The New Politics of Child Labor in the United States

• In Event: Re-working Democracy: Defending Substantive Rights through Labor Struggle

Abstract

Few scholars think about the United States when they think about child labor. Research in American Politics considers the issue of child labor as something that was largely resolved by Progressive and New Deal reforms of the early 1900s. Yet, recent incidents related to child labor in America have gained traction in national media outlets and amongst political actors. For example, journalists at Reuters were selected as finalists for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on low-income, migrant children who are forced to work and have largely slipped out of educational and social service systems. Reporters and opinion writers at the New York Times also have written extensively about present-day U.S. child labor emphasizing loopholes in U.S. child labor laws and new state efforts to roll back restrictions on child labor. Such attention has prompted responsive actions from the U.S. Department of Labor, including the formation of a new Interagency Task Force to Combat Child Labor Exploitation in 2023. It seems that the politics of US child labor are far from resolved.

In this study, we analyze the evolving landscape of child labor in the United States by examining the changing interests, political dynamics, and policy landscapes surrounding this issue with important implications for the structure and organization of work, inequality, and power within the United States. We conduct a comprehensive examination of the state-level child labor policies and how they have changed over the past two decades with a new, original dataset. We use web scraping techniques to collect data on state child labor laws from 2003 to 2022. We focus on five categories of laws: employment/age certification, non-farm employment, agricultural employment, entertainment, and door-to-door sales. We first examine trends descriptively across states and over time, understanding state-by-state variation in child labor laws, as well as where laws are changing geographically and how they are changing in terms of content, industry, and enforcement mechanisms. We also link data on child labor violations under the Fair Labor Standards Act from 2005 to 2022 to examine how instances of child labor violations vary across states and policy landscapes.

We then analyze why child labor policies vary across states and over time. Rooted in a political economy framework, we hypothesize that one explanation lies at the intersection of organized interests and labor demand. During the past century, groups advocating in favor of child labor were relatively weak and disorganized, particularly at higher levels of government. Conversely, opponents to child labor, including labor unions and Progressive reformers, were more organized and successful than pro-child labor interests. Opponents to child labor were able to make two compelling arguments to the American people and political elites: (1) young children should not be part of the workforce, and (2) older children could be allowed to work in a limited capacity that does not interfere with their schooling. Such ideas about child labor led to national and state legislation to achieve these goals.

However, the balance of political interests related to child labor has shifted over time. This shift is characterized by the declining power of organized labor since the 1950s and the growing openness of large corporations to rely on child labor. It is possible that this shift has led states to chip away at longstanding policies restricting child labor. To examine this empirically, we connect our dataset of child labor policies with publicly available, state-by-year level data on dominant industries, labor demand, union strength, migrant populations, and political donations. We investigate the extent to which such factors are predictive of pro- or anti-child labor state policies.

This study sheds new light on labor dynamics in the American landscape, at a potentially pivotal moment in time, after many years of union decline and corporate dominance but potential signs of new and distinct types of labor organizing. We emphasize that the effects of early 20th century labor organizing on U.S. policy and politics have been long lasting but also are subject to change. Such changes may be incremental but nevertheless consequential in shaping the structure and organization of work within the United States.

Authors

• Melissa Lyon, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

• Steve Holt, University at Albany, SUNY

• Lucy Sorensen, SUNY-ALBANY

• Ji Hyun Byeon