live. Such cases are common in the Juvenile Court. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and unless proper fathers are provided, proper children are an impossibility.
The influence of the father upon family life is of the utmost importance, but it is insignificant as compared with the influence of the mother. The father is usually away from home, but the mother spends the greater portion of her time there. It is with her that the children come into most intimate contact, and hers is by far the most important influence in the home.
The women who enter a factory at the age of twelve and spend the years from twelve to twenty inside of four dark, dirty walls amid whirring machines, in constant association with bad men and women, have not, in the first place, the physical stamina necessary to bring strong children into the world. As Dr. Davis of Lancaster, Pa., a great women-employing center, puts it,—"These factory girls fade at an early age, and then they cannot discharge the functions of mothers and wives as they should."
In the second place a girl who has spent her life in the factory is usually untrained in the maintenance of a home. There is a wide difference between an intense, high-strung, exciting factory life, and the quiet routine of a properly conducted home, and the change from one to the other is difficult to make. There are a thousand things which girls who grow up at home learn, but which never become a part of the education of a factory child. There are arts of cooking and of cleaning, arts of care-taking and home-making that come only from the actual contact with these problems in the home. This contact the factory child has never had. An eleven-hour day in the factory precludes the possibility of any housework except the merest drudgery.
This lack of home-making knowledge has its inevitable consequences. There is a very definite relation between tough meat and underdone potatoes for supper, and a long session in the saloon for the husband after supper. A washerwoman who did much of the drying of her clothes in the two small tenement rooms in which the family sat, ate, and slept, was offered an opportunity to do the work at stationary washtubs in a Neighborhood House close by. Her ground for refusal was that she had always done her washing in her own room, and that it was too much trouble to go outside. What refuge have the father and the children in such a family, save the open streets, the saloons, the public squares? Bad companions and unwholesome life are infinitely preferable to the dank, nauseating smell of clothes, forever washing and drying, and, as it seems, never washed or dried. The solidarity of family life can be maintained only by trained mothers and capable fathers, mothers who will make inhabitable homes to the extent of their means, and fathers who will use every effort to provide the means with which to make the home inhabitable. Factory work for children goes far to thwart both ideals, by making of the boy an unskilled worker, incapable of earning large means, and by making of the girl a wife and mother, incapable of doing her duty by her husband, her home, or her children.
III. Child Labor and Taxes
There is a second social aspect of the problem, of almost equal interest with the effect of child labor on the family. "What effect has child labor on taxes? A definite, accurate answer to the proposition is impossible. Nothing can be done except to indicate some evident tendencies, and point to some apparent conclusions. Taking all of the facts into consideration, it would appear that child labor results not only in disintegrating family life, but in increasing taxes as well.
When the Superintendent of a Boys' House of Refuge was asked what proportion of the children who came to him were working children and what proportion were school children, he said that he could give no proportion, because the school child was a rare exception in his institution.
The community which allows its children to start work early in life, and in pursuit of their badly directed ideas, to learn things that result in their being committed to the House of Refuge, pays the penalty for its folly in the increasing taxes that go to support penal institutions.
The point is well illustrated by a study made recently in Chicago, of the first hundred delinquent boys who appeared before the C hicago Juvenile Court in 1909. Of this group of one hundred boys, sixty-five were past fourteen, one had finished the eighth grade, eleven had finished the sixth grade, ninety were born in the United States. And, most important of all, for this study, "only thirteen of the one hundred claimed to have never worked. Of this thirteen six were past fourteen years of age. Not a single boy had ever been apprenticed in any trade." "At this present rate, 8 per cent, of all the children and 12 per cent, of all the boys born in Chicago, who live to be ten years of age, will be brought into the Juvenile Court as delinquents before they are sixteen. The City of Chicago pays for its delinquent children committed to reformatories $168,600 per year."[3]
The child, particularly the boy, who is thrown out upon the world too early in life, and made to face its responsibilities, is overwhelmed with its bigness and wearied by its never changing monotony. He seeks relief for his strained nervous system in some kind of activity which leads ultimately to the door of the police court. The freedom of the factory, and of wage-earning, do more than aught else to break home restraints. The working boy is usually the street boy, because the street offers more opportunity for relaxation after the long strain of a day's work, presenting a pleasing contrast with the dull sameness of home.
A vast proportion of criminals begin their criminal career as boys by some petty offense, small in itself, and often committed through ignorance, and not through intent to do wrong. It would be interesting to know how much of this ignorance is the result of early wage-earning, with its lack of opportunity for real training.
How much of the cost of the criminal system may be traced in its origin to the premature employment of children, is uncertain. One point, however, is evident. If it be true that "lines of commitment and lack of schooling run parallel" at least a proportion of the tax cost of the criminal system may be laid to child labor, which inevitably means lack of schooling for the child laborer.
In addition to facing the problem of supporting, in its houses of refuge and its penitentiaries, boys and men whose criminal careers have been started by a too early exposure to the trials and temptations of modern industrial life, the community must face the problem of maintaining in its hospitals and almshouses the crippled and degenerate and inefficient, who have been thrown out of the great industrial tread-mills and left ruined for life,—broken, incompetent workers. The studies which have been made indicate that the proportion of industrial accidents among working children is far higher than that among adult workers. Children are essentially ignorant and careless. They do not realize the dangers connected with their occupations, and constant injuries and accidents are the result.
The average child who enters industry at an early age closes behind him the door of opportunity to a higher and better industrial plane. The child laborer becomes a less effective producer than the child who had additional schooling advantages. As Jane Addams puts it:—"The pauperization of society itself, however, is the most serious charge." To paraphrase an illustration used by the Webbs, the factory says of the community, "You have educated the children in the public schools; now please give them to me, I will use them until they begin to demand an adult wage, and then I will turn them out again. If I have broken them down the community will take care of them in the poorhouse and the hospitals."
What connection is there between child labor and pauperism? In his book on American Charities, Dr. A. J. Warner takes statistics from various cities, and compiles, under several heads, the causes of pauperism. The first cause in importance is non-employment. In almost every case, the men who first lose their places and are most quickly thrown out in an industrial crisis, and who are the last to be taken on in times of industrial prosperity, are the men who are inefficient because they have neither sufficient training nor sufficient bodily vigor to sustain long periods of activity.
How far is child labor responsible for this class of paupers? "We have a municipal lodging house in Chicago filled with tramps.… It is surprising to find how many of them are tired to death of monotonous labor, and begin to tramp in order to get away from it, as a business man goes to the woods because he is worn out with the stress of business life. This desire to get away from work seems to be connected with the fact that the men have started to work very early, before they had physique to stand up to it, or the mental vigor with which to overcome its difficulties, or the moral stamina which makes a man stick to his work whether he likes it or not."[4]
Laying aside for the moment any humane considerations, both crime and pauperism are expensive. A ready method of doing away with one element in these expensive, inhuman maladjustments is to do away with child labor, which so readily leads to crime, pauperism, or both.
In the social fiber, in family life, in taxes, child labor is costly. It breaks down the individual, it destroys the family life of the present, and threatens the family life of the future, and last, probably least in importance, it adds to the number of incompetent that the community must support. From any social viewpoint, child labor is costly.
- ↑ "Child Labor from an Employer's Point of View." By Emil G. Hirsh. Annals of American Academy, vol. xxv, p. 554.
- ↑ Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, 1906. Pp. 83-89.
- ↑ "Child Labor and the Juvenile Court." By James M. Britton, M.D. Proceedings of the Fifth Conference, National Child Labor Committee, 1909. Pp. 112-114.
- ↑ "Child Labor and Pauperism." By Jane Addams. Charities, vol. xi, p. 302.