Testimony

There is a bill before the Connecticut state legislature for the state to ratify the Child Labor Amendment. As this is something I have advocated for over a long period of time, I was asked to submit testimony. I did. Here it is:

Testimony of Erik Loomis

Professor, Department of History, University of Rhode Island

HJ 217 Resolution Ratifying the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Permitting Congress to Regulate Child Labor

Good afternoon. My name is Erik Loomis. I am a Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island. I am the author of three books on U.S. labor history, including A History of America in Ten Strikes. I have written extensively on the issue of child labor in the U.S., both past and present. I thank the Connecticut legislature for considering the ratification of the Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The return of child labor to national headlines has surprised many casual observers. Child labor seems like something from the bad old days of American history, the era in which workers’ lives were expendable and uneducated children had more value to society as workers than students.  

But child labor has roared back in the last two years. Eleven Republican controlled states have revived child labor. Most are farm states such as Iowa and Arkansas, both of which lowered the age limit for working in meat packing to 14 and to work as bartenders to 16, even though they cannot legally drink for another five years. Wisconsin Republicans have recently filed a bill to lower the age for bartenders to 14. Young girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment from older drunken men. Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill eliminating a requirement that children under 16 get permission from the state to work. Minnesota Republicans have introduced a bill to lower the age limit in construction to 16.

Even under these loosened requirements, violations for child labor have reached headlines around the nation. In February 2023, Department of Labor inspectors found 102 children working overnight shifts in Arkansas meatpacking plants.[1] Children have reported falling asleep in class after working overnight, being injured by chemical burns, and engaging in dangerous and even life-threatening labor with little oversight.

Not surprisingly, children are again dying on the job. Recently, a 16 year old boy died in a Michigan sawmill.[2] Another 16 year old boy died in a Mississippi chicken plant.[3] Many of these child laborers are immigrant children, including the boy in Mississippi, who had migrated from Guatemala. The combination of a tight labor market, indifference from employers and too many politicians to children working, and desperation from immigrants trying to escape violence and poverty has created a perfect storm for a renewal of child labor in this country.

This should remind us of the last time child labor dominated American life, a century and more ago. Children labored in textile plants throughout the nation from the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Some children who worked in coal mines all day were undernourished and never saw the sun. For most of the nineteenth century, this received little comment.

The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century saw a major reform movement to eliminate child labor. Led by women such as Florence Kelley and documented by the photographer Lewis Hine, the movement to ban child labor grew in influence. The 1911 Triangle Fire, in which many of the 146 dead were immigrant teenage girls, helped galvanize national attention on the issue. In 1916, Congress passed and President Wilson signed the Keating-Owen Act, which used the Commerce Clause to ban most work done by children in industries engaged in interstate commerce. However, a conservative Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart in 1918.

Child labor advocates responded to the Supreme Court by pushing for the Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution, which would explicitly grant Congress authority to regulate the issue. It had significant support at the congressional level and Congress sent it to the states in 1924. However, a combination of corporate lobbying at the state level and concerned parents in the South with long traditions of child labor managed to block it from ratification. As of 1937, twenty-eight states had ratified it.

Finally, most but by no means all child labor became banned under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Though some sectors were exempt, most notably agriculture, far more children spent their time in schools rather than on the job after 1938.

Unfortunately, thanks to those exemptions, child labor never truly went away in the United States. Some states have strong laws covering exempt sectors, others remain very weak. Human Rights Watch filed a report in 2015 documenting children as young as 12 working in North Carolina tobacco fields.[4]

Today, for the first time in a century, proponents of child labor have the confidence to express these thoughts in mainstream politics. The Biden administration has pledged to fight this scourge, but it only has so many tools in an underfunded Department of Labor, where, as of a decade ago, OSHA had so few inspectors that it would take them 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country one time.

However, we have tools to fight child labor at our fingertips. There is an obvious policy move here: ratify the Child Labor Amendment.

Despite being sent to the states a century ago, in 1939 the Supreme Court in Coleman v. Miller ruled that unless Congress issued an end date on an amendment sent to the states, the amendment remains active. In fact, this is how the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified, even though no states ratified it between 1873 and 1978.

Labor advocates have increasingly called for a return to ratifying the Child Labor Amendment. Legislators in states such as Rhode Island, New York, and even Nebraska have introduced legislation to ratify the amendment, while Minnesota has introduced legislation to reaffirm its previous ratification.

The Child Labor Amendment would not necessarily solve all these problems. The Fair Labor Standards Act already grants Congress limited power to regulate child labor. However, there are two very good reasons to ratify it. First, it would place the issue of child labor front and center in American life and force politicians to take a stand on whether they approve of the practice. In an era of revived child labor, it would create a national conversation on an issue that should outrage us.

Second, the Supreme Court has returned to its anti-labor politics of the 1920s. Each session, the justices issue a new anti-labor ruling. We also know that precedent means little to the current Court, as the overturning of Roe in the Dobbs case demonstrated. Changing the Constitution is a necessary bulwark to preserve the child labor protections we do have and to ensure a future where we can finally eliminate dangerous child labor from our nation entirely.

In short, the nation needs to decide whether protecting vulnerable children from injury and death on the job is a national priority. Ratifying the Child Labor Amendment is a simple way to say yes, it is. Connecticut, I trust you to do the right thing.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

Erik Loomis

Professor

Department of History

University of Rhode Island

[1] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2023/07/teen-dies-after-industrial-accident-at-sawmill-near-up-border.html

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/16-year-old-boy-dies-accident-mississippi-poultry-plant-rcna94963

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/09/teens-tobacco-fields/child-labor-united-states-tobacco-farming