Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.
Up until recently, child labor was not a subject you would see discussed in any media. There has been a perception that child labor was a thing of the past. It was outlawed roughly 100 years ago. It was something Charles Dickens wrote about in 1850 in “David Copperfield.”
Dickens was traumatized when at age 12 he was forced to work 10 to 12-hour days in a boot-blacking factory. He was in charge of gluing labels on bottles of shoe polish. The conditions were harsh and dirty. Dickens’s father had been incarcerated in a debtors’ prison, causing family separation and economic crisis.
Like many children of his era, Dickens was deprived of the opportunity of a full formal education. He was put under tremendous pressure to support himself and his family. Dickens often wrote very sympathetically about destitute boys who were robbed of their childhoods.
In America, I know there was a long struggle in the early twentieth century to legislate and limit child labor. Around 1900, one in six children was engaged in gainful employment. Progressive-era reformers challenged poor working conditions, long hours and the exploitation of young children. After a struggle that lasted almost three decades, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. That law, in part, prohibited some oppressive laboring conditions, including much child labor.
So it’s extremely surprising to see child labor re-emerge as a contentious issue. The New York Times has been...
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