What are the reasons for the employment of children? It is almost
needless to argue that child labor is socially unnecessary, that the
labor of little boys and girls is not required in order that wealth
sufficient for the needs of society may be produced. If such a claim
were made, it would be an all-sufficing reply to point to the great army
of unemployed men in our midst, and to say that the last man must be
employed before the employment of the first child can be justified. When
there is not an unemployed man, when there is not a man employed in
useless, unproductive, and wasteful labor, if there is then a shortage
of the things necessary for social maintenance, child labor may be
necessary and justifiable. Under any other conditions than these it is
unjustifiable and brutally wrong. In the primitive struggle with the
hostile forces of nature, such struggles as pioneers have had in all
lands before the deserts could be made to yield harvests of fruit and
grain, the labor of wives and children has been necessary to supplement
that of husbands and fathers. But what would be thought of the men,
under such conditions, if they forced their wives and children to work
while they idled, ate, and slept? Yet that is, essentially, the practice
of modern industrial society. Here is a great country with natural
resources unparalleled in human experience for their richness and
variety; here labor is so productive, and inventive genius so highly
developed, that wealth overflows our granaries and warehouses, and
forces us to seek foreign markets for its disposal. The children
employed in our factories are not employed because it would otherwise be
impossible to produce the necessities of life for the nation. The little
five-year-old girl seen by Miss Addams working at night in a Southern
cotton mill was not so employed because it was necessary in order that
the American people might have enough cotton goods to supply their
needs. On the contrary, she was making sheeting for the Chinese
Army![141] Not that she or those by whom she was employed had any
interest in the Chinese Army, but because there was a prospective profit
for the manufacturer in the making of sheeting for sale to China for the
use of her soldiers. The manufacturer would just as readily have
sacrificed little American girls in the manufacture of beads for
Hottentots, or gilt idols for poor Hindoo ryots, if the profit were
equal.
[Illustration:
A “KINDERGARTEN” TOBACCO FACTORY IN PHILADELPHIA
]
That is the root of the child-labor evil; it has no social justification
and exists only for the sordid gain of profit-seekers. It is not
difficult, therefore, to understand the manufacturers’ interest in child
labor, or their opposition to all efforts to legislate against it. Cheap
production is the maxim of success in industry, and a plentiful supply
of cheap labor is a powerful contributor to that end. The principal
items in productive cost are the raw material and the labor necessary,
the relative importance of each depending upon the nature of the
industry itself. Now, it is obviously to the interest of the
manufacturer, as manufacturer, to get both raw material and labor-power
as cheaply as possible, whether the industry in which he is interested
is governed by competitive, or monopolistic, or any intermediate
conditions. If competition rules, cheapness is vitally important to him,
since if he can get an advantage over his competitors in that respect he
can undersell them, while if he fails to get his supplies of labor and
raw material as cheaply as his competitors, he will be undersold. If, on
the other hand, monopoly conditions prevail, it is still an important
interest to secure them as cheaply as possible, thereby increasing his
profit.
It is an axiom of commercial economy that supply follows demand, and it
is certain that the constant demand for the cheap, tractable labor of
children has had much to do with the creation of the supply. At bottom
the employers, or, rather, the system of production for profit, must be
held responsible for child labor. There are evidences of this on every
hand. We see manufacturers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania getting
children from orphan asylums, regardless of their physical, mental, and
moral ruin, merely because it _pays_ them. When the glass-blowers of
Minotola, N.J., went on strike, in 1902, the child-labor question was
one of their most important issues. The exposures made of the frightful
enslavement of little children attracted widespread attention. There is
very little in the history of the English factory system which excels in
horror the conditions which existed in that little South Jersey town at
the beginning of the twentieth century.[142] When the proprietor of the
factory was asked about the employment of young boys ten and eleven
years of age, many of whom often fell asleep and were awakened by the
men pouring water over them, and at least two of whom died from
overexhaustion, he said: “If two men apply to me for work and one has
one or two or three children and the other has none, I take the man with
children. I need the boys.” In actual practice this meant that no man
could get work as a glass-blower unless he was able to bring boys with
him. A regular padrone system was developed in consequence of this: the
glass-blowers, determined to keep their own boys out of the factories if
possible, secured children from orphan asylums, or took the little boys
of Italian immigrants, boarded them, and paid the parents a regular
weekly sum.
