Night shift in a glass factory.

Abstract

THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILD labor, a practice still evident in this country and common in many parts of the world, was once rampant in the United States. As captured in this photograph by John Spargo (1876– 1966), published in his The Bitter Cry of the Children (New York: Macmillan Co; 1906), children—who should have been in bed resting before the next day at school—often toiled through the night. The 1870 US census recorded 750 000 workers younger than 15 years, not counting farm workers. Children on family farms were routinely expected to work long and exhausting hours. Socialists, labor leaders, Progressive reformers, and public health workers led the protracted fight against child labor. Photographs such as this one were effective tools for education and mobilization, as were the more famous images by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. Such images clearly brought home to people the terrible conditions and injustice of much of child labor. Indeed, the National Child Labor Committee employed Hine from 1909 to 1911, using his photographs to arouse public opinion. Only in the 1930s, however, with the growing power of organized labor, did the campaign succeed in implementing the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The problem is by no means over. The many provisions of the APHA Policy Statement on Protection of Child and Adolescent Workers (1994) deserve study and reaffirmation. Not mentioned in the APHA statement but also critical for child health is the campaign for a living wage, so that the many single mothers who work at low-wage jobs will be able to afford food, housing, and other necessities for their children—without requiring the children to work.