Laboring over Children’s Work

In September 2014, the New York Times ran two stories that may at first appear to be unrelated. On the sixth, Steven Greenhouse’s article about young migrant workers in North Carolina stunned readers with the headline “Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in Tobacco Fields.” Ten days later a series titled “‘A National Admissions Office for Low-Income Strivers” went viral.

Both articles deal with underprivileged teens who want to work their way out of poverty. The conventional thinking is that those in the latter article are going about this the right way, through higher education. The former group of young teens, who have to work for cash to help support their families under hazardous and unhealthy conditions, need to be protected and saved from child labor.

In the recently published Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work, a multidisciplinary (demography, economics, education, and sociology) group of authors question this conventional wisdom about child labor. In fact Michael Bourdillon, Deborah Levison, William Meyers, and Ben White are careful to use the term “children’s work” and not “children’s labor” to emphasize that much of the productive efforts of young people should be thought of as work and not under the more exploitative label of “labor.” They argue that “work” is a more accurate description so long as it is used with appropriate qualifiers like “harmful, illegal, paid, economic, light, etc.” (11).

Bourdillon et al. would certainly consider the tobacco workers’ labor risky given the serious health consequences. But they would also caution that the academic striving of educational work is not without negative consequences, especially when tied to high-stakes testing and performance that can have serious psychological impacts. Moreover, the work of teen tobacco workers must be properly contextualized, and the adolescents themselves seen as individuals with agency and rights, before making their actions illegal.

Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work is one of three books published in 2013 that address the topic of working children in contemporary and historical contexts. Social historian Peter Kirby’s Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1860 and psychiatrist-turned-historian Chaim Rosenberg’s Child Labor in America: A History address the historical evolution of practices and regulations related to working children, which help us understand how we have arrived at the world described in Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work. All three books show that the issue of children’s labor is far grayer than the usual black/white dichotomy would suggest.

Kirby and Rosenberg both emphasize the importance of apprenticeship systems in the past, the ways in which machines significantly changed the type of work children performed, and the powerful adults that shaped efforts to eradicate labor in the two countries. In the United States, as Rosenberg describes, four upper-class women (Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Lillian Wald) played crucial roles in the efforts to make child labor illegal and to promote education; they did so by marshaling their resources and imposing a different value set on the poor. The story is different in the United Kingdom, where aloof medical professionals (male, of course) in London first joined the fray, far away from factory towns. Eventually, those who worked near the children became more important, with the media playing a role by highlighting sensational occupational injuries.

As to be expected with books by historians, both books are heavily sourced (Kirby’s in particular has a large number of footnotes, while Rosenberg’s book diverges into unrelated, if sometimes interesting, detours). In the end, Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain does a better job of organizing facts and research around a central premise: Kirby argues that we can use different types of data from the past to see how and why occupational health matters...