In the mills of the South it is frequently made a condition of the
employment of married men or women that all their children shall be
bound to work in the same mills. The following is one of the rules
posted in a South Carolina cotton mill:—
“All children, members of a family, above twelve years of age, shall
work regularly in the mill, and shall not be excused from service
therein without the consent of the superintendent for good
cause.”[143]
Many times I have heard fathers and mothers—in the North as well as in
the South—say that they did not want their children to work, that they
could have done without the children’s wages and kept them at school a
little longer, or apprenticed them to better employment, but that they
were compelled to send them into the mills to work, or lose their own
places. Even more eloquent as evidencing the keen demand of the
manufacturers for child labor is the fact to which Mr. McKelway calls
attention, that, in response to their demand, cotton-mill machinery is
being made with adjustable legs to suit small child workers. Mr.
McKelway rightly contrasts this with the experience in India when the
first cotton mills were erected there. Then, for the first time, it was
found necessary to manufacture spinning frames high enough from the
floor to accommodate adult workers.[144]
With such facts as these before us, it is easy to see that the urgency
of the employers’ demands for child labor is an important factor in the
problem. Underlying all other causes is the fundamental fact that the
exploitation of the children is in the interests of the employing class.
It may be urged that it is necessary for children to begin work at an
early age because the work they do cannot be done by men or women, but
the contention is wholly unsupported by facts. There is no work done by
boys in the glass factories which men could not do; no skill or training
is required to enable one to do the work done by breaker boys in the
coal-mines; the work done by children in the textile mills could be done
equally well by adults. The fact that in some cases adults are employed
to do the work which in other cases is done by children, is sufficient
proof that child labor is not resorted to because it is inevitable and
necessary, but on account of its cheapness.
It does not, of course, necessarily follow that low-priced labor is
really cheap labor; it may prove to be just as uneconomical to employ
such labor as to buy poor raw materials merely because they are
low-priced. The quantitative measure is no more satisfactory as a
standard of value when applied to labor than when applied to other
things. Thomas Brassey, the famous English engineer and contractor, used
to declare that the cost of carrying out great works in different
countries did not vary according to the wages paid, and that his
experience had been that in countries where wages were highest the rate
of profit was also highest. Very similar testimony has been given by
many large employers of labor, and the point seems to be fairly well
established. It is said, for instance, that the cost of erecting large
buildings does not differ very much in the great capitals of the world,
though the rate of wages differs enormously, and that in America, where
wages in the building trades are much higher than anywhere else in the
world, the labor cost is really less than elsewhere.[145] In view of
this economic fact, it has been urged that child labor is not cheap
labor, except in a false and uneconomic sense, that it is inefficient,
and that it would be to the interest of the employers themselves to
employ adult labor instead.
