The US has a child labor problem – recalling an embarrassing past that Americans may think they've left behind
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Saturday, June 10, 2023
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Traveling the country with his camera, Hine captured the often oppressive working conditions of thousands of children – some as young as 3 years old.
Key Points:
- Traveling the country with his camera, Hine captured the often oppressive working conditions of thousands of children – some as young as 3 years old.
- The patina of these black-and-white photographs suggests a bygone era – an embarrassing past that many Americans might imagine they’ve left behind.
‘An investigator with a camera’
- Hine believed that the future of the U.S. rested in its identity as an immigrant nation – a position that contrasted with escalating xenophobic fears.
- Based on this work, the National Child Labor Committee, which advocated for child labor laws, hired Hine to document the living and working conditions of American children.
- By the late 19th century, several states had passed laws limiting the age of child laborers and establishing maximum working hours.
- To gain entry into factories and other facilities, Hine sometimes disguised himself as a Bible, postcard or insurance salesman.
Legislation follows
- The camera serves as an eyewitness to a societal ill, a problem that needs a solution.
- Although the Supreme Court later ruled it and a subsequent Child Labor Tax Law of 1919 unconstitutional, momentum for enshrining protections for child workers had been created.
- In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established restrictions and protections on employing children.
The ethics of picturing child labor
- A recent surge of unaccompanied minors, primarily from Central America, has brought new attention to America’s old problem of child labor and has threatened the very laws Hine and the National Child Labor Committee worked to enact.
- While the content of Hine’s photographs remains pertinent to today’s child labor crisis, a key distinction between the subject of Hine’s photographs and working children today is race.
- Contemporary reports of child labor violations offer few images to accompany their texts, graphs and statistics.
- Photographs of child labor in foreign countries are far more common than those made in the U.S., which leaves the impression that child labor is someone else’s problem, not ours.