Child Labor and Exploitation in Turn-of-the-Century Cotton Mills

Abstract

This paper tests the claims of historians and labor reformers that turn-of-the-century industrialists exploited children in cotton mills, particularly in the South. The paper compares mill children′s earnings with estimates of their value of marginal product and also reports empirical earnings functions. Test results are consistent with, though they do not prove, the absence of exploitation. Children′s earnings in Southern mills were roughly equal to their value of marginal product. Children′s pay in both the North and the South depended on such characteristics as age, schooling, and experience. While neither test of exploitation is decisive in itself, there is no clear evidence of neoclassical economic exploitation in either Northern or Southern cotton mills.