Doubtless this argument has been used in the true propagandist spirit of
appealing to as many interests as possible, and proving the sweet
reasonableness of the demand for the abolition of child labor, but I am
inclined to doubt its value. We may, I think, trust the employers to
look after their own interests. It is true that if you put an underpaid
and underfed Italian laborer at a dollar a day to work, and alongside
put a decently fed American laborer at double that wage, you will
probably find the labor of the latter the more profitable; just as
cheap, miserably paid coolie labor is the most expensive of all. But I
do not think it follows that adult labor would be cheaper than child
labor to the employer. Most child labor is made possible by machinery
and conditioned by it, and adult labor would be conditioned by it in the
same manner. There is very little scope for individual differences to
manifest themselves where the machine is the controlling power. In other
industries, such as glass manufacture, where machinery plays a
relatively unimportant part as yet, the labor of the boys is conditioned
by the speed of the men they serve. The men, urged on by the piecework
system, work at their utmost limit of speed, and the boys must keep pace
with them. It is unlikely that if men were employed to do the work now
done by the “snappers-up,” they would be able to increase the speed of
the glass-blowers, the only way in which their labor could prove
cheaper. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that men
would not consent to be driven as boys are driven. I have gathered from
glass-blowers themselves that they are very often as much opposed to the
introduction of adult helpers as are their employers, for the reason
that they believe adults would not serve them with the same speed as
boys. For these reasons, and many others into which it is impossible to
enter here, I am convinced that little good will result from a
propaganda aiming to show the employers that their economic interests
would be best served by the abolition of child labor.
In a similar way it has been urged, with ample evidence of its truth,
that the employment of children retards the introduction of mechanical
devices and their fullest development.[146] This is perfectly true, not
only of child labor, but of almost all forms of labor that are
unhealthful or degrading. There is absolutely no need of human street
sweepers, exposed in all weathers and constantly inhaling foul,
disease-laden dust, any more than there is need of little boys working
in the glass factories, carrying red-hot bottles to the ovens. In each
case machinery has been invented to do the work, and it is used to a
small extent. If these occupations, and scores of others, were
absolutely prohibited, and the prohibitory law rigidly enforced, streets
would still be swept, but by mechanical sweepers, and bottles would
still be taken to the annealing ovens, but by mechanical means. The
world will probably, let us hope, never become the paradise dreamed of
by the German dreamer, Etzler, who believed that all the work of the
world would be done by machinery in the future, and human labor become
altogether unnecessary.[147] But there is no doubt that much of the work
which to-day degrades body, brain, and soul could be done just as well
by mechanical agents. Not, however, through sermonizing or appealing to
the employers will these mechanical devices be generally adopted to take
the place of the life-destroying labor of boys and girls; but by making
it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, for them to employ
child labor at all.
Not long ago I was in a glass factory where the “carrying-in boys” had
been displaced by automatic machinery. As I watched the machine doing
the work I had been accustomed to seeing little boys perform, I asked
the manager of the factory why it had been introduced. His answer was
simple and direct, “Why, because it had become too difficult to get
boys.” A few days later I went into another factory where boys were, as
usual, employed in doing the work. I asked the owner of the factory why
he did not use machinery instead of employing boys. “Because it is not
practicable,” he replied. “We must have boys and can’t do without them.”
When I told him that I had seen the work done by machinery with perfect
satisfaction, he laughed. “Yes, that is true, but I still say that it is
not a practicable proposal,” he rejoined. “I mean that it is not a
practical business proposition. I am not interested in machinery, as
machinery, and if I can get all the boys I want, at wages making their
labor no more expensive than the cost of running machinery, why should I
tie up two or three thousand dollars of my capital to install machines?
So long as I can get boys enough, I don’t want to bother with machines.”
Then I asked: “What would you do if you could not get boys—if their
employment was forbidden, and the law strictly enforced?” His reply was
suggestive. “Why, then machinery would be the only thing; then it would
be a practical business proposition,” he said.
[Illustration:
A GLASS FACTORY AT NIGHT
]
I have given this manufacturer’s opinion, as nearly as possible in his
own words, because it is an admirably clear statement of what I believe
to be the natural attitude of the employing class upon a grave question.
All that stands in the way of a general use of machinery to do the work
now performed at such an enormous cost in human life and happiness, is
the temporary inconvenience of the employers from having to tie up some
of their capital. Just as the woollen manufacturers in England, as soon
as they were debarred from employing children, adopted the piecing
machine,[148] so the employers of America to-day would have no
difficulty about securing machinery, much of it already invented, if the
employment of children should be forbidden. But, generally speaking,
they will not of themselves make the